Takopi’s Original Sin opened the stacked Summer 2025 anime season on June 28 with a ~35-minute Episode 1 premiere, delivering an extremely painful contrast to what you may have thought the anime would be based on just the way it looked in the trailers.
*Trigger Warning: This review includes mention of suicide, which may be distressing for some readers. If you or someone you know is struggling, please seek support from a trusted individual or contact a local helpline.
The episode opens simply, with our protagonist finding the adorable pink alien in a pipe full of trash. The alien gives an incomprehensible name that is subtitled as “Nueinukf,” but the girl names it “Takopi” due to its speech pattern of ending words with ‘-pi.’ After she feeds and names Takopi, we learn that the girl’s name is Shizuka, and she is a 4th grader. Meanwhile, Takopi is a Happian from planet Happy, whose goal is to, well, make others happy.
As Takopi shows off his first “Happy Gadget,” one that would allow Shizuka to have a go at flying, we also get the first sign that something is not alright with the little girl and her life.
This immediately gave a sign that this anime would be way darker than I’d thought. Takopi breaks the coldness by funnily deducing that Shizuka must have already flown before and that it’s a common thing for humans, but this just felt like Takopi would be in for some harsh Earth reality down the line.
We quickly get to see the reason behind Shizuka’s state. As she hides Takopi, Marina walks with her friends bragging about breaking her writing board. The gang jokes about how Shizuka may or may not be able to afford a new one, with Marina claiming she has welfare money. Here it was obvious that there was a big grudge between Shizuka and the other girls, but no one could already tell just how serious it really was.
Here we see Takopi being clueless of the brutality of human beings, and notes that they’re having fun talking about something together.
Still, I thought this may end up as some kind of childish fight that would magically get resolved with Takopi’s omnipotent help. This was the case until a bit further down the episode at least. Takopi debuts a new Happy Gadget, the Happy Camera. There’s no real explanation as to why it’s a happy gadget at the start, and it just seems to be a camera that can print photos quickly. They take a photo, and we soon meet Chappy when they head home.
Chappy is Shizuka’s big dog, and it’s the first time we see her somewhat happy as the dog celebrates her return. We see the dog want to eat Takopi in another lighthearted scene, and another one when Takopi asks Shizuka about her father. It happens after we learn that her mother works as an escort, and she just says she doesn’t have a dad. This felt pretty heavy, but then Takopi again shows the cluelessness and proceeds to deduce that humans only require a mother to be born.
Then I thought that Shizuka raised a huge red flag. She claims that she’ll be fine no matter how painful things get or what happens, as long as Chappy is there for her. I immediately thought about all the unfortunate fates of dogs in movies and TV shows, and I wished that Chappy would remain a healthy good boy for the duration of this anime’s 6 episodes.
Shizuka escorts Takopi, who proclaims that the main goal is to bring a big smile to Shizuka’s face. We get another bit of a wholesome moment between the two, and it seems like the start of a heartwarming adventure.
This is when we get probably the coldest transition in the episode as time skips to the next day.
Something happened, and it looks like it was too horrifying to show the viewers. Shizuka is completely beaten, but that doesn’t seem like unusual to her. However, she’s holding Chappy’s necklace, and we can assume the worst was done to the poor dog. This entire scene was incredibly eerie, and it was done in the perfect way to make your heart drop.
Takopi, however, again has no idea that something bad happened. When she says she ‘fought with a friend,’ Takopi busts out a new Happy Gadget – the Reconciliation Ribbon.
It’s a ribbon that can stretch infinitely, and it’s supposed to make two people friends again after tying their pinky fingers with it. Shizuka gets another shot of a terrifyingly depressed face, and she says “That’s amazing.” Here I thought that she’d had enough, and that she was going to get revenge using the ribbon after she asks Takopi to borrow it. Takopi was told never to give gadgets to humans without supervision, but it was easy to fold under pressure from its savior. While there was some hesitation at first, Shizuka’s “please, Takopi” made that fade away, and she was quickly off with the magic ribbon.
As she walked away, we saw footprints on her back, again confirming that the bullying she was going through was significantly worse than just fights with friends.
The day passes with no Shizuka, and Takopi heads to check things out. This is where my initial thoughts, coming from way too much shonen, were dispersed, as Takopi finds that Shizuka wanted to use the ribbon on herself. Takopi’s clueless reactions just made this even harder, as it took some time to even realize that Shizuka had committed suicide. Seeing there was no rush to get her down or even think about something bad again made me think that Takopi was in for a lot of harshness.
Takopi does eventually realize that Shizuka has passed, and then regret and self-blaming come to play. Takopi wonders why she would have done something like that, and even why such behavior exists. Expressing the desire to ask her and learn more, we learn of the hidden function of the Happy Camera–time leaping.
With a “I hope you’ll smile tomorrow,” Takopi feeds the photo back to the camera, and we’re back to the beginning, about to see what Shizuka’s school life is like.
The school scenes again made me feel like things could still get more light-hearted. As Marina got annoyed with Takopi’s involvement in making Shizuka seem more confident, we also got to see her cute reactions and seemingly childish behavior.
Takopi remains happily naive, and he thinks it’s a good thing when Marina invites Shizuka out to ‘talk.’ As Shizuka braces herself for a probable routine beating, Takopi suggests to go in her place. Happily running to the location, reality soon gives a rude awakening.
Marina mocks Takopi’s speech pattern that remained, and we see what Shizuka must have gone through numerous times. Marina also talks of Shizuka’s mother being a parasite who leeches off of other men, suggesting that it may be the reason behind her hatred. Still, Takopi continues to try and understand what is happening as Marina just keeps getting more mad. It seems to come to a boiling point, and I don’t even know how Takopi managed to use the Happy Camera, but we end up going back in time again.
This means we now had an obvious villain, Marina-chan, who holds a grudge against Shizuka for something related to her mother. It still doesn’t even begin to justify the level of torture she enacts onto Shizuka though.
Here I thought Takopi would now accept that too, but Takopi instead takes the blame and thinks its own actions somehow got Shizuka in trouble. Shizuka is aware of the secret help, and she thanks Takopi and explains that things got this way when her mother got close with Marina’s father.
The episode seems to end on a somewhat positive note, with Shizuka telling Takopi things aren’t so bad lately (since its arrival), and Takopi committing to a future where Shizuka doesn’t have to die. Even Marina appears to throw a fit due to failing at her bullying 10 days in a row.
But, that’s not where the episode ends. At the end, we get to see Marina get home to a mess of a house, with her mother sitting at the table on her own. Her father is openly cheating with Shizuka’s mother, and Marina’s mother is taking it out on her daughter. She blames Marina for coming back so late, rhetorically asking if she’ll listen to her troubles.
Marina is just a child, and suddenly her behavior towards Shizuka made sense. It’s clear that this has been going on for a while, as her eyes tear up immediately as she braces herself for what’s coming. She says “yeah,” and the episode ends as her eyes go blank, hinting that this anime will be everything but the wholesome slice of life anime the visual and trailers may have suggested.
I have no idea if Takopi’s Original Sin will show these kids somehow escaping the abuse and their family situations, or if it will instead show that reality often doesn’t have a happy ending. Either way, Takopi is a great way to address many of humanity’s bad sides from an ‘alien’ point of view, and to show how young children can take in a wave of negative emotions.
With the anime set to run for only 5 more episodes, I can’t wait to see where it leads and how Takopi and Shizuka’s story will go.
Images via Crunchyroll
© Taizan 5 / Shueisha / “Takopi’s Original Sin” Production Committee
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