With less than 10 episodes currently out, the My Dress-Up Darling TV anime has brought a ton of fans to the fandom who can’t get enough of the earnest relationship between Marin and Gojo as they fall in love with each other. One person who loves the series more than most is manga creator Shinichi Fukuda, who fell in love with the TV anime version of the manga.
“When I received the first two finished episodes of the anime version, it was so good that I was overwhelmed with emotion and cried!,” Fukuda told Comic Natalie in a recent interview, the first-ever interview with the private manga creator. “I watched [the two episodes] over and over again for 13 hours … I had never been happier in my life as a manga artist.”
Fukuda explained that when pre-order launched for the anime, she immediately grabbed a copy – not just to support the series she created, but to get the pre-order bonus, a dakimakura of Marin drawn lewdly by the anime staff. “I could probably get a sample version, but I’d just be like ‘that’s neither here nor there.’ I just want as many dakimakura of Marin that I can get!”
Though Fukuda wasn’t always moved by the anime, saying that when she was first told that My Dress-Up Darling would be getting an adaptation, she “had been up all night and was not thinking straight, so I had a vague feeling that it was someone else’s business.” Fukuda thought she would be “crying and rejoicing” when she first heard the news, but because she was so tired she “didn’t feel it at all.,” even though it was one of her dreams to get an anime of their work. Though she didn’t think the series would get an anime due to the explicit nature of the visual novel that was shown in the early chapters.
The full interview is available to read over on Comic Natalie in Japanese, with Fukuda talking about the manga series and how she thought Gojo’s voice actor Shoya Ishige was “too cool” to voice Gojo.
The My Dress-Up Darling TV anime is directed by Keisuke Shinohara and features animation produced at CloverWorks. The series began on January 8 and is streaming weekly right here on Crunchyroll, which describes the series as such:
Wakana Gojo is a high school boy who wants to become a kashirashi–a master craftsman who makes traditional Japanese Hina dolls. Though he’s gung-ho about the craft, he knows nothing about the latest trends, and has a hard time fitting in with his class. The popular kids–especially one girl, Marin Kitagawa–seem like they live in a completely different world. That all changes one day, when she shares an unexpected secret with him, and their completely different worlds collide.
Source: Comic Natalie
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Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs a YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram.
