Warning: Spoilers follow!

Manga readers may have noticed a slight difference in the big climax of the first episode. When Momo’s spiritual powers awaken while she’s being abducted by the Serpoian aliens, there’s a flashback to the beginning of the episode when she unsuccessfully kicked her lousy ex-boyfriend during an argument – a fight she clearly lost.

At this moment, Momo kicks one of the aliens and dramatically escapes from their clutches, making for a far more powerful scene that shows her growth as a character and her newfound power as a spirit medium.

In the manga, however, this callback is not present during their scuffle with the Serpoians. We had the chance to ask Dan Da Dan’s director Fuga Yamashiro about his decision to include this moment during the episode’s climax – a moment he believes the manga’s author, Yukinobu Tatsu, probably wanted to include as well, but couldn’t.

Science Saru

In the first episode, Momo is kidnapped by aliens and manages to awaken her spiritual powers.

“I added the kick because I felt the author probably wanted to add it too, but that
“He couldn’t because it would have disrupted the flow of the manga form, so he had to take it out,” Yamashiro told us.

“My intention was to recreate the author’s intent while taking advantage of the specific strengths of the medium I was working with. Adding a short insert like this works like a flashback in animation, thanks to the medium’s inherent sense of speed and rhythm.

“I thought it was important to create a dramatic catharsis in the scene. Compare it to the
Opening scene where Momo tries to kick her boyfriend but he blocks him, but after meeting
Okarun and the confrontation with her own past and her feelings enables her to grow and change internally.
so she was able to land the kick against the Serpoian and send him flying!”

“Dan Da Dan” is already shaping up to be one of the biggest premieres of the fall anime season, and it’s all thanks to little details like these that make an already outstanding story even more impressive.

Of course, we can’t ignore the breathtaking action sequences and breathtaking fight scenes that Dan Da Dan manages to impeccably translate from the black and white pages of the manga. For Yamashiro, making each fight scene a story in itself is important in order to successfully translate these moments into an animated format.

Science Saru

“Dan Da Dan” is packed with action sequences that will captivate the viewer.

“The manga is full of cool panels, one after the other, and it never feels like it’s going to stop,” Yamashiro said. “Combining all of that with natural acting was quite difficult. I put a lot of effort into making sure that fight scenes, for example, aren’t just a collection of cool shots, but rather a kind of story in themselves.”

For Yamashiro, discovering the rhythm of each episode and translating the visual elements of a storyboard into moving, breathing animations is the most fun part of bringing Dan Da Dan to life—though he says it’s also quite a difficult task.

“What we call ‘cut’ in Japanese when we set the timing of the episode was the
“For me, this was the most fun part of adapting Dan Da Dan,” he explained. It’s the step where you create the rhythm of the images and see the final form of the episode for the first time.

“Of course, you can imagine to some extent what the episode will look like when you read the storyboard, but this is the process where it actually becomes visually realized. Finding the right pacing can be really hard work!”

Fans can watch “Dan Da Dan” on Crunchyroll and Netflix starting October 3, or catch the first three episodes in theaters before its August-September release.