The director of 2016’s best anime reveals the series’ best quality was initially its biggest challenge. Adapting a manga into anime requires a careful balance between fidelity and transformation. A scene that takes only a few panels on the page can require several minutes of television, while an elaborate illustration may become much easier to understand once movement gives it spatial context. The challenge becomes even greater with manga whose visual style depends on unusual artwork or highly experimental compositions, since a literal translation can feel stiff or lose the qualities that made the source distinctive.
The 2010s include an unusually strong collection of manga-to-anime adaptations, with several series that showcased radically different approaches to the same challenge. Attack on Titan translated Hajime Isayama’s increasingly elaborate worldbuilding into sweeping action sequences, the currently ongoing Hunter × Hunter‘s adaptation gave Yoshihiro Togashi’s intricate power system an accessible audiovisual translation, and Demon Slayer combined Koyoharu Gotouge’s relatively simple manga artwork with Ufotable’s elaborate digital compositing and sword choreography. My Hero Academia, Made in Abyss, Land of the Lustrous, and Vinland Saga, have also withstood the test of time a decade later.
Among such a remarkable collection, Mob Psycho 100 arguably offers the most complete example of what manga-to-anime adaptation can achieve, especially in terms of visuals.
Yuzuru Tachikawa Saw Mob Psycho 100’s Unique Art Style As The Anime’s Biggest Challenge
Adapting The Manga’s Style Was Make-Or-Break For Mob Psycho 100
Speaking to ScreenRant at Anime Expo 2026, Mob Psycho 100 director Yuzuru Tachikawa discussed how adapting ONE’s manga was particularly difficult. ONE’s manga has an intentionally rough, loose style where faces can look awkward, bodies can become almost abstract, and panel compositions can swing from crude comedy to strikingly expressive. Yoshimichi Kameda’s character designs preserve their unusual proportions and simplified faces, but the animation adds all the movement, color, distortion, and compositional freedom needed to make ONE’s eccentricity feel alive. The result is a visual vocabulary of its own, with ink-like textures and bursts of color that accurately translate Mob’s emotional state. Tachikawa explained:
“I was not aware of the original work that this was adapted from. I was working on a different anime when a producer gave me the original Mob Psycho 100 manga, and that’s how I first learned about the series. I noticed very quickly that it had some very special art.
The drawing style was very unique. So that was something that caused me to think: How am I going to adapt this, and how are we going to do this graphically? However, it has some universal themes in it like how to face your emotions. In that sense, I thought this was ripe for me to try some experimental methods for adapting this into an anime.
I thought that it would be interesting to see what this could be. What this could turn into. It was a challenge, and I thought that was great.”
The Mob Psycho 100 anime’s achievement becomes clearer when its changes are viewed as deliberate adaptation choices. Tachikawa and his staff knew when to remain close to the manga’s framing and when to depart from it, especially during major action scenes. Besides, the story remains remarkably faithful to the manga, but the television version rearranges and occasionally expands the material. Mob’s isolation before his first major emotional explosion, for instance, becomes an elaborate sequence of memories, colors, darkness, and visual fragments that externalizes a psychological process already present in the manga. Individual animators could also impose their own techniques, including Miyo Sato’s paint-on-glass work, which added an eerie flair.
Mob Psycho 100’s Accuracies And Departures Paid Off
Mob Psycho 100‘s anime adaptation made an unusually precise decision about what to preserve from ONE’s manga and what to reinvent for animation. Kameda’s character designs retain the strange proportions and almost crude designs that make ONE’s manga characters so memorable, but the animation surrounds them with an extraordinary range of visual techniques. The anime also knows when fidelity matters. Comedic timing, character expressions, distinctive poses, and many compositions are recognizable from the manga, but with much more speed and momentum than the original version’s static panels.
One Punch Man also adapted a manga associated with ONE around the same time, though its first season largely translated Yusuke Murata’s far more polished artwork into fluid animation. Meanwhile, My Hero Academia embraced a cleaner superhero aesthetic, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable used Hirohiko Araki’s distinctive poses and fashion as the foundation for a highly stylized anime. Mob Psycho 100 sits somewhere between these approaches, with a loyalty to the manga’s eccentricity but also a willingness to push animation into pure, avant-garde expressionism.
What’s your favorite part of Mob Psycho 100?
- Release Date
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2016 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Tokyo MX
- Directors
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Katsuya Shigehara, Kenichi Fujisawa, Yohei Shindo, Hiroshi Takeuchi, Tsuyoshi Tobita, Takashi Kawabata, Shohei Miyake, Yoko Kanamori, Toshiyuki Sone, Tomoaki Ohta
- Writers
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Hiroshi Seko
- Franchise(s)
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Mob Psycho 100
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Setsuo Ito
Shigeo ‘Mob’ Kageyama (voice)
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Takahiro Sakurai
Arataka Reigen (voice)