What if Doraemon couldn’t save Nobita? What if the blue robot cat, who travelled back in time to rescue a helpless boy with his pocketful of gadgets, arrived too late, or worse, it couldn’t comprehend human emotions?
Takopi’s Original Sin, the newly released anime adaptation of Taizan 5’s manga, answers the aforementioned questions, and it does it with a no-holds-barred approach to modern-day problems.
An adorable squid-like alien from a planet that brims with happiness, Takopi is cut from the same cloth as Doraemon. He lands on Earth and befriends a lonely, bullied pre-teen girl, hoping to make her life better with his magical gadgets. But unlike Doraemon, this happy-go-lucky creature is oblivious to human misery, and that makes all the difference.
Here’s why the new anime, currently streaming on Crunchyroll, should be on your watchlist.
(Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead)
An alien on a mission to spread happiness, albeit falteringly
Takopi is a little, pink alien from Planet Happy on a mission to spread happiness.
With his tiny limbs, awkward speech and a heart full of kindness, Takopi looks like a character straight out of a picturebook. After crashlanding on Earth, he expects to find new friends and make their lives happier.
Shizuku and Takopi from 'Takopi's Original Sin' X
But the sharp contrast between his cheery nature and the hostile reality of Earth becomes clear. Takopi stumbles upon a fourth-grade girl named Shizuka, who becomes his first friend on Earth (almost reluctantly). However, the young girl at the heart of Takopi’s story is lonely and broken beyond help.
A child’s cry for help — a pertinent take on mental health challenges
Takopi’s Original Sin begins with a trigger warning. It opens with the little Happian landing on Earth and expecting to make his first friend. The tone soon shifts when Shizuka — a small, lanky girl with exhausted eyes — finds him starved inside a pipe at a children’s playground.
Despite Takopi’s cheerful personality, Shizuka remains reserved. She is deeply traumatised — bullied by her classmate Marina at school and emotionally neglected at home. Her mother, she mentions, is an escort, leaving her to deal with the daily trials of life alone at a young age. Her only solace? Her pet dog Chappy.
Shizuku returns home to her pet dog Chappy X
Takopi, oblivious to the complexities of human pain, tries to cheer Shizuka up by using “Happy Gadgets” from his alien belt — remember Doraemon’s gadgets? But what unfolds is far from a comforting fix. Each attempt by Takopi to ease Shizuka’s pain only worsens it, highlighting how innocent Takopi fails to understand the depth of her trauma.
After getting beaten up by Marina at school, Shizuka uses Takopi’s magical ribbon, meant to reconcile friends after a fight, to take her own life instead. This leaves Takopi confused as suicide isn’t a common happening on his happy planet.
Using his Happy Camera, which allows one to travel back in time to the moment a picture was clicked, Takopi begins a series of trials and errors to fix his friend’s life. He fumbles and fails, but doesn’t stop fighting. At the end, he realises that empathy and communication are the key; not his gadgets.
A still from 'Takopi's Original Sin' X
The innocence of the alien vs the cruelty of the human world
A pure-hearted being pitted against the complexities of human nature — that’s what makes Takopi’s Original Sin so emotionally resonant. Takopi is as innocent as any cartoon character, but the world around him is harsh, merciless and incorrigible. Every scene in the anime feels like a clash of these two forces — Takopi’s kindness and the world’s cruelty.
Adding to this contrast is the subtle art style which depicts Takopi with soft colours, while drawing Shizuka with empty eyes. The silence, too, asks to be heard throughout the first episode, paving the way for the emotional ending song Glass no Sen by Tele.
Far from the childhood fantasy
For those who grew up watching Doraemon, Takopi’s Original Sin hits like a punch in the gut. It turns the alien helper trope on its head and drags it into a world where superficial solutions cannot patch broken hearts. And for fans of Inio Asano’s manga Oyasumi Punpun, a story which also uses deceptively adorable visuals to explore trauma and abuse, it echoes a similar emotion.
If Doraemon was the carefree fantasy we held close to our hearts as children, Takopi is the reality we now confront as adults.