The anime Draw This, Then Die! shows us how hard it is to make manga with its new trailer

If you’ve ever tried to draw your own manga in school notebooks and realized that creating a good story is a pain, this premiere is going to hit you right in the heart.

Shinei Animation just released the first promotional trailer for Draw This, Then Die! (or Kore Kaite Shine for Japanese purists), confirming that this gem about artistic passion will land on our screens July 3.

The trailer features Isho, the electrifying opening by Tatsuya Kitani — a track that injects all the emotional vibe into the difficult path of becoming a mangaka.

A Cast of Heavyweights to Master the Art of Manga

Making a series about creative processes and dreams of youth is a challenge. The production committee opened their wallets and assembled a team of seiyuus that’s utter madness:

• Akira Sekine as Ai Yasumi — known for Princess Principal and The Dangers in My Heart
• Saori Hayami as Rei Teshima — the unmistakable voice of Yor Forger in Spy x Family and Shinobu Kocho in Demon Slayer
• Inori Minase as Hikaru Sekiryu — our dearest Rem in Re:Zero and Hestia in DanMachi
• Atsumi Tanezaki as Nana Teramura — legendary for Anya Forger and Frieren
• Kikuko Inoue as Hebichika-sensei — the eternal goddess Belldandy in Oh My Goddess!
• Yukana as Hana Kongoji — immortalized as CC in Code Geass

This isn’t star sprinkling; it’s a calculated bet that the emotional weather inside these scenes requires voices calibrated down to the micro-expression.

Tears, Sweat, and Ink on a Remote Island

Under the meticulous direction of Hiroaki Akagi, the plot promises to squeeze every emotion from artistic creation.

The story takes us to the remote island of Izu Oshima to follow Ai Yasumi, a high school student who breathes and lives by her favorite stories.

Far from being another slice-of-life heap of schoolchildren, the original work of Minoru Toyoda is so brutally honest that it swept the top prize at the 2023 Manga Taisho and won at the recent 2025 Shogakukan Manga Awards.

What the Trailer Is Really Showing You

There’s a certain look a production gives you when it knows it’s holding a winning hand. Not a boast — more a quiet gleam, the unspoken confidence of people who’ve done the homework.

Watch the visuals roll, and Tatsuya Kitani’s opening track Isho isn’t bludgeoning you with motivational clichés. It’s needling the parts of you that ever tried to make something from nothing.

The melody works like the prod of a sharpened pencil — uncomfortable, accurate, hard to ignore.

The Reality Behind the Romance

Here we will see the reality of the industry:

• The creative blocks damn creative blocks
• The suffocating pressure to create something worthwhile
• The iron friendships forged when you join other crazy people with the same hobby

It’s basically a love letter to creators, showing both the rewards and emotional blows of birthing a project from scratch.

Permission to Be Uncomfortable

The trailer gently asks the audience to admit something uncomfortable: that all the romanticising of the creative path never prepares you for the moment a panel refuses to work, or the panic that someone has already told your tale better.

The friendships it hints at — the iron bonds — they’re forged not in mutual admiration but in the shared recognition of mutual dread.

• If a series like this can strip the glamour from creation and still find an audience of millions, what does that say about our appetite for stories about process over product?
• When we invest emotionally in a fictional mangaka’s breakthrough, are we bartering for an absolution of our own neglected ideas?
• Might this honest, unflinching behind-the-scenes narrative become the sleeper cultural export that reframes anime as a raw documentary of the artistic mind?

Are you going to give this inspiring story a chance in the summer, or do you prefer to play it safe with pure action shonen?