How the Light Hit at "Naani"
Season 2's most-quoted beat comes down to a single word. In an interview with Japanese entertainment outlet MANTANWEB, director Akinori Fudesaka walks through episodes 45 and 46, where Maomao calls out to her friend by the name Shisui (子翠) rather than her true identity, Loulan, and gets a soft "naani" (なあに) back.
Fudesaka says the team planned the corridor where that exchange happens well in advance. They set its structure and the placement of its windows so light would come flooding in at the instant the characters round the corner. Landing that on screen meant the 3D staff and the art team working in step.
Shisui is voiced by Asami Seto (Nobara Kugisaki in Jujutsu Kaisen, Mai Sakurajima in Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai). Fudesaka says her delivery of the line gave the team more than it had asked for.
The Frog Scene Got a Second Opinion
The other moment Fudesaka discusses needs no description for novel readers. "Frog" is shorthand enough that the word alone identifies the scene. It takes place in the cave behind a waterfall where the characters shelter from assassins.
Fudesaka frames the problem as calibration. He consulted women on the staff about where the line sat between comedy and something uncomfortably sexual. He describes the result as a scene where sexiness, comedy and beauty sit side by side. That stretch of the interview runs under a heading about color and backgrounds reinforcing emotional expression. Color design on the series is credited to Misato Aida, with Katsumi Takao as art director and Daisuke Imai on editing.
A Best Director Win He Credits to the Room
Fudesaka joined the adaptation as assistant director on Season 1 and stepped up to director for Season 2. He won Best Director for that season at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026, sharing the award with chief director Norihiro Naganuma, who directed Season 1.
He is quick to redirect the credit, saying it belongs to the staff and the cast rather than to any one person. By his own account he was flat out for the entire production, with no space to stand back and decide whether any of it had worked. Even so, he says, the team mapped the series' peaks and key turning points deliberately and built the process toward them.
Part of the pressure was the audience split. Natsu Hyuuga's novels began on Shosetsuka ni Naro, Japan's largest user-submitted fiction site, and are published by Imagica Infos under its Hero Bunko imprint, with two separate manga adaptations running alongside them. The series has more than 57 million copies in print worldwide. Readers arrive from the novels, from one of the manga, or from the anime alone.
"Delivering the appeal of the work equally to all of them, and turning that into visuals they would accept, was the hardest part and the part we put the most into," Fudesaka said.
The series follows Maomao, a girl pressed into work as a food taster in a lavish imperial rear palace. Together with Jinshi, the palace's good-looking administrator, she keeps getting pulled into the incidents, plots and rumors crowding the place. Aoi Yuki voices Maomao and Takeo Otsuka voices Jinshi.
Looking Ahead
Season 3 started on October 2 in Nippon TV's FRIDAY ANIME NIGHT block, airing Fridays at 11 p.m. JST. OLM is handling animation on its own this time, after sharing production on the first two seasons with TOHO animation STUDIO. Yorushika performs the opening theme, and Eve wrote the ending theme, "AIYOU".
Crunchyroll streams the season across North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, the CIS and the Indian subcontinent, with subtitles and an English dub, on Fridays. Netflix carries it in select Asian territories. The season is split in two, with the second half due in April 2027.
Before that, the film The Apothecary Diaries: The Deceased Empress' Treasure opens in Japanese theaters on December 11, telling a new story from an outline by Hyuuga. No overseas release has been announced for it yet. The light novels are available in English digitally from J-Novel Club and in print from Square Enix Manga, which also publishes Nekokurage's manga adaptation in English.