New Crunchyroll Romance Anime Butchers The Original Story

True Beauty is an adaptation of a Korean webcomic from Yaongyi by the same name. It follows the story of Jugyeong Lim, who has been bullied by fellow students and her family due to her appearance. After someone posts a picture of her attempting to wear makeup, she ends up getting kicked out of school.

During the break, before she transfers to another school, some people online show her videos and offer tips on how to apply makeup better. By the time she transfers, she’s a pro and looks gorgeous. No one would ever know she used to be bullied for her appearance.

Or at least, no one would know if she could stop running into fellow students when she’s out in public and not wearing any makeup.

The English voice actors include Rebecca Danae (The Apothecary Diaries) as Jugyeong, Eduardo Vildasol (Kaiju No. 8) as Suho, Mauricio Ortiz-Segura (Black Butler: Public School Arc) as Seojun, and Molly Zhang (Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie) as Sua. The series isn’t technically an anime, as it was made by a Korean team with Cocktail Media and Studio N. This is the first animated series for both studios.

Though I started the original True Beauty webcomic, I never finished it. The story felt too long and drawn out to me. However, I did get pretty far into the story enough, and I was excited to watch the anime and see if they fixed the pacing.

Immediately, I found I liked the anime style for True Beauty. It wasn’t very close to the original, but it was still easy enough to tell which characters were which, and I liked how the characters looked. However, that’s honestly all I had positive about the adaptation.

While I thought the pacing was a little slow in the webcomic, especially later in the story, the animated version of True Beauty went in the complete opposite direction. There were a lot of parts cut from the plot, which ended up changing the storyline.

Now, I know parts have to be cut and changed a little to make the pacing work better in a TV show, but this wasn’t the way to do it. They managed to get rid of all of the parts that developed the characters, completely skimming over Jugyeong’s struggles with bullying and how long and hard she worked to develop her makeup techniques.

By the end of the third episode, over 28 chapters of the comic were covered, and five major story arcs from the original True Beauty. That’s nearly 10 chapters an episode. To cram that much of the story into one standard-length episode, some of the sweeter moments between Jugyeong and Suho, and a lot of her family interactions were completely left out.

REVIEW SCORE

Considering Suho is meant to be one of the main love interests, it seems weird to cut a lot of the more fun moments between the two and eliminate most of his sweet interactions. It makes him come across solely as a jerk. To be fair, he is a pretty big jerk in the True Beauty webcomic, but there are moments when he shows a different side of himself that makes him a lot more tolerable.

Despite not technically being an anime, True Beauty is listed on My Anime List. There, it has an average score of 6.39. On IMDb, the series has a bit of a better rating, scoring 7.2 as its average score.

If you want to watch the series for yourself, whether or not you’ve read the original webcomic, True Beauty can be found on Crunchyroll.