"Mono" anime english dub premieres May 3 – Cast & where to watch
The English dub of the anime Mono, which is the adaptation of Afro's popular four-panel manga hit, will launch on May 3, 2025. The series is renowned for its serene and out-of-the-box storytelling.
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The series is all about a class of high school girls who are members of an exclusive club called "cinephoto," a combination of photography and cinema.
Mono began in 2017 in Manga Time Kirara Carat. It provides a cozy slice-of-life experience that celebrates creativity, friendship, and self-expression. The anime is slow-paced and has an artsy feel, injecting life into the serene scenes with character-driven episodes.
English voice cast announced
The new English voice dubbing boasts a cast of renowned voice actors:
Abby Trott is Satsuki.
Michaela Murphy as An
Yolis Arroyo playing Sakurako
Kana Shimanuki playing Haruno
Hayden Bishop as Kako
Each performer introduces a new and familiar vibe to the series that brings the characters to new viewers.
Where to watch Mono
Mono initially telecasted in Japan on April 12, 2025, on Tokyo MX, BS11, Tochigi TV, Gunma TV, and AT-X. It is also available online across various Japanese platforms. English viewers can view the English version of the episodes from May 3 on licensed international platforms.
The anime first premiered to a select audience at Kofu City, which is where the anime takes place, on March 29 and later in Tokyo on April 5. The special screenings introduced a select few fans to the style and tone of the anime ahead of when the general population had access to it.
Creative personnel and production
The anime is produced by Aniplex and animated by Soigne. The anime has an original ending theme song titled "Weekend Roll" by halca. Ryota Aikei directed the series, who was an assistant director of Jujutsu Kaisen.
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Takuya Miyahara handled character design, and the script was written by Yoko Yonaiyama, who is also familiar with A Sign of Affection.
A heartwarming story of friendship and creativity
Mono is all about the daily student life and the joy of discovering art, presenting the audience with a soft and emotional experience. With the release of the English dub, more anime enthusiasts and new viewers who enjoy peaceful and imaginative stories will be able to watch the series.
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It is why Awara's Raju, a vagabond and small-time thief, registers as innocent, even as he slashes pockets with the grin of a slippery kid, and eventually murders thugs and assaults his high-strung father who left his mother out to dry. His innocence is a moral but not a legal victory in the film, which begins and ends as a court drama. Spared from being executed, he is jailed for three years. But that is not the film's justice—the justice is Raju's release and his union with his lover, Rita. That is his arc. The loss of innocence is when a character allows this desire for respectability—which could mean money and power—to eclipse the moral demands made from the character—to be kind, helpful, and in a world where spreading joy is a virtue. The provocation of Kapoor's films is that sometimes the two desires might be opposed to each other. You cannot be both respectable and innocent. 'The innocent character, then, is one who values goodness over respectability, even if he never gives up on the dreams of respectable labour.' In Kapoor's cinema, bad actions are profit-mongering ones, evil tied to fortune. Bad actions done by the poor—such as thieving—are so deeply contextualised that they shed their 'badness'. There is something morally compromised at worst and joyless at best about being moneyed: the lawyer in Awara eating dinner on the lonesome long table; the businesspeople in Shree 420 partying and swindling each other; the politician and industrialist in Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) trying to make a quick buck off the river's pollution, but also, literally, sullying Ganga the character by holding her hostage to their carnal desire; and the land-owning thakur in Prem Rog (1982). The innocent figure, thus, works as a foil to the respectable or the ambitious one who never looks back and is in constant pursuit—fragile and wiry. 'Mudh mudh ke na dekh' (Don't look back), Maya sings to Raj. You can faintly hear Kapoor's cinema whisper in your ears: can you be both ambitious and innocent? Can you optimise for profits and love? In 1948, at the spindly age of 24, Raj Kapoor not only began his own banner, RK Films, but also made his directorial debut, Aag. At that time he was known as 'Raju' the hustler about town or 'the elder son of Prithviraj' the towering theatre personality of Mumbai. The arc of Kapoor's five-decade career, his becoming the Showman of Hindi Cinema, was an act of retrieving himself from his father's shadow, a theme that keeps rising in his films until youth itself becomes synonymous with the shrugging off of received legacy. In Aag, Kewal (Raj Kapoor) leaves his family tradition of lawyers, to become a stage actor. In Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), his last film, Naren (Rajiv Kapoor, Raj Kapoor's youngest son) leaves his industrialist father to go 'kahin door', somewhere far off, by the banks of the Ganga, with his lover and their child. Here, I must caution a difference between innocence and naivete. If to be innocent is to be unblemished by the world, to be naive is to not know blemish, to be ignorant of it. The broad arc in Raj Kapoor's cinema can be seen as the movement from the innocent male to the naive one. This might be because as Kapoor's filmography ages, his actors—his sons Rishi Kapoor and Rajiv Kapoor, and his brother Shashi Kapoor—look embryonic, smooth-skinned, wide-eyed, without facial hair. The first time they see a beautiful woman in the film feels like the first time they have ever seen beauty. The first time they hear a beautiful song, their response is pronounced with heightened, dopey feeling, as though they have discovered melody. The face of Raj Kapoor, after all, looked touched by life—he had a moustache. These faces look touched up, air-dropped. But I also suspect this male naivete has a lot to do with how desire was shown in these later movies, whispers from Mera Naam Joker (1970) and Bobby (1973), expressing itself most egregiously in his final three films, Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), Prem Rog (1982), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), where women withered as suffering symbols of sexed tradition, who yearn to be cast out and punished, losing their sense of self at the feet of their lover. In the 1950s, working exclusively with Nargis, the imagery of women in Kapoor's films was saree-clad virtue. Whether they were poor in Shree 420 or rich in Awara, there was no scope for moral dithering or erotic fixation. Even when Nargis wore a swimsuit in Awara—shot indoors in a set constructed on Nargis' demand, for she refused to be outdoors in a swimsuit—Rachel Dwyer notes, 'the close up [is] of her face with her hair blowing in the wind, not one of her body.' Enter voyeurism But soon, with Nargis' exit from Kapoor's oeuvre, a voyeurism enters Kapoor's cinema. Although Vyjayantimala's scene in a swimsuit in Sangam (1964) only came after much cajoling, Kapoor seems disturbingly fixated on the idea of the exposed female body. In Bobby and Mera Naam Joker, these were used to fuel the men's first brush of desire—'pandrah-solah baras vala pyaar', the love of an adolescent, basically a hormonal surge. But from Mera Naam Joker onwards, these sexualised female bodies performed by freshly minted actresses could not muster what Michael Newton calls Nargis' 'spontaneity of feeling'. And a stilted, staged, sexed presence begins to permeate these films. The women became forcefully buxom, and the chemistry between the lovers refuses to see it as erotic, only romantic. If only the writing were as frank as the wardrobe. Why is there this chasm between what we are seeing and what we are hearing? Raj Kapoor still wanted to hold onto the mantle of tradition even as he called himself a 'bosom man' in a conversation with the writer Khushwant Singh. The woman became the site of pavitrata (purity) for the people on screen and the object of lust for us off-screen—he wanted it both ways. What is this purity he is after, an idea that is itself tainted by generations of de-sexualising women? Besides, these women do not seem aware of themselves as sexualised objects, for there is an abandon that comes with self-knowledge that these women lack. The erotics is for us, the audience, to salivate over. Also Read | Awara and the Constitutional question When Zeenat Aman writes about the furore around Satyam Shivam Sundaram where she walks about wrapped in a white cloth or in tight low-cut blouses—'I was always quite amused by the accusations of obscenity as I did not and do not find anything obscene about the human body'—she is responding to the image in isolation. The human body is a site of desire. But when it is hollowed solely into a site of desire, that is uncomfortable to watch, like watching a shapely mannequin being eroticised. How do you respond to these women, over-sexed traditionalists who will caress the shivling with their face in an act of devotion, come to pujas in bursting blouses, shower under waterfalls in white wraparounds, are constantly burned, assaulted, raped, thrown into brothels? It turns the men into saviours who turn their backs on their families and their future to hold on to love as a sacred solution to all of society's ills. The male actor, then, has to be turned into a naive lover, unaware of how these sexed bodies are being looked at, unaware of how it will be made maili or sullied by the world. If they respond to the erotic body erotically, it might come off as sleazy. A man cannot say to a woman, I want to have sex with you. He has to talk about her 'tan ki sundarta', the body's beauty. In some ways, words construct meaning. But elsewhere, they seem to leach meaning. The more they say the less they mean, these joyless puppets in the fag end of Kapoor's cinema that once showed us what innocence looked like. Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
