How Was the Vinland Saga Anime Made?

The anime of Vinland Saga runs 48 episodes across two seasons. Season one was animated by Wit Studio and aired on NHK General TV from July 8 to December 30, 2019; season two, by MAPPA, aired from January 10 to June 20, 2023 on Tokyo MX and other stations, with Netflix and Crunchyroll carrying it worldwide.

The constants matter more than the logos: director Shūhei Yabuta, a CGI animator turned director who was a fan of the manga, writer Hiroshi Seko, character designer Takahiko Abiru, and composer Yutaka Yamada carried the series across both studios. Yabuta and Seko reordered the opening into chronology, where the manga uses flashback, and wrote original material around Thorfinn’s nightmares and Einar’s past; Yukimura publicly praised the second season’s reading of Thorfinn’s state of mind.

Adapting the art was the hard part. Yabuta has described Yukimura’s detail as genuinely difficult to animate, and the Viking ships were modelled in 3D CG, action and camera planned as one piece. The first season adapts the War Arc; the second, the farm years of the Slave Arc.