Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It is a popular returning rom-com anime series of the Spring 2022 anime season, and it also qualifies as an "edutainment" anime series with its slick blend of quality educational material and engaging storytelling methods. Something similar could likewise be said about the culinary anime series Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma.

These anime titles dive deep into their respective real-life industries to depict accurate lab experiments or cooking, but if the creators aren't careful, they may end up with something tedious and slow in exchange for perfect accuracy. Fortunately, both shows use similar visual and storytelling tricks to make these edutainment stories feel like true shonen material in each episode.

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How Science Fell In Love & Food Wars! Use Shonen Visual Cues

ayame and shinya charging up

Both of these edutainment anime series use real-life industries as the basis for non-violent shonen stories, and it works well when the right methods are used. It's not always easy to strike a balance between informative and fun, but with the right visuals, both Science Fell in Love and Food Wars! pull it off. The trick is to use strong, larger-than-life visuals to make an industry's duller details seem worthy of a Dragon Ball episode.

In fact, a recent episode of Science Fell in Love did just that when the main scientist couple, Ayame and Shinya, compared oxytocin levels with the established couple Suiu and Chris. Ordinarily, collecting saliva samples and reading a data sheet would make for a dull anime experience, so Science Fell in Love depicts this clash of oxytocin levels as a Super Saiyan battle on the alien planet Namek -- a familiar sight for any anime veteran. This goofy but intuitive visual gag makes the otherwise mundane battle come to life, and viewers don't have to understand the hard science of hormones to understand what's happening.

Similarly, Food Wars! makes cooking far less tedious when it uses wild fan service to express a character's delight at a sampled dish, and the show also uses visual cues such as JoJo-inspired Stand battles to symbolize two opponents competing in a cook-off. Normally, watching simmering broth and vegetables being diced would be dull, but in addition to the characters' colorful personalities, Food Wars! uses those intuitive shonen-style visuals to make the competition appear fiercer than ever. Tadokoro Megumi isn't just an underdog cooking a seafood dish -- she's a tough girl with a food-inspired Stand trading blows with Kurokiba Ryo's own fierce Stand. There's no question that this is a shonen battle, right down to the bone. And Science Fell in Love emulates that technique perfectly to turn a visually dull premise into something incredible.

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How Other Edutainment Shonen Use Similar Techniques

cells at work and dr. stone

More than other edutainment anime, Science Fell in Love and Food Wars! rely heavily on zany visuals and some fan service to make their subject matter come to life, but to a lesser degree, other beloved edutainment anime do the same thing, and for roughly similar reasons. A good start is the Dr. Stone franchise -- a time-based isekai story in which the hero, Ishigami Senku, awakens in a brand-new Stone Age. He reinvents civilization one contraption and chemistry experiment at a time, and when Senku announces his plans, the Dr. Stone manga and anime alike use dazzling visuals to represent his ideas, often with a dash of humor. That's how Senku can make a primitive steam engine or water mill seem that much more exciting.

Cells at Work! also does this every minute of its runtime, as it depicts the inner workings of the human body as a massive city populated by uniformed cells working all day long. It's not exactly captivating to watch a real-life white blood cell slowly gobble up a germ, but when the white blood cell is a knife-wielding action hero and the germ is a colorful monster, and they're fighting to the death in the streets, that changes everything. Cells at Work! often takes time to explain the hard science of what's going on, but with those kinds of zany visuals and fun characters, the science lessons feel like exciting shonen fare, not just a slideshow in a high school science class. With the right techniques, almost anything can become an unforgettable shonen adventure.