How Tower of God Became an Anime: From Korean Webtoon to Japanese Studios

Spoiler level: None. This article explains the anime’s production and adaptation choices without revealing major story events.

Before Tower of God could become a television anime, its production team had to solve a surprisingly practical problem: how to read the original comic.

SIU’s Korean webtoon was designed for vertical scrolling. Japanese animation staff, meanwhile, were preparing a series built around timed scenes, moving characters, and television episodes.

So the team prepared manga-style reading copies of the material it intended to animate.

That detail comes from an interview with Takashi Sano, director of the 2020 anime. It offers a useful glimpse into a process that involved more than adding movement and sound to an existing story.

The anime also changed studios between its first and second seasons. Yet some of the people responsible for its scripts, character designs, and music continued working on it.

Here’s how a Korean digital comic became a Japanese television production—and what the people behind it have said about their choices.

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From Korean Webtoon to International Anime

Tower of God began in 2010 as 신의 탑, a Korean webtoon created by SIU and published through Naver WEBTOON.

Its first television anime premiered on April 1, 2020.

The project was presented as a collaboration between Crunchyroll and WEBTOON, with Japanese studio Telecom Animation Film handling animation production and SOLA ENTERTAINMENT providing production management.

That arrangement brought together several different roles.

SIU created the original Korean comic. WEBTOON was the publishing platform associated with the source material. The Japanese animation team adapted that material for television.

The first season was also included in Crunchyroll’s initial lineup of Crunchyroll Originals.

This distinction is worth remembering: Tower of God wasn’t created as an anime and then adapted into a webtoon.

The Korean comic came first, building its own readership before the television adaptation was announced.

The original production arrangement is documented in Crunchyroll’s February 2020 announcement.

Why Did the Animation Team Turn a Webtoon into Manga-Style Pages?

Webtoons and printed manga organize images differently.

A printed comic arranges panels across pages. A vertically scrolling webtoon can use the space between images to influence when readers encounter information.

Both are forms of sequential storytelling, but they create different reading experiences.

During a July 2020 interview with Bounding Into Comics, director Takashi Sano described an adjustment made for the anime production.

The staff needed to work with a long, vertically formatted source. To make that material easier to read, the team arranged the portion being adapted into manga-style books for internal use.

These weren’t new editions released to the public.

They were working materials intended to help the animation staff follow the story.

It’s a particularly revealing detail because the format had to be adjusted before some of the more obvious adaptation decisions could even begin.

The team was moving from an experience controlled by the reader’s scrolling to one controlled by the timing of an animated episode.

Scenes needed durations. Dialogue needed performances. Images needed to become movement.

That doesn’t mean every webtoon requires the same preparation.

In another interview, Sano said that adapting the webtoon involved relatively few restrictions overall.

So the manga-style copies are best understood as a practical choice made by this production team, rather than evidence that Korean webtoons are inherently difficult to animate.

Sano discusses those working materials in his 2020 Bounding Into Comics interview.

What Did the Director Notice About the Story’s Korean Context?

One of Sano’s observations goes beyond the comic’s format.

In a May 2020 interview with Crunchyroll, he said he saw Tower of God as closely connected to Korean social structures. He also wanted to make the anime accessible to a broader audience.

A June 2020 interview with the Japanese publication WebNewtype makes his interpretation more specific.

Sano mentioned two aspects of Korean society that he felt were reflected in the original comic:

• Intense competition surrounding education.
• Differences in social and economic status.

He connected those concerns to the tensions and personal struggles among the characters.

This is an interesting perspective on a fantasy story filled with tests, rankings, and characters pursuing different ambitions.

But there’s an important boundary between the director’s interpretation and the creator’s stated intentions.

Sano was explaining what he recognized in SIU’s work. His comments don’t prove that every test in the Tower was designed to represent a particular Korean institution.

Nor should his interpretation be treated as a description of what every Korean reader sees in the story.

What it does show is that the adaptation team was considering the source’s Korean context, not simply its action sequences.

For an international audience, that adds another way to understand the production.

The Tower is fictional, but the questions characters face about ambition, inequality, and belonging can connect to experiences outside its fantasy setting.

The interviews are available through Crunchyroll and WebNewtype (Japanese).

How Did the First Season Handle a Long-Running Story?

By the time the anime premiered, the original webtoon had been running for almost ten years.

The first television season had 13 episodes.

That created a structural problem: how much of the original story could be adapted while still giving viewers enough context to understand its characters?

In the WebNewtype interview, Sano explained that the team had considered beginning with a more dramatic section from later in the comic.

The difficulty was that doing so would leave too little room to introduce the characters and their backgrounds.

Instead, the production focused on organizing the opening material into a television season with its own structure.

Erika Yoshida was credited with series composition, a role involving the overall organization of the scripts.

The challenge was therefore more specific than deciding how many original chapters could fit into each episode.

It involved choosing a starting point, establishing relationships, and giving the audience enough information to follow the Tower’s unfamiliar world.

The anime has a fixed running time for each episode.

The webtoon doesn’t impose that same viewing pace on readers.

That difference helps explain why adapting a long-running digital comic involves choices about story structure even when the filmmakers want to remain close to the source.

Why Does the First Anime Have a Distinctive Visual Style?

The first season’s appearance was also the result of deliberate choices.

In WebNewtype, Sano explained that he wanted to preserve something of the atmosphere of SIU’s early artwork.

Rather than adding elaborate shading throughout the animation, he asked the character designers to simplify lines and reduce shadows.

He also discussed using variations in outline appearance while limiting certain photographic finishing effects.

The goal was to keep the drawings closer to the visual atmosphere he associated with the original comic.

This wasn’t simply a technical shortcut described by the director.

It was part of his approach to interpreting the source’s artistic identity.

What did SIU say about Rachel’s design?

The same interview includes a particularly useful example of communication between the anime staff and the original creator.

Sano explained that the team had initially proposed a more conventionally attractive design for Rachel.

According to the director, SIU objected to that direction.

Sano said he understood the concern: changing Rachel’s appearance in that way could affect how the character was perceived.

The example shows why character design is more than making someone look appealing on screen.

An appearance can communicate something about a character’s role in the story.

It also demonstrates that preserving the original work doesn’t necessarily mean copying every drawing exactly.

Sometimes it means considering why a character was designed a particular way before making changes.

This is one documented instance of creator feedback, not evidence that SIU approved every frame of the anime.

How Much Did SIU Participate in the Anime Production?

Sano described the communication process in his 2020 interviews.

Rather than working directly with SIU on every decision, the director said that WEBTOON’s editors acted as intermediaries between the original creator and the anime staff.

The Rachel design discussion is an example of that arrangement.

It shows that the creator could provide feedback while the animation team remained responsible for producing the television series.

Those roles shouldn’t be confused.

SIU authored the original webtoon. The anime staff interpreted and produced an adaptation of it, with communication taking place through the publishing side.

The interviews don’t establish the approval process for every script, design, or episode.

What they do document is a working relationship across the original Korean publication and the Japanese anime production.

What Changed Between Anime Seasons 1 and 2?

The second television season premiered in July 2024, four years after the first.

It adapted material associated with Return of the Prince and Workshop Battle.

The most visible production difference was a change of animation studio.

Tower of God anime production credits for Seasons 1 and 2

Production role	Season 1 (2020)	Season 2 (2024)
Animation studio	Telecom Animation Film	The Answer Studio
Director	Takashi Sano	Suzuki (鈴木 慧)
Chief director	—	Kazuyoshi Takeuchi
Series composition	Erika Yoshida	Erika Yoshida
Character design	Masashi Kudo, Miho Tanino	Miho Tanino, Seigo Kitazawa, Yoshimitsu Kashima
Music	Kevin Penkin	Kevin Penkin

The director of Season 2 is credited as 鈴木 慧 on the official Japanese website. English-language reporting has used differing romanizations of his given name.

The production credits show both change and continuity.

Telecom Animation Film was replaced by The Answer Studio, and the directorial team changed.

But Erika Yoshida returned for series composition, Kevin Penkin continued as composer, and Miho Tanino remained involved in character design.

So it would be inaccurate to describe the second season as an entirely new creative team starting from nothing.

Animation production involves several separate responsibilities. A change in one area doesn’t necessarily mean every other area changes alongside it.

You can compare the official Season 1 credits with the official Season 2 credits.

Why did the animation studio change?

The official credits establish that the studio changed.

They don’t, by themselves, establish why the decision was made.

There isn’t enough evidence in those credits to attribute the change to a particular budget issue, production dispute, or response to the first season.

It also doesn’t establish which season viewers should prefer.

Those would require different evidence from the production facts discussed here.

For this article, the meaningful point is simpler: the second season used a different animation studio and directorial team while retaining some important creative contributors.

What Does the Adaptation Tell Us About Korean Webtoons?

The production history of Tower of God brings together several parts of modern digital storytelling.

The original was created for Korean webtoon readers, following a format built around scrolling and serialization.

The television adaptation was organized through Japanese animation production, with international companies involved in bringing it to viewers.

Along the way, the people making the anime had to decide how to read the source, structure its story, preserve its visual identity, and communicate with the original creator.

Those are specific decisions documented through interviews and production credits.

They don’t tell us whether the anime is better or worse than the webtoon.

They do help explain why the two versions can’t be treated as identical presentations of the same material.

And they show something worth remembering about Korean digital stories that reach global audiences: the finished adaptation is shaped not only by the original work, but also by the people and production practices involved in bringing it to another medium.

If you’ve finished the anime and want to continue reading, the Tower of God Reading Order Guide provides official WEBTOON starting points.

For the original Korean webtoon, its spin-off, and other adaptations, visit the Tower of God Hub.