Summer anime seasons have a reputation for being quieter than spring, and every year that reputation gets proven wrong. Summer 2026 is already shaping up to be one of the stronger recent seasons, with a mix of highly anticipated sequels, original productions, and adaptations that have been on watchlists for years finally making it to the screen.
Whether you’re completely caught up on your watchlist or just looking for something new to add to it, this list covers the 12 best anime shows currently airing this summer.
1. Saga of Tanya the Evil II
Nine years is a long time to wait. Season 1 aired in 2017, the film dropped in 2019, and then nothing for half a decade while fans kept wondering if the story would ever continue. It finally does on July 8, picking up directly after the film left off with Tanya von Degurechaff, the reincarnated Japanese salaryman trapped in the body of a terrifyingly competent little girl, deeper into a war she never asked for against a god she refuses to acknowledge.
Studio NUT returns with most of the original team intact, though Takayuki Yamamoto steps in as director for the first time, helming a full series. The light novel has 14 volumes, and Season 2 is expected to cover volumes 4 through 6, which fans of the source material have been calling some of the strongest material in the whole franchise.
2. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3
At this point, Rudeus has gone from helpless infant to someone with real relationships, real responsibilities, and a long list of things he’s handled badly along the way. Season 3 opens with the Eris Training Arc, following Eris through her self-imposed exile to the Holy Land of Swords, before pivoting to Rudeus and his party heading to Perugius’s floating fortress for a magic that could change everything. The emotional stakes here are considerably higher than anything the first two seasons set up, because the show has spent years earning them.
CBR reported that Mushoku Tensei topped Japan’s Summer 2026 anticipation polls, beating every other show this season. It holds an 8.2 on IMDb and was nominated for Best Isekai at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards for four consecutive years running. Studio Bind was built with Mushoku Tensei as its main long-term project, which is a big reason the series keeps such consistent production quality.
3. Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You
Sasaki is a burnt-out salaryman in his mid-forties who gets through the week on mochi chips, cigarettes, and the brief comfort of chatting with Yamada, his favorite supermarket cashier. One evening, he finds a striking woman behind the store and ends up sharing a smoke break with her. He has no idea she’s the same person he’s been smiling at across register number two. That running gag sounds thin on paper, but the show earns it completely because the dynamic between these two people, in both versions, is genuinely warm without overselling itself.
The manga started as a Twitter webcomic in 2022, won the Next Manga Award that same year, and had over 3 million copies in circulation by 2026. The anime hit a perfect 5-star rating on Crunchyroll within three days of premiering, pulling in 14,000 ratings before most shows manage half that after completing their full runs. In a sea of teen romcoms, it’s refreshing to finally get a grounded adult romance aimed at people in their thirties and forties.
4. Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War – The Calamity
This is the one Bleach fans have been waiting twenty years for. Everything since episode one has been building toward Ichigo versus Yhwach, and The Calamity is where that finally happens. Yhwach has taken down the Soul King, the Gotei 13 is in ruins, and what’s left of the cast has to pull off something close to impossible with very little left in the tank. Tite Kubo is personally involved in expanding the notoriously rushed manga ending with anime-only content, which makes this the version of the finale the story always deserved.
Studio Pierrot has maintained the staggering animation quality that made the Thousand-Year Blood War adaptation so celebrated, and the first three episodes got a theatrical run in the US, Japan, and Australia before the TV broadcast began on July 25, pulling in $3 million in US theaters alone. That number tells you exactly how much the fanbase has been holding its breath for this. That said, you absolutely need to have watched the previous three cours first, but if you’re already there, nothing else this summer comes close.
5. Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Walpurgisnacht: Rising
Before anything else, you need to watch the original 2011 TV series and the 2013 film Rebellion first. This is a direct sequel to Rebellion’s ending, which left Homura Akemi having reshaped reality itself to keep Madoka by her side, a decision that split the fanbase right down the middle and kept people arguing for over a decade about what it meant. Walpurgisnacht Rising picks up in that rewritten world as a dangerous new threat connected to Walpurgisnacht forces Homura to confront exactly what she built and what it cost.
The entire original creative team is back. Gen Urobuchi writes the screenplay, Studio SHAFT handles animation with Akiyuki Shinbo as chief director, and Yuki Kajiura returns to compose the score through her FictionJunction project. Rebellion was the first late-night anime film to gross over 2 billion yen at the Japanese box office, which gives you a sense of the weight this sequel carries. The film was announced in 2021, delayed four separate times, and fans started calling it the GTA VI of anime movies. It finally hits Japanese theaters on August 28, 2026. The wait has been genuinely painful.
6. Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs 2
Leon is a regular office worker who is forced by his sister to grind through an otome game, a romance game made for women, for two straight days before dying of exhaustion. He wakes up reincarnated inside that exact game, in a world where women hold all the power and men exist mostly to look pretty and compete for female attention. The twist is that Leon has zero interest in any of that. He just wants a quiet life in the countryside, and the fact that he knows exactly how the game’s story plays out makes him dangerous in ways nobody around him sees coming.
Season 2 premieres four years after the first season aired in 2022, with Studio ENGI and most of the original staff returning. The light novel it’s based on ran for thirteen complete volumes, meaning the story actually has somewhere to go rather than trailing off into open-ended manga territory. For isekai fans tired of protagonists who take everything too seriously, Leon’s specific brand of reluctant chaos is a genuine breath of fresh air.
7. Grand Blue Dreaming Season 3
If you’ve never seen Grand Blue Dreaming and someone describes it to you as a show about college students who go scuba diving, that description is technically accurate and completely useless. What it actually is is a relentlessly chaotic comedy about a group of men who drink heavily, strip down to nothing at every available opportunity, and drag a perfectly normal first-year student named Iori into their insanity, whether he likes it or not. The diving is almost incidental, but the friendships built around it are not.
Season 3 heads somewhere new for the first time, taking the crew to Palau for the franchise’s first overseas arc. Zero-G and Saber Works are handling production with Shinji Takamatsu returning as director, the same man who has been steering this ship since 2018. The fact that Season 3 was announced before Season 2 even finished airing tells you everything about the confidence behind this show.
8. Skeleton Knight in Another World II
Arc woke up inside his MMORPG as a fully armoured skeleton knight, and four years after Season 1 aired, he’s back. Season 2 picks up with the political tension between humans and elves escalating into something bigger, with a corrupt prince eyeing the throne, an uneasy alliance forming between kingdoms, and Arc still trying to mind his own business while his sense of justice keeps dragging him into everyone else’s problems. The fox companion Ponta is still there, which is reason enough for some people.
This is not an anime that tries to reinvent isekai. In fact, it doesn’t try to become anything else. It knows its place as a show about an overpowered protagonist, a growing party of companions, solid action, and a fantasy world that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Aura Studio takes over production from Studio KAI for this season, with a new scriptwriter, Toshizo Nemoto, who previously worked on That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 4 and Inu X Boku Secret Service. If Season 1 hit the right notes for you, Season 2 delivers more of what made it work.
9. I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day
Yuri anime rarely gets adapted with this level of creative intent behind it. The opening theme is by ReoNa, the ending by Sajou no Hana, series composition is handled by Jukki Hanada of Sound Euphonium and Bloom Into You, and the voice cast includes Rie Takahashi (Megumin, Emilia, Ai Hoshino) and Yui Ishikawa (Mikasa Ackerman, Violet Evergarden, 2B), two of the most in-demand names in the industry right now. Even with a likely single-run cour, the talent assembled around it sends a clear signal about how seriously everyone involved is taking the source material.
Additionally, the manga it adapts was nominated for the 2019 Next Manga Award and made MAL’s 2024 Unique Art and Story recommended reading list. The story follows two girls at a school that trains orphaned children as magical weapons, one immortal, one dying, and the romance that forms between them inside that world.
10. You and I Are Polar Opposites Season 2
You and I Are Polar Opposites Season 1 wrapped up in March 2026 with both central couples finally making moves and viewers immediately wanting more. Suzuki and Tani are now actually together, which sounds like the part where most romance anime run out of ideas. The difference here is that Kōcha Agasawa, who also wrote The Ramparts of Ice, writes relationships with enough texture to keep going long after the will-they-won’t-they is settled. The friendships surrounding the main couple carry just as much weight as the romance itself, which is rarer than it should be.
The manga ranked second in the 2022 Next Manga Awards, third in the 16th Manga Taishō, and second in bookstore employees’ recommended comics for 2024, with over 2.1 million copies in circulation by May 2026. Often compared favorably to My Dress-Up Darling for the chemistry between its leads, You and I Are Polar Opposites is a must-watch for any romcom fan.
11. Clevatess Season 2
When Cleavatess aired in 2025, it was one of last summer’s biggest surprises, a dark fantasy that opened with mass slaughter and somehow pivoted into a story about the lord of magical beasts reluctantly raising an orphaned baby and a resurrected hero he personally killed. That premise sounds ridiculous, and the execution was anything but. Season 2 picks up with Clevatess and his unlikely found family infiltrating a prestigious magic academy under false pretenses, hunting for secrets left behind by a defeated enemy while navigating a world that is still very much at war with itself.
With Yuji Iwahara, best known for his character designs on Darker Than Black and as the original creator of Dimension W, the pedigree behind this series is serious. Lay-duce returns for production, with the main Season 1 cast and staff reprising their roles, while MYTH & ROID handle the ending theme with “Awake Anew.”
12. The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 3
The 100 Girlfriends’ premise is exactly as unhinged as the title suggests. Rentaro Aijo was rejected by 100 girls over his lifetime, visited a shrine to pray for luck, and the God of Love showed up to explain that all those rejections were actually a divine clerical error. His compensation is 100 destined soulmates, all of whom he will meet in high school. Any girlfriend he fails to date properly dies. The show takes that absurd setup and runs with it at full speed, introducing increasingly chaotic new characters while maintaining a genuine sweetness underneath all the comedy.
Season 3 premieres July 5 on Crunchyroll and adapts the Idol Arc, which fans of the manga have been waiting to see animated for a while. Bibury Animation Studios returns with the full cast and director Hikaru Sato, and at this point, the Rentaro Family voice cast alone is enormous. With two solid seasons already behind it and a fanbase that keeps growing, the show has carved out a very specific niche as the rare harem anime that actually respects every character in it rather than using them as decoration.
