The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider

Tanzaburo Tojima has just turned 40 and is still seriously dreaming of becoming a Kamen Rider. Just as he is about to give up on this dream, he gets caught up in a "false Shocker" robbery.

Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is based on the Tojima Tanzaburo Wants to be a Masked Rider manga by Yokusaru Shibata. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

There's something incredibly charming about a show that is so confident in its absurdity that you cannot help but smile. Almost nothing that goes on makes sense, and there's no way this show is trying to present its characters as real people, but you don't care. I want to see this 40-year-old man obsessed with Kamen Rider to beat the hell out of a bear who has their own internal monologue, wondering who the hell this guy is. When the same guy puts on a Kamen Rider mask that is several sizes too small for his muscular face, my body is throbbing the same way that his body is throbbing before he beats the hell out of some goons that ruined the festival.

I wish I loved something in this world the same way that this guy loves Kamen Rider. I'm all for wearing our passions on our sleeves, but this guy took that idea to an extreme that I cannot help but admire. This is a man who has committed himself in such a way that I genuinely believe that if you do not get as pumped up as he is, you do not have a soul. Or maybe you're experiencing your own over-the-top reaction to his actions that match all of the characters in the show. If that is you, then you don't understand the depth of this man's love.

Do you want to know who understands? The staff working on this show does. The amount of production quality that is baked into this one episode has so far put all the other premieres I have watched to shame. I love the bold colors and thick outlines of all of the characters. I like the retro aesthetic that feels more than just a throwback. I love the attention to detail with all the Kamen Rider references and throwbacks, and the music gets my blood pumping! This is enough to make me turn on an episode of Kamen Rider, even though I haven't touched a single piece of the franchise in my thirty-two years of life. But that's just it, now I want to pop my cherry with this franchise after just one episode. I am sold on anything this show wants to sell me.

At thirty-*mumbles* years old, sometimes I look around my apartment—the vast manga collection, the Lego flowers, the smattering of figures, the Homestuck poster signed by Andrew Hussie—and wonder what it's all for. Will these things make me happy in my old age? Will there be anyone to treasure them when I'm gone, or will they just be bits of paper and plastic to be shipped off to the landfill? But then I remember that I am here and alive, and they are allowed to occupy space in my home as long as they bring me joy.

So, I have a bit of sympathy for Tojima when he decides to sell off the collection of Kamen Rider merchandise at the cusp of turning 40. Some people's midlife crises involve them buying a bunch of unnecessary, expensive crap, but I suppose Tojima went in the opposite direction. Hey buddy, you've got a lot of years left to sit in that empty apartment!

At the same time, though, Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is a combination of things that don't interest me. I recognize tokusatsu's influence and importance to anime and manga as a medium, but I'm not really interested in a show that focuses on it unless the writing is sufficiently clever and the boys are sufficiently hot. (Call me, Masayoshi!) I'm also not particularly drawn to series about a man going through a midlife crisis, unless, I reiterate, the writing is sufficiently clever or the man is sufficiently hot. (Call me, Kotetsu!) And I'm definitely not interested in stories where the middle-aged man's backstory is informed by a girl who exists solely to be sexually threatened and then rescued, like half the episode here.

It is also, tragically, ugly as sin. LIDEN FILMS has, once again, taken on three series in a single season, a move that we all know is practically begging for the production to collapse as soon as it's begun. It wants to be One Punch Man, but the action is blocky, barely animated, and stiff. While the vocal performances were solid, I'll never be unhappy to hear Katsuyuki Konishi. (Call me, Kamina!), the two insert songs were unpleasant buttrock.

I didn't enjoy it personally, but I can see what they're trying to do. It's a celebration of the inner child, not just in Tojima's enduring love of Kamen Rider but the way his eyes shine as he walks among matsuri booths, or the ways his cheeks turn pink when he pops a piping hot takoyaki into his mouth. I just deeply, deeply do not care for Yokusaru Shibata's storytelling or humor.

Much like The Eminence in Shadow (whose tone and protagonist wouldn't be out of place in this show), this anime is an ode to the power of fiction—how it captures our imaginations and drives us to do things we would have otherwise not been capable of.

While a 70s TV show it may be, Kamen Rider saved the titular Tojima as a boy from his father's abandonment and his mother's long working hours. It likewise saved him in high school, allowing him to push back the pain and save not only himself but also Emily from a gang of teenage thugs. Without Kamen Rider—and Tojima's love for it—who knows what would have happened to him. But even that's only the prelude to the main theme of this episode: the importance of dreams within the human condition.

We all have dreams—ones we gave up on. Maybe we outgrew them. Maybe we failed to achieve them. Maybe we didn't have the needed talent or drive to even get started. Because of this, there is something powerful about a person who refuses to give up on their dream, even if others mock and ridicule them for it—even if pursuing their dream has left them tortured and alone. Take away all the Kamen Rider trappings and humor at Tojima's expense, and that's what you have with this first episode.

Tojima has spent nearly four decades pursuing an impossible dream. He has trained his body to perfection, preparing for the day when he would have his chance. All it cost him was everything else. He lives alone. He spends his free time punching trees (and bears) in the woods and works part-time manual labor to make ends meet at age 40.

So, in the final scene, when he dons the mask, it is so much more than stopping a robbery. Tears run down his face and his voice trembles—not because he is afraid or embarrassed but because this is the moment. It is the pinnacle of his entire life. The moment where he becomes who he was always meant to be. It doesn't matter that the mask is plastic and the Shocker troops are low-level yakuza thugs. For a precious few seconds, he is the hero protecting the innocent. He is Kamen Rider.