The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Eren the Southpaw

Koichi Asakura is a young designer working at an advertising agency until one day, he loses his job. He once thought of himself as a high-level artist in art college, spending his time messing around. It was there that he met Eren, a girl with extraordinary artistic talent. Asakura seeks her out and discovers she has quit painting.

Eren the Southpaw is based on the manga series by Kappy. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

“All art,” Oscar Wilde famously wrote in the opening to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is quite useless.” While Wilde was being facetious, the entire, lengthy preface to the novel is an exploration of art and its often contradictory meanings. Wilde is pointing out that there's no one right definition of art, nor one right way to create it, while elements of the novel itself can be read as discussing the dangers of becoming too obsessed with art and its beauty. While I wouldn't put Eren the Southpaw on the same level as anything Wilde wrote, I think it may be trying to do something similar. Eren, Sayuri, and Koichi are all, in this episode, high school students trying to understand their relationship with art. They run up against other people's views of it. And they haven't yet discovered that all art is quite useless.

It's an ambitious theme for any work to tackle. This one is trying very hard to show us the contradictions and problems faced by aspiring artists in 1998, although it looks like the majority of the series will play out in 2010. Koichi is trying to find a way to make art his career in a way his father can't object to, so he's chosen graphic design. Sayuri is trying to think about her future in a way that will make her happy, but that isn't directly tied to art as something she feels she must do. And Eren…Eren seems lost. She's resentful of her own talent as an artist because her father lacked that skill and never fulfilled his dreams. She's angry at the world. And in order not to explode, she's turned to graffiti, but even that doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

Eren is actually my largest issue with this episode. While I absolutely understand where she's coming from in terms of her anger and inability to stop making art even though she seems to want to, her portrayal treads close to the uncomfortable line of a stereotypical depiction of someone who is neurodivergent. Her emotional dysregulation, her hyperfixation on drawing, and her omnipresent anger conjure up the bad old days of how people with learning differences or various neurodivergencies were portrayed. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but it's particularly striking after Journal with Witch last season.

On the whole, this episode can be summed up by the word “dissatisfied.” All of the characters seem dissatisfied with their lives (and we know that persists into Koichi's adulthood from the very beginning), and I felt dissatisfied watching it. The graffiti depicted is fascinating, and I love that it's being touted as a real art form rather than vandalism, but I can't take watching any more of the story.

After all, art's utility truly belongs to the eye of the beholder.

Eren the Southpaw is an anime that at long last recognizes a fundamental truth that so much mainstream art has made a concerted effort to silence: We southpaws of the world are, indeed, a superior breed of human, and we will be this world's undoing unless we are paid the respect and reverence that we are owed. All of you dexxies out there (that's what we call you right-handed freaks when you aren't around) had best be paying attention. Eren is merely the first harbinger of our imminent uprising. The next phase will begin once we all wipe the ink that got all over our hands after writing all those propaganda posters. All in due time.

In all seriousness, what I actually appreciated the most about Eren the Southpaw is the way it tackles a deeply relatable bit of subject matter, which is the clash between the idealistic values that are borne from life as a young amateur artist and the dispiriting compromises you must so often make when you try to ply your trade and pursue your passions in the adult world. Usually, we see this trope handled in stories about musicians or other big-time entertainers who have to choose between selling out or staying true to their independent roots. Refreshingly, Eren the Southpaw paints a more novel picture by focusing on how our protagonists express themselves through the art of graffiti. It's just an especially potent lens through which to tackle this story, since graffiti is an inherently rebellious, statement-making medium with a complex and rich history.

Granted, I don't expect this anime melodrama to serve as a robust introductory survey to the grand tradition of graffiti art, but I'm impressed enough that we're getting namedrops for Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat to begin with. It tells me that the show is genuinely passionate about the subject, which, in turn, makes our protagonist Koichi a much more engaging guy to follow. He's not just some mouthpiece that exists to spout the findings of his author's latest Wikipedia dive; you genuinely get a sense for why this guy is so inspired by these artists, and how that passion might be met with equal despair and disappointment by his future self. We also perfectly understand why he might be so drawn to Eren, the titular southpaw, given that she lives and breathes her artwork in a way that Koichi can still only dream of embodying.

Ironically, the biggest drawback of this episode is the artwork itself, which is appropriately colorful but disappointingly limited and flat in many sequences. It's not enough to kill my enthusiasm for the show, but I'm just imagining how much harder this premiere would have hit if it had gotten the A-plus treatment that a prestige title from Kyoto Animation or Science SARU might have received. Ah, well. As it stands, Eren the Southpaw is still a very engaging and original drama with a lot of potential, and I'm hopeful that the show can capitalize on it throughout the season.

What would you do if you couldn't follow your dream? Would you find happiness and fulfillment when out of the office? Or would your soul slowly wither away and die? Koichi is convinced that a life of mundanity would kill him, that he would become so bored that life wouldn't feel worth living. His parents think his art is a waste of time, and he's hoping to go to art school to become a graphic designer as a kind of compromise to pursue art as a valid career path.

Eren the Southpaw feels messy, and I'm struggling to get a real sense for just what it is that evokes that in me. Eren has the sense of being a manic pixie dream girl who shakes Koichi up enough to really pursue his dream, as seen when he covers up the truly awful mural he made with the art club with a portrait of her. But at the same time, she's totally wrapped up in her own tragedy of her father's death and her alienation from her peers. She's so so so so angry, to the point that she acts like a feral animal instead of a member of society. Is this girl's anger here to motivate Koichi? Is the tragedy of her father's death and her inability to regulate her emotions just there to activate his shonen-poisoned ideals so that he'll fight to become one of the few art students who will make it? Forgive me for being cagey.

The episode does do some neat structural things. I genuinely appreciated how Sayuri called out that Koichi is way too into shonen manga, so when he shouted at Eren at the end of the episode, it made sense as the kind of thing he learned from Naruto and Luffy. The episode is sprinkled with juxtaposition throughout: Koichi's resentment of the baseball players being supported in their dreams versus Sayuri laughing at the one who asked her out; Eren's father being supportive of her art in childhood versus Koichi's dad grumping at him about studying for exams; and, of course, the obvious comparison between the crappy high school art as opposed to Eren's masterful spray paint graffiti. But there are some odd flourishes as well; why did they add the effect of a CRT screen being turned off at the end of a scene where Eren is talking to her mother? I suppose it's all part of the mess.

I did not love Eren the Southpaw, even if I liked it well enough. This is the kind of series where you're either all in or out, and I'm not ready to commit.

Do you ever feel like you should be more invested in a show than you actually are? Like, when I take a step back and look at Eren the Southpaw, I can see there's a ton of good stuff lying right there.

This is the story of two teens and their relationship with art. On the surface, they are in opposite positions. Kōichi is a realist. He comes from a seemingly well-off family and knows he's better than the average artist but isn't shooting for the moon. He's decided on a job where he can both do art and earn a stable salary—namely, as a graphic designer. Meanwhile, Eren's family is on the poorer side due to her father's death. She has both ridiculous drive and talent when it comes to art—becoming jealously enraged when facing the amateur work of others. To her, art is a zero-sum game—she's either the best or nothing at all.

The choice both characters face in this first episode is how much they're willing to give up in pursuit of their chosen paths. Until now, Kōichi has largely been coasting by. With little support at home, he's been content to simply rely on his talent rather than do any hard work—planning to get into any old art school and then get a job at a random company. However, when he comes across Eren's graffiti, he is driven to give his all in his art and bring everything he has against her—even if he ultimately comes up short.

Meanwhile, Eren has everything she needs to go big—the ambition, tenacity, and skill—but can't make herself pull the trigger. Her whole life is her art, but to become a professional, she needs to take the gamble and use her family's savings—what her father left when he died. She knows just as well as Kōichi that it's nearly impossible to live on art alone—to create only what you want to. The real question is, can she live with herself if she doesn't try?

And that is where the two are similar. They both long to be something more than a cog in society's wheel. They know they need to be “something” even if they have trouble defining what that is. Hopefully, their high school encounter will serve to spur them into action—art inspiring art.

Yet, all that said, I don't think I'll be back to watch it. In the end, while I understand the themes of the anime, I didn't really connect with Kōichi or Eren. I don't really like either of them as people, even as I recognize their problems. Perhaps I'm just too far out of high school to get back into their angsty mindset—or perhaps it's because I didn't find what I was meant to do until after both high school and college. Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if this series becomes a critical darling this season, even if I won't be one of the critics watching it.