The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi!

Meiko Morita moves to Tokyo from the countryside to transfer into an elite girls' academy. In exchange for "free tuition if she does volunteer work," she begins living and working at Hedgehog, a manga café that also doubles as a girls' dormitory. She meets idiosyncratic characters such as Rie Amamiya (a wealthy heiress who serves as Hedgehog's dormitory keeper/café manager and who is into yuri and Boys Love (manga), Marika Suzuki (a popular streamer on "MuTube" under the name "Marica Belltree"), and Neo Nakano (a pro gamer who competes in world championships).

Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi! is based on the manga series by Hisamakumako. The anime series is streaming on OceanVeil, Rakuten VIKI, and REMOW's It's Anime YouTube channel on Saturdays.

While Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi! definitely has the potential to be something special for anime and manga fanatics who are deep enough in this space to appreciate its largely referenced based humor, unfortunately this premiere is grounded in too much set up to give much of a sense of the quality of the episodes ahead.

In this premiere, country bumpkin Meiko Morita is unexpectedly invited to attend a prestigious school in Tokyo. However, when she arrives she discovers that her dormitory is attached to a manga cafe, and that her roommates are as strange as these circumstances. Rie Amamiya, whose family owns the school, is a mega otaku who extended the attendance invitation to Meiko after confusing her for a mangaka with a similar name, Marika Suzuki is a popular YouTuber who doesn't wear pants, and Neo Nakano is a loli professional gamer. While much of the jokes in this first episode are grounded in parodying anime tropes — that one of girls jumping in unison during the opening animation appears several times in this OP — the rest of the jokes to be had here are at Meiko's distress and embarrassment at being misunderstood by her classmates. She doesn't want to be celebrated as a famed manga artist when she isn't one, and she doesn't especially want to live out of what's essentially a manga cafe, but she can't exactly return to her family now that she enrolled in this school and has to try to make the most of it.

While each of the main characters definitely has room to grow and develop more chemistry with each other, they all still feel a bit one note by the end of this episode. Furthermore, the animation is a bit limited, with characters not moving much and using minimalistic expressions and reactions to make a joke land. Or, rather, this show more often than not tries and fails to make a joke land. Meiko's big reactions to ridiculous circumstances didn't do much for me, nor did the show trying to force a joke about this manga cafe carrying smuttier works. This episode just does not do much to hook potential viewers who aren't immediately bought into its premise of high school girls running a manga cafe, and the “cute girls doing cute things” genre is so saturated now that I think a lot of other shows would better fill the niche Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi! is going for.

Maybe it will get better as it goes on, but I really don't feel like I know enough about Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi! after its premiere to recommend it to anyone.

Ah, Manga Time Kirara. We meet again, my old foe. You never do fail to impress me with how utterly insipid the anime based on your manga are. While there are exceptions to this rule, you are by and large a holdover from the height of the moe era, and I wish they would stop using resources to adapt your four-panel manga about dull, plasticky teenagers into glossy anime series.

You can probably guess how I feel about Ichijyoma Mankitsu Gurashi!, a series about a girl who gets drafted into indentured servitude due to a case of mistaken identity. Meiko Morita transfers to a high school in the city as the result of an aggressive recruitment campaign, only to find that she's expected to live and work in a manga cafe in exchange for room, board, and tuition. She has no wages, nowhere to live other than her workplace, and it all hinges on the owner of the cafe, a wealthy classmate, mistakenly believing Meiko is her favorite manga artist. This isn't a cute slice-of-life sitcom, it's human trafficking. Meiko, blink twice if you need help!

Of course, it wouldn't be a Kirara series without an ensemble of quirky moe girls. I couldn't even tell you what Neo's gimmick is other than being pedobait, and Rie's whole deal is that she's rich enough to indulge her manga addiction to such an extreme that she's stocked an entire two-story manga cafe with her private collection. While my husband asked if I was jealous of her, I had to admit that I kind of related to Marika, who is always cold on top but doesn't feel the chill on her legs and thus does not feel the need to wear pants. However, when I wander around in a shirt and underwear, I am a real human being doing it in the privacy of my own home; I do not have a camera following me around focusing on my shiny rear end. Marika is not so lucky, and the leery camera added a sheen of sleaze over a boring-but-mostly-harmless-except-for-the-maybe-indentured-servitude-thing series.

There just aren't a whole lot of jokes here, and the ones that do exist are repetitive and unfunny. We are expected to laugh at Meiko slurping down instant miso while gushing over the flavor not once, but twice. The jokes about Marika's pantslessness felt endless. Rie has too much manga, we get it. It reaches for funny but finds itself short, and tries to course correct to cute instead. Just like every goddamn Kirara anime. I hate it here.