The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Rooster Fighter

In a world where terrifying monsters walk the earth, one heroic rooster is destined for greatness. When giant demons threaten the innocent, he's going to show them who's boss. The neighborhood cock of the walk is more than just an ordinary rooster—he's humanity's greatest defender. His opponents may be ten stories tall, but nothing is bigger than his stout heart and his fearsome battle cry—cock-a-doodle-doo.

Rooster Fighter is based on the manga by Shu Sakuratani. The anime series is streaming on Hulu and HBO Max on Saturdays.

To tell the truth, I thought I'd enjoy this first episode of Rooster Fighter far more than I actually did. After all, if I can consider a story about a man being reincarnated as a vending machine in a fantasy world one of my most anticipated of the season, it should be clear that going over the top with an anime about a rooster fighting giant demons wouldn't be an issue. What is an issue, however, is the fact that Rooster Fighter is trying to be two things at once—and fails at truly being either.

On one hand, this anime is a clear shounen fighting anime parody. It cycles between jokes about the protagonist being a roster and various lone-wandering samurai clichés. Yet, when it comes to the fighting, the battle anime tropes are no longer jokes—we're supposed to take them 100% seriously and be in awe of just how cool our feathered protagonist is.

And that's where the show and I don't seem to connect. The parody aspects aren't exactly leaving me rolling on the ground—they are painfully one-note. Worse still, they undercut the action by having the series repeatedly take the piss out of itself. It doesn't help that every character in the show so far—be they human or bird—is a walking cliché lacking anything resembling complexity or nuance.

On the other hand, one thing I have no complaint about is the voice acting—be that in Japanese or English. While Kenta Miyake and Patrick Seitz give different takes on Keiji, both give him that testosterone-filled energy that makes everything feel far more serious than it actually is.

In the end, this episode lives or dies based on how badass (or comedic) you find a rooster giving a kamehameha Cock-A-Doodle-Doo. As for me, I'm still on the fence.

I may not have loved this episode, but I sure did enjoy listening to Patrick Seitz make chicken noises. I've learned to be wary of simuldubs, but this is one of the good ones – Seitz manages to make Keiji (not Mr. Cluckers) sound badass without being ridiculous until you stop to think about it, and Luci Christian's brief appearance as Elizabeth at the end of the episode does the same. Chickens can absolutely have outsize personalities, and this series understands that.

It also opens and closes with gratuitous chicken sex. Rooster Fighter's just breaking all the storytelling norms.

Essentially, this runs like a spaghetti western. Keiji is the white hat cowboy who rides into town on his way someplace else – he's a wanderer, a drifter, a man who loves 'em and leaves 'em and fights the bad guys while he's around. He's been that way ever since a demon ate his sister Sara, and now he can't rest until he's had his revenge on the no-good scoundrel. So he comes into town with the sunrise and leaves with the sunset, single-mindedly pursuing his mission and never giving in to the urge to stay another night. (Possibly because his chickie is now sleeping with another cock.) You can't tie him down.

It's self-serious in a way that lets you know that it's fully in on its own joke. For the most part, that works, because while there's absolute absurdity to the actions, the demons Keiji is fighting are relatively scary looking. They seem to be humans corrupted by their own desires – for a boy, to be the top seller – and turn into exaggerated monsters. The hydra lady was creepy enough, but the salesman running around on legs made of hairy-knuckled fingers was downright upsetting.

That said, I don't care for the way this is animated. It's a bit stiff and uncanny, and while I understand that choices were likely made to make animating a rooster easier, I still don't love it. It's hard to deny how much fun everyone involved in this production seems to be having, though, and Keiji just may be the parody hero we need in these dark days.

The golden rule that any show with a one-joke premise must abide by is that its singular, defining joke had better be really funny. The fervent, uncompromising zeal with which the bit must be committed cannot be underestimated. Comedy being subjective and all means that everyone's mileage will naturally vary, and there will undoubtedly be plenty of folks who scoff at Rooster Fighter and walk away before the opening credits drop. As for me? Well, friends, I just so happen to find roosters to be naturally amusing subjects on account of how they live their entire oblivious lives as irredeemably stupid and ridiculous creatures, and Rooster Fighter is all about dropping those idiotic birds into increasingly ludicrous and violent anime scenarios. I think it's goddamned hilarious.

To be clear, I don't want anyone confusing the word “hilarious” in that claim for “good”, because I don't think there's any universe wherein Rooster Fighter would be considered a standard-bearer for any traditional measure of quality, unless you are specifically grading anime on the number of graphic chicken-sex scenes they contain, in which case this series would obviously reign supreme above all others. Even if you were to discard the blatantly idiotic premise, the show's lack of any discernible taste, not to mention its frequently janky-looking mashup of 2D and 3D animation, has essentially doomed it to obscurity as a late-night cult hit for future generations of teenaged stoner-weebs and poultry enthusiasts.

That said, this is an Adult Swim joint through and through, so I don't know what you expected. As decades of Aqua Teen Hunger Force reruns have already proven, a show doesn't need to be good to be entertaining, and Rooster Fighter entertained the hell out of yours truly. Yes, the vast majority of that entertainment comes from the fact that the series really is just an archetypal Lone Anime Warrior Out for Revenge type of story, except the script has Control-F'd any mention of the word “Hero Guy” and replaced it with “Keiji the Murderous Rooster.” Our hero is the exact kind of womanizing, superhuman misanthrope with a penchant for spilling demon blood that would have been right at home in any Adults Only OVA from the late-80s. Except, you know, he's a rooster. He goes “Buh-Gawk!” when he powers up. He has that funny dangly thing under his beak. Folks can just pick him up and carry him around in their arms. It's a funny bit. I don't know what to tell you.

To give the show a bit more credit, when we're not wasting time on any of the human characters that are barely even animated half the time, the primarily 3D Rooster-on-Weird-Demon-Thing action is pretty fun. Again, that is in the sense that a cheap and barely coherent kung-fu movie from the 1970s is still fun to watch, even though the film stock is sometimes barely holding together, and you can clearly see the wires lifting all the stunt doubles. I won't pretend that Rooster Fighter is an appointment-viewing kind of series, but I will absolutely keep it in mind for the next time I get together with my friends from high school, and we need something extra stupid to put on while we partake in the various methods of legal intoxication that my great state provides.

The first episode of Rooster Fighter ends with a transphobic joke of a demon exposing itself, revealing breasts in a lacy bra on an otherwise masculine body. The people around it groan in horror, shouting that it's disgusting. Instant one star.

But even if it hadn't run afowl of my social justice sensibilities, I would not have given Rooster Fighter a high rating. It's a series that sells itself on crass absurdity, the story of a rooster who fights demons to avenge the death of his sister. There are exactly two jokes: Keiji speaks and acts like a wandering ronin while also eating stinkbugs and shitting on the sidewalk, and the demons are so fixated on one thing that the one based on a salaryman kept shouting random business-speak words. Scintillating wit, this isn't.

Here's my thing: I was never going to like this series. It just isn't my speed. I didn't like One-Punch Man either, and that's pretty much apecks of absurdist gross-out action-comedies. I shouldn't dislike the experience of watching Rooster Fighter, I should hate it. My problem with Rooster Fighter isn't that it's too gross and vulgar, it's that it isn't gross and vulgar enough. When the salaryman demon explodes, it shouldn't just be chunks of meat; the ground should be scattered with chunks of viscera. The mother demon in the in media res cold open shouldn't be wearing a bikini! She should have her titties out! Yes, I know there are practical reasons to keep it covered up, since this was made to be aired on Adult Swim. I stand by my point. I shouldn't even be able to look at the screen while watching this.

Yet I could, even though I didn't particularly want to, and I did not appreciate what I saw. The two demon battles follow a similar formula as well: a demon shows up and sees a child. An adult tries to protect the kid, but is helpless against the demon. The demon pinches the child's clothes between its claws, but just before it can drop the static drawing of a child into its mouth, Keiji intervenes. The animation by SANZIGEN is the uncanny mix of hand-drawn minor characters and main characters who were worth creating 3D rigs for, although I suppose it's better composited than we've mostly seen so far. It probably helps that none of the 3D characters are human, and thus don't require the same level of expressiveness. We don't need a carefully-rendered face to show Keiji's shock at being cluckolded.

Okay, I'm out of chicken puns. I'll show myself out.