The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Thunder 3

Thunder 3 is a story centered on the unbreakable bond between three childhood friends as they embark on a desperate search for a missing girl. The series follows Pyontaro, an ordinary middle schooler, and his two best friends, Tsubame and Hiroshi—a trio known as the Small 3. Their lives are upended when Pyontaro's cheerful younger sister, Futaba, suddenly vanishes. As they join forces to find her, their search quickly escalates into a profound adventure that takes them far beyond their wildest imagination.

Thunder 3 is based on the manga series by Yuki Ikeda. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Wednesdays.

I'm quite confident in announcing that this is most definitely the Summer 2026 anime season's strangest isekai, and I worry that it may not find an audience as a result. The art style, especially in Thunder 3's opening minutes, is certainly off-putting to those raised on a diet of Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer. I'm looking forward to this adaptation ever since I read the manga ages back, and while the delayed implementation of the central premise is indeed genius, it may work against viewers with short attention spans, their eyeballs distracted by so many other more immediately attractive shows.

Thunder 3 is worth sticking with, through the cutesy prologue set in an unusually cartoony (even for anime) world where little blob person Pyontaro lives with his family and cute-as-a-button little sister Futaba. Pyontaro is obsessed with boobs, while one of his two schoolfriends has an underpants fixation. They live a normal schoolkid life, with normal schoolkid concerns, with Pyontaro's main complaints involving have to share a bed with Futaba who's prone to wetting herself overnight.

Even in this seemingly sedate prologue, there's something clearly not quite right. Their teacher, “Doc”, gives lectures about parallel worlds, and then orders a DVD off the internet that apparently grants access to said worlds. Obviously, he entrusts this cosmology-rewriting object to his students without thinking of the consequences—said consequence being that when running the disc on Pyontaro's “TS5,” it transforms the living room TV screen into a portal to another dimension, through which cutesy li'l Futaba wanders.

The world Futaba discovers is much more like the “real” world, though the people, despite being more realistically proportioned than those in the “cartoon” world, are still animated using very rudimentary and fairly ugly CG. This place has enormous CG alien spaceships hovering in the sky, which freak Futaba out almost as much as the people crowding around her, staring at the “manga character”. I don't blame them, she's surrounded by a haze of dots like screentone.

At this point, the opening credits decide to run, about two-thirds through the episode. Anyone who stops watching there has been trolled. For one, the opening animated sequence completely spoils the premise of the show – this is Gantz but with funny cartoon people mixed in. We see a whole bunch of formidable-looking people in Gantz-like battle outfits ready to kick alien butt.

The post-opening sequence segment shows us tiny little toddler Futaba terrifying the invading aliens so much that they launch several enormous ballistic missiles at her. That's not something you see every day, even in anime. When Pyontaro and pals also step into the TV world, they discover they're superpowered in comparison to everyone in this flimsy world where solid rock crumbles beneath their fingers. So begins their quest to retrieve Futaba from the aliens, and then the ending sequence begins. It's such a weirdly structured episode, but it adapts the entire first chapter of the manga extremely closely.

Aesthetically, it looks pretty horrid, but at least the alien mechs are cool, even if they seem to be animated at a steady 2fps. I can understand anyone bouncing off Thunder 3 when only considering the opening episode's first half, but as a manga reader, I can confidently say that this shit gets absolutely wild, and I'm excited to see how it transfers to the screen.

Imagine answering the door to another version of yourself, who claims to have travelled from a parallel universe? You'd have questions, wouldn't you? Especially if this version of you looks squished down and chibified, with a comparatively enormous head and roughly-drawn features? The “real world” version of Pyontaro and his family seem to have no such deep requirement for answers. Other than laughing about the absurdity of the entire situation, they allow Pyontaro and his dog into their house, while the doppelganger families of Pyontaro's friends do much the same for them. Perhaps living in a world now colonized by 3-meter-tall aliens and witnessing their enormous ships hovering menacingly in the air every day tends to dull the surprise factor of the remarkable. Or perhaps the parental instinct is just that strong.

Before seeking out their doppelganger families though, the Small Three are disturbed to find their portal back to their own world has been closed (by Pyontaro's dad ejecting the disc from his console). It's a scary prospect, being trapped in a strange world where you have no food, your money doesn't work, and everyone looks at you funny. The boys' plan to secure funds for a train fare is hilarious – they take to the streets to sing for their supper, possibly inspired by the guitar-playing girl whose counterpart they meet here is just as dismissive of them as her cartoony version. Regardless, they're such a novelty, the coins come rolling in.

This world does have its upside for the boys. The most joyfully fun part of the episode is the sequence where they test the limits of their new abilities. With bodies so resilient that the Earth around them is as comparatively insubstantial as cake, they can jump hundreds of meters into the air, rip up the road surface merely from running (at supersonic speed), and even fire some kind of projectile energy beams. They're like Superman, aliens in a foreign world, blessed with such incredible power that they must be careful not to hurt innocent people.

The situation with the real aliens is even stranger. Five months ago they turned up in the skies above Earth, claimed to come in peace, and since then they're integrated… sort of… into human society. Hovering buses bring these towering bipedal creatures back and forth from the floating ships, and they randomly wander around the cities. Oddly, they don't seem to interact with humans at all, completely ignoring them. It's kind of eerie, and a bit rude. This world's version of Pyontaro blames them for food store shelves being empty, but we don't know for sure if this is true. People seem to have accepted the aliens' existence, including their claims of peace, despite the fact their ships are armed with enormous guns, and they've begun to move military hardware onto the ground. This doesn't look great for humanity's future.

Pyontaro's more worried about his sister's future, and triggered by her more realistic counterpart and her identical relationship with her own brother, he pines for the missing Futaba. Futaba herself seems fairly unperturbed, considering her situation, sitting on a medical examination couch, about to have her brain dissected by a whining drill. It's such a bizarre tonal disconnect seeing the alien scientists talk about dissecting her brain, and then seeing this little cartoon toddler sitting there nonchalantly—as we know this tiny little blob person has the power to effortless tear everything around her apart like cardboard.

That tonal disconnect is at the heart of why this show is so entertaining and silly. Hopefully that will be enough to keep viewers returning, because the visuals are generally pretty awful. Apart from the awesome-looking ships and mechs, everything else, especially the “real” CG humans, looks stiff and awkward. I can forgive the very rudimentary CG for the Small Three as a certain uncanny valley effect is actually beneficial for their fundamental concept, but I wish the “real” people looked and moved less like dolls with minimal points of articulation.

Fair Warning: The only way for me to talk about this show is to spoil the heck out of this first episode, so stop here if that kind of stuff matters to you. For what it's worth, I recommend this show to folks with more adventurous tastes, and I think it's best to go into it blind.

Thunder 3's premiere is, without a doubt, one of the strangest I've ever covered in the ten years I've been doing the Preview Guide. Everything about its execution is just off-putting as hell, and it's truly difficult to tell how much of it is intentional. The CGI artwork is simplistic and limited to the point that it will probably alienate most viewers from the get-go, with the whole show looking like a cheap afterthought thrown together for tiny kids. Our heroes, Pyontaro, Hiroshi, and Tsubame, are all adolescent boys in the throes of puberty, though, with a lot of this episode's jokes dealing with their newfound obsessions with women's underwear and online pornography, so right away there is a tonal disconnect going on.

The same disconnect applies to the voice acting in the English dub I watched, which is actually quite good, just…weird. Abby Trott, Ryan Bartley, and Brenna Larsen all play Pyontaro, Hiroshi, and Tsubame with the familiar cadences of the usual anime vocal archetypes, but the direction of their delivery is pitched toward maybe 20% more naturalism than usual.

When you combine those performances with the way Risa Mei plays Pyontaro's tiny sister, Futaba, with such accurate precociousness, I was halfway convinced for a moment that this was one of those productions that employed actual child voice actors. The closest approximation to the overall effect of the show's stylistic and performance choices that I can come up with here on the fly is to the edgy, borderline inappropriate young-adult fare that Hollywood produced in the late '80s and early '90s. I'm talking about movies like The Monster Squad, where you go back and watch it as an adult only to discover that the script is filled with so many more sex jokes, homophobic slurs, and casual child endangerment than you remembered.

Anyway, the point is, I honestly didn't know what to make of this show for the entire first half of its premiere. That's around when little Futaba ends up crawling into the television, Poltergeist-style, after the boys try to test an experimental game given to them by a weird professor-type. The world of the “TS5” game that Futaba finds herself in is also computer-generated, but the environment is (comparatively) hyper-realistic and filled with human characters styled after more mature anime and more naturally proportioned. When these other people see Futaba, they are completely freaked out because it turns out that she and all of the other Thunder 3 characters are supposed to look ripped straight from the pages of a comedic children's comic. Little Futaba even carries a shadow of manga screentone with her wherever she walks.

When the boys figure out what is happening and chase after Futaba, it is already too late. She has been trapped in the middle of a sci-fi alien invasion plotline already in progress, and while none of the animation is ever “great”, there is a very stark and intentional shift that occurs when the evil spaceships arrive and start launching missiles at the freaky comic-book children. This is when I truly got what Thunder 3 was going for, and suddenly I couldn't stop cackling like a madman. At least some of that bizarre stylistic and tonal discombobulation that I was experiencing was definitely on purpose, and it put me in the perfect headspace to appreciate the reveal of what kind of show Thunder 3 is really going to be.

Well, okay, I still don't know if I can actually tell you what kind of show Thunder 3 is really going to be, but it sure is a hell of a lot more interesting than those utterly strange opening ten minutes led me to believe. This series might turn out to be absolute nonsense by the time things wrap up, but there's no way I'm going to pass up at least another episode or two to see just how it all shakes out.

Now that Thunder 3's premiere has let the big twist of the show's premise out of the bag, the second episode is here to leap headfirst into Pyontaro and Co.'s Bogus Journey across the multi-genre multiverse. The boys might look like the typical, cartoonish caricatures of a comic meant for little kids, which makes them stick out like a sore thumb in the more realistic universe of alien invasions that little Futaba has been lost to, but this predicament comes with some benefits. As Hiroshi demonstrates when he runs off sprinting like a speeding bullet, the boys are not bound to the physics of this new universe, and their new superhero powers will undoubtedly be useful when it comes to fighting the alien menace that stole Futaba. The dog even has super farts, and yes, it is very funny.

Thunder 3, as I hope should be obvious to anyone who listened to my advice and took a chance on that premiere, is working with a killer premise, and this second episode helps to make sense of some of the choices that might not have given the best first impression. The limited animation used for the gang and their universe still doesn't look amazing, but the way their models mix with the new universe and show off the superpowers does work well—and we get interesting moments like when the boys run into this universe's version of Guitar Girl, which leads the boys to find the other versions of themselves. The direction of the show could definitely stand to be a little less static, since so many scenes rely on fairly rote point-and-shoot patterns of shots, but I think I'm used to the look of the show enough to appreciate what it's going for.

In addition to the head trip of meeting entirely different versions of his family and friends, Pyontaro also learns about what is going on with this world regarding the whole alien invasion scenario. I was honestly hoping for a bit more conflict and drama on both of these fronts, but Thunder 3 is being surprisingly straightforward with how it is handling the exposition for this sci-fi setting. I suppose I've just been spoiled by the creative excesses of series like Dead Dead Demons DeDeDeDe Destruction. Still, this is a cool follow-up to a very intriguing first episode, and while it didn't wow me, I'm definitely intrigued enough to keep on watching Thunder 3 to see what else this show has in store for Pyontaro and his friends.

When most stories do parallel worlds, the realities are similar on most levels. Oh sure, there might be strange creatures, magic, advanced technology, or the like, but objects still fall at 9.8 meters per second squared. The basic laws of physics and the nature of the material world are the same. Likewise, rarely does just being from a parallel world in and of itself grant new innate powers—i.e., most powers are granted by an outside force or are learned in the isekai world. This is not the case with Thunder 3.

The main middle schooler trio of Thunder 3 comes from an all-ages manga with a sci-fi twist (think Doraemon or Crayon Shin-chan). Pyontaro is obsessed with boobs on the down low, Tsubame is obsessed with panties on the “up high,” and Hiroshi… I'm not actually sure what his deal is yet. When they cross over into a “serious sci-fi world” chasing after Pyontaro's sister, Futaba, they quickly discover that they are equivalent to Superman arriving on a world with a yellow sun.

And when you think about it, this makes total sense. The boys are from a world where matter is simply harder and people stronger. (After all, how often do people get seriously hurt in Doraemon or Crayon Shin-chan?) Not to mention, they are from a world where people have names like “Dr. Doc” and a sketchy PS5 disc you buy online works as a doorway to other universes. The laws of reality clearly aren't the same as our own.

Long story short, I am impressed by the creativity on display. It reminds me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—two different realities clashing even as they exist alongside one another. Will I keep watching? I'm not sure. But I'm happy that I'll have the excuse to watch the second episode next week.

Welp, it's nice to know the original author and I were 100% on the same page with the concept behind this story. Last week, I even said, “They quickly discover that they are equivalent to Superman arriving on a world with a yellow sun.” I had a solid laugh when the characters said almost the same thing verbatim in this episode.

That said, we're two episodes in, and I'm not sure how I feel about Thunder 3. I like the idea of vastly different universes interacting—and that being the basis for superpowers. I also like the idea of gag characters being thrown into a more serious world with alien invaders.

But beyond that, this show just feels weird. I don't really know how I am supposed to feel about what's happening to Pyontaro, Tsubame, and Hiroshi. Like, the whole scene with their respective families in the 3D world is so odd. They simply laugh off the whole situation and invite the kids in. Like, isn't this a world-changing event happening on your literal doorstep? A multiversal version of your child has shown up, and your focus is on the fact that he can eat salmon?

And then there's the whole situation with the aliens. Rather than an invasion, they're like a dude who crashed a party at your place one time, and now they've just kind of moved in. Like, they keep to themselves and don't cause trouble—and you sure as hell aren't going to confront them as it seems like they could kick your ass—but that doesn't mean you want them around.

Simply put, I remain baffled after watching this—and I don't think that's enough to get me to come back next week. Maybe I'll read the manga or at least a summary of the story at some point if I feel the need, but probably not. I will say it's the strangest take on alien conquest I've ever seen, so I'll give it an extra half-a-point for that if nothing else.