The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Hana-Kimi

Mizuki Ashiya, a Japanese-American, just transferred to a boarding school in Japan for one reason: To see her idol, Izumi Sano, jump in the high jump. There are just a couple of problems. 1) It's an all-boys school, 2) she's pretending to be a boy, and 3) several people know her secret.

Hana-Kimi is based on the manga series by Hisaya Nakajo. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Sometimes you really can't go back. I loved the Hana-Kimi manga as a teenager – it felt new and exciting, and I wasn't socially savvy enough to see the very real problems with what Mizuki is doing. It's also not the most credulity-straining iteration of the “girl cross-dresses to go to a boys' school” genre; that title belongs to Gō Ikeyamada's Uwasa no Midori-kun!!. But in the years since I first read it, Hana-Kimi has somehow paled for me. It really took this first episode of the sadly overdue anime adaptation to show me why: what looked like a daring and maybe even romantic adventure when I was closer to Mizuki's age now looks like a poorly considered crackpot plan, and it doesn't even have the guts to be as pants-crappingly insane as Uwasa no Midori-kun!!.

Still, I have to admire how incredibly true to herself Mizuki is as a character. From the moment you realize she hasn't told anyone she's transferring to a boys' school halfway around the world to her aggressively American entry into the classroom (read: yelling), we get a really good sense of who she is. This is a girl who knows what she wants and is willing to ignore any and all information that stands in her way. Does she check whether her idol, Sano, is still doing the high jump? Nope! Consider that most dorms are double-occupancy? Never for a moment! Think about the cultural differences between the US and Japan, even if you grew up as a Japanese American. Not a chance! She wants to meet Sano and go to school with him, and she is going to do it!

What stumbles for me is how uncomfortable she's clearly making Sano. Well, and how bad she is at disguising her gender, but that's sort of par for the genre course. Even in an American high school classroom, charging up to someone and asking to be friends is a little weird and likely to make someone shy away, but Mizuki acts as if she has a right to Sano because she admires his sports skills. She's upset that he's stopped jumping and keeps getting in her personal space. Sure, Nakatsu is always in her space, but apart from when he pats her chest, her body language isn't screaming discomfort. Sano's is, and it's hard not to feel a little bad for the guy, especially since he had his own room up until Mizuki's arrival.

Am I reading too much into this? Probably; Hana-Kimi was never meant to be more than a fluffy shoujo rom-com. But revisiting it, I don't find it particularly romantic or comedic. The art does capture the manga's look quite well (though there's something off about the dog), and the voices all sound right for the characters, but I think my time with this series has passed.

I'm kind of at a weird place with Hana-Kimi, I've never read the manga. Instead, I was introduced to the story through the 2007 Japanese live-action drama adaptation. I really enjoyed it to the point that, nearly 20 years later, a few scenes are still stuck in my head, even though I've never rewatched it. Honestly, I'm shocked that it's taken so many years to get an anime.

Hana-Kimi is the story of Mizuki, a girl who becomes so obsessed with high school athlete Izumi Sano that she moves from America to Japan, enrolls in his school, and pretends to be a boy (luckily, her name is unisex) all to befriend him. The comedy writes itself as she attempts to pass as a boy while living a normal high school life—oh, and being Sano's roommate.

This first episode is exactly what I expected. But my favorite little touch is that the anime never really states what Mizuki is doing and why. Through her actions, we are given all the information we need without any expository dialogue detailing her plan. It also does a good job of using her internal monologue sparingly, letting the comedic situations speak for themselves whenever possible.

So, needless to say, the show is off to a strong start. Now, to sit back and wait to see if the anime will include a certain infamous scene from the drama involving dancing, singing, a table, and a pair of panties.

Ah, yes, the old She's the Man treatment. It's been a while since we've gotten one of these rom-coms about a girl who has to pretend to be a guy for some contrived reason that you definitely shouldn't think too hard about. If you can say anything about our heroine, Mizuki, it's that she's got gumption. Not many folks could get away with flying to the other side of the world and surreptitiously enrolling in an all-boys school so she can obsessively stalk/organically connect with a hottie Japanese track star. She even manages to keep her cool despite only needing thirty seconds or so to massively embarrass herself in front of said hottie, Izumi, only to then be instantly pulled into a bizarre conversation about American sex practices with a stranger and glared at with intense suspicion by the school's doctor.

In fact, the ludicrous but all-too familiar tropes fly by with such fast and furious abandon that I was beginning to wonder if Hana-Kimi was trying to operate as a parody send-up of rom-com cliches. Then, after taking a minute to research why in the heck the name “Hana-Kimi” sounded so darned familiar, I realized that this show's source material comes from a manga that is nearly as old as I am. The real question, then, is whether you forgive or even embrace Hana-Kimi for being a nostalgic throwback to the shojo manga of yesteryear, or if you find yourself wishing that this anime had gone a little further to evolve with the times.

I'm of two minds about it, personally. I already went on in my preview for You and I Are Polar Opposites about how romantic comedies are perfectly capable of invigorating even the most overused cliches if they can just be charming enough to win the audience over, but Hana-Kimi's premiere is lacking…something, for me. Maybe it's the artwork, which, if anything, could stand to be more nostalgic and retro. The original manga's art had the sharp angles and subtle grit that I associate with the shojo aesthetic of the late 90s and early 2000s, and I can't help but feel that the all-digital artwork of this 2026 adaptation looks too flat, simple, and clean. This is one of those times when I want to see those stylized lips, lanky limbs, and hair spikes that could cut through solid steel.

Perhaps it's simply a matter of the anime being a couple of decades past its prime. This anime probably would have felt fresh as hell in 2006, but does it have a shot at standing out in 2026? Despite its flaws, Hana-Kimi's premiere is far from a failure. Even if you aren't coming at the series from the perspective of a longtime fan or a pop-culture anthropologist, the show is just bubbly and spunky enough to keep an average viewer entertained for twenty minutes and change. Unfortunately, I can't see it outshining other programs like You and I Are Polar Opposites or the upcoming premiere of Tamon’s B-Side. Who knows, though? Maybe this old horse needs a few laps around the track to find its pace before it can begin catching up to the competition.

I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything, but I have one question going into Hana-Kimi: why? Why this one? Why now? Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to have more classic shoujo adaptations, and I really like the Hana-Kimi manga. It's not a favorite or anything, but I enjoyed what I read. But its conception of gender is a little… outdated, shall we say, and there are dozens of wonderful '90s shoujo series that have aged much better.

But none of my issues with the series have really come up as of the first episode, in which Mizuki enrolls at an all-boys' school to pursue her crush, a high jumper on the track team whom she saw in a magazine. It's a bit of an extreme move, considering she's lived in the US for years; most girls are content to cut out pictures from a magazine and imagine “what if” as they gaze at them on their wall. But I suppose the fantasy of it is part of the appeal, right? If anything, Mizuki has gumption to choose this.

Signal.MD has had a rough few years – The Fire Hunter was a disaster, and Nina the Starry Bride was mediocre-looking – but the animation team under greenhorn director Natsuki Takemura has done an excellent job so far. In addition to surprisingly well-executed tracking shots that keep the “walk and talk” dialogue scenes visually interesting, there's a good bit of bounce to the animation. The characters aren't over-animated, but there's a little bit of extra fluidity, a little bit of extra “animated-ness” that makes the characters look more lively as they gesture and walk.

It's great because Hana-Kimi is the kind of show that needs a bit of extra liveliness to come to life. It's a romantic comedy! The characters live in that space between grounded and over-the-top, where everything is a bit exaggerated to tell a greater truth. What a coincidence that Mizuki ends up rooming with her crush, Sano! And that there's a golden retriever at the school that's only friendly with women, who is immediately drawn to her. It's kind of silly that every athletic team in the school literally chases Mizuki down the hall after getting wind of her sprinting speed, but it's fun! The show has yet to give Sano much to do beyond hints of future angst, but Mizuki is adorable, and the friendly, approachable Nakatsu is an ideal character to help her settle into the strange world of a boys' boarding school.

There's a lot to Hana-Kimi that hasn't aged well, and I'm not super stoked about what will happen when the broader community catches wind of it. It's been 30 years since it was first published, and our understanding of gender has come a long way since then. Still, it's a solid production of a nostalgic property, and it's hard not to appreciate that.