The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of Phoenix-

The fire-extinguishing samurai who stopped the great fire was called "The Fire-Eating Bird." Matsunaga Gengo, once known as "The Fire-Eating Bird," was the best fire-fighting samurai in Edo. He had resigned from the fire brigade for a reason, but suddenly received an invitation to serve in the Shinjo clan. The Shinjo clan's fire-fighting team had no money and no personnel and was looked down upon by those around them. With the encouragement of his wife, Miyuki, Gengo decides to rebuild the collapsed fire-fighting clan as its chairman. Gengo and his friends, all of whom have their own peculiarities, struggle to "save any life," despite being ridiculed as "ragged steeplejacks." In Edo, a mysterious series of suspicious fires called "foxfires" continues.

Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of Phoenix- is based on Hikuidori (Fire Eater), the first volume from Shōgo Imamura's Ushūboro Tobigumi historical novel series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Oh dear.

Doing this work, you encounter a lot of studio names. Some you learn to associate with strong productions: Lapintrack, Trigger, Science SARU, and the like. Others may have less savory reputations, whether they have a poor track record for animation quality, such as Typhoon Graphics, or are infamous for how they treat their staff, such as MAPPA. With so many new anime being made every season, however, the field is dominated by workmanlike organizations that started out as support studios but responded to the industry's insatiable need to create as many series as possible.

“Synergy SP? Where have I heard that name before?” I thought as I pulled up Oedo Fire Slayer. It sounded familiar, but I couldn't connect it with a reputation.

Then a little girl in a kimono, poorly animated via motion capture, slid her way across the screen. And I thought: isn't Synergy SP the studio that did the dance animation for Wandance? The ugly motion capture dance animation with blank faces and uncanny motions that actively prevented people from watching an otherwise solid series?

…aaand it turns out I was wrong, but the resemblance is striking.

To be honest, I couldn't tell you much about the plot of Oedo Fire Slayer. There's a guy with trauma from his previous experiences firefighting, and now he has to assemble a new squad. He has a wife. There's something to do with money. Okay.

It's not that I wasn't trying to pay attention! The animation was so distractingly bad that I simply could not process what was happening in the story. How am I supposed to remember the dialogue when I'm weirded out by how that old guy's mouth is waggling up and down? Are you telling me I'm supposed to take the story seriously when I'm cackling at how a character is scrabbling against the wood as if he's gliding over an ice rink? And the hands, oh the hands… They're more like horrifying flesh gloves. For some reason the production team decided to create backgrounds that look like they were drawn with watercolor pencil, an especially poor choice for making it look like they exist on the same plane as the 3DCG characters.

Maybe Oedo Fire Slayer has a good plot. I don't know. What I do know is that this is proof that animation quality matters in either direction, and if you have the worst CG animation this side of EX-ARM, you can't expect anyone to take you seriously.

Every once in a while, it happens that an anime's presentation is so bad that it overshadows everything else. I mean, an anime about revitalizing a band of firefighters in Edo Japan—where fires could wipe out an entire city in a few hours if not stopped—is a solid concept for some interesting historical fiction. Even adding in the more spiritual additions like Matsunaga being able to somehow sense where people are inside a fire could work—especially when combined with Matsunaga's apparently fire-related trauma.

In this episode, two things stood out positively. Matsunaga's wife has a hilarious personality that makes me want more scenes with her. (Her giving their guest a leaky teacup to shame her husband into taking the better-paying job is some great subtle manipulation.) I also like the flashback scene where Matsunaga becomes a black-and-white animatic. It adds some real visual flair to the production… and holy crap does this anime need more of that.

The elephant in the room is that, regardless of what's going on in the story, this anime looks horrible. Despite being 3D models, the characters appear strikingly undetailed, turning them into ugly blobs of uniform colors much of the time. This is especially heinous when it comes to hands, as they lack lines and creases.

Even faces have only a few lines, which, combined with the fact that there are only two tones of each color being used (shadowed and not shadowed), means that the vast majority of characters look nearly identical to one another. Worse still, the lack of facial detail breeds a lack of shown emotion. Voice actors shout, but the character models do not match.

A brief bit of Google research tells me that this story has a manga version, which is being released in North America. If anything about feudal Japanese firefighters sparks your interest, go read that instead. Your eyes will thank you.

The firefighter is going to be a character that is easy to mythologize and exploit for heroic drama, no matter where or when the flames have decided to burn, but it is especially interesting to learn about how the job gets done in a setting that doesn't have easy access to things like modern water supplies and safety technology. The appeal of Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of the Phoenix- becomes obvious from before you even start the anime. The Japan of the Edo period is just chock-full of so much wood and paper, and so lacking in the ability to create light or heat with anything but good, old-fashioned combustion. The danger of widespread fire becomes an unavoidable practical concern and a cultural touchstone that everyone can immediately grasp. When you combine that with the show's cast of diverse, relatable characters who are being presented with what feels like an impossible task—to battle against the primal forces of nature itself—Oedo Fire Slayer feels like it ought to be a slam dunk.

Unfortunately, nearly everything about how the show operates in practice is a disaster. The one positive thing I can say about this premiere is that the writing is okay, and the actors do a fine job of delivering their material. This is not surprising, since we're adapting a series by popular historical fiction author Shōgo Imamura, who specializes in exploring character-driven narratives embellished by the nuances of culture and context from times gone by. If nothing else, watching the premiere of Oedo Fire Slayer makes me hope for an accessible English translation of his Ushūboro Tobigumi novels to arrive on these shores someday, as I think I'd find them much more interesting than the Netflix adaptation of his Last Samurai Standing book. The point is, messing up the script at this point wouldn't just be a point of failure; it would be downright embarrassing.

No, Oedo Fire Slayer saves the real embarrassment for the audio and visual presentation of Imamura's story. Before we even get into what we're looking at, I need to pay special attention to the show's soundtrack, which triggered a response of genuine anger in me. The very first sounds we hear from this show are the plunky doot-too-doos of lazy recorders and twee xylophones, as if this were some cheap romantic comedy and not a human drama about surviving terrifying natural disasters. When the score does try to take itself seriously, it becomes an overbearing mess of (presumably) synthesized choirs and strings. The score comes to us from Yasuharu Takanashi, and sure, he's definitely a “work for hire” type of artist that has produced a lot of music of varying quality over the years, but I'm shocked at how phoned-in Oedo's music sounds from the very first seconds of the episode.

Unfortunately, the music is small potatoes compared to the terrible 3D animation, which looks fully a decade out of date and ruins any chance the series had at being taken seriously. To compare the stiff and completely lifeless movement and faces of the characters to cheap wooden puppets would honestly be a disservice to the art of puppetry, as anyone who has seen Thunderbolt Fantasy or even a half-decent Punch & Judy skit can attest to. The choice to go fully 3D may have been influenced by how prevalent fire is going to be in every single episode of Oedo Fire Slayer, but the artists at Synergy SP are clearly in over their heads. Watching this premiere gave me violent flashbacks to the days of the early 2010s, when an all-CGI anime made for TV was basically guaranteed to be dead on arrival. I hate to write off a show with so much promise as this one, but Oedo Fire Slayer is just impossible to recommend to anyone with functioning eyes and ears.

This is not an attractive show. Mostly that comes down to an imperfect use of CGI – while it looks okay at first glance, characters don't interact with backgrounds naturally, floating above the ground or looking like cutouts being manipulated against a paper backdrop. Faces are too defined, and other body parts, like hands, lack details such as knuckle lines. While I admired the opening shot of a little girl trying to escape a fire, with its stylized feathers, this episode quickly went downhill visually. When you compare it to the Edo of last season's Shabake, it's kind of depressing. (Fewer chonmage hairstyles, though, which is neither a good nor a bad thing.)

But what about the plot? Well…it's kind of mixed. There's definitely an interesting story here about the firefighters who worked in Edo, and it's easy to believe that some, if not most, would walk away from the job with trauma, assuming they walk away at all. Protagonist Gengo seems to have been one of the lucky ones, as he survived, but he knows at least two people who didn't – his mentor and, very likely, his father. Now, when faced with a fire, Gengo's hand begins to shake, and while it's clear he still has the skills and knowledge required, he may no longer have the heart for it. And yet, he can still pinpoint the sound of a fire bell from a great distance, so he may not be as down for the count as he'd like to be.

As first episodes go, this isn't amazing. I appreciate that we don't know precisely what caused Gengo to quit (we can guess, as I did above), and it does seem like there's some attention to period detail here, from the tiny little fire axes to the way fire brigades operated at the time. But, uh, that's really about it. Everything is really overwhelmed by how bad this looks, which does a lot to distract from any interesting story elements present. If you're really invested in the history of Edo firefighters, it may be worth trying this; otherwise, it can be safely left alone.