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Anyone who even vaguely follows anime knows that the beginning of a new season is hectic. The Japanese anime industry operates on an extremely rigid quarterly calendar, in which shows generally all begin around the same time and wrap after three months of airing. This means that in the first week of a new quarter, you have upwards of 50 or 60 shows airing their debut episodes in the same seven or eight days.
With such a sheer volume of work coming out, the anime market can get crowded, and its easy for these works to bleed together into a vague blob of gag comedies, action-adventure shows, and sickly-sweet romances. After a relatively light Winter season, Spring has a lot of big-ticket shows, including returning series like “Re:Zero,” “Dr. Stone,” and “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.”
To help cut through the noise, here’s a look at five new series premiering this April that I’ve seen, and whether they’re worth your time. This is just the shows I received screeners for and whose embargoes have lifted; I can’t talk about a few others. Also of note is all of these shows will be airing weekly on Crunchyroll in North America, and I generally only received the screener for their first episode, so it’s hard to come to a full verdict with just a small taste. With that said, what from this Spring schedule should you most be paying attention to?
“Agents of the Four Seasons” (Premiered March 28)
It’s hard to judge whether a show will be worth jumping into based just on one 24-minute episode, but it’s especially difficult with “Agents of the Four Seasons,” a show about a group of people known as Agents who act as shepherds for the four seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The first episode introduces the audience to precisely one of those Agents, Hinagiku, as she returns after a 10-year-long, as yet unexplained absence to bring Spring back to the world.
It’s very much a slow, slightly plodding prologue to whatever the show will become rather than a full meal, one that throws you into this world without much in the way of guard rails to ground yourself. I also wouldn’t say the actual story told — about Hinagiku reckoning with the consequences of her hiatus from her duties after an encounter with a young girl who no longer remembers Spring — is a particularly strong or emotionally compelling hook for wherever the story will go from here. It’s possible this show is operating on a slow boil that’ll be worth it in the long run, and the animation from Wit Studio is good enough (particularly in the lushly rendered sequence where Hinagiku performs her ritual) to be worth checking out. But overall, it’s not a series I came out of the first episode dying to see more of.
“Go For It, Nakumara!” (Now Streaming)
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, “Go For It, Nakumara” is a show that establishes its premise pretty succinctly in its first 5 or so minutes. On the first day of high school, introverted Okuto Nakumara spots his classmate Aiki Hirose in the crowd of an assembly, and immediately falls head over heels for him. The problem is Nakumara, whose only real friend is his pet octopus, is way too shy to actually talk to Hirose. As the show picks up, he slowly works up the courage to talk to Hirose and try to befriend him — efforts that mostly lead to failure and humiliation.
“Go For It, Nakumara” is based on a manga that I’ve actually read, and it’s fun, lighthearted, and very sweet, if a little insubstantial — quite literally, considering how it only ran for a single volume. Don’t expect particularly deep character writing for the title hero or the object of his desire. But it’s legitimately funny, executing its main gag of Nakumara’s attempts to socialize failing miserably with some creative panache. The anime so far is a faithful adaptation of what makes the manga a pleasing comfort: the animation and art style nod to the puffy hair and simple line art of ’80s anime while still feeling fresh and modern, the comic timing is sharp and farcical, and the intro theme song is a cheesy blast.
“Daemons of the Shadow Realm” (April 4)
The reveal in the first episode of “Daemons of the Shadow Realm” is embargoed and also shouldn’t be spoiled, because watching the show and getting hit with the left-field turn it takes is honestly the best part of the experience. That said, this reveal isn’t an end-of-episode twist, but a turning point that occurs around halfway through the episode, making it exceptionally hard to talk about.
One of the most anticipated shows of the season, the big selling point of “Daemons of the Shadow Realm” is that it’s based on a manga by Hiromu Arakawa, whose masterpiece “Fullmetal Alchemist” is one of the most beloved manga of all time, and received an anime adaptation generally held up as the peak of the action/fantasy shonen genre in the medium. Like “Fullmetal Alchemist,” “Daemons” is a story about siblings: the opening shows the birth of two twins, Yuru and Asa, who are prophesied to one day master the control of spirits known as “Daemon.” In a flash forward to their adolescence, Yuru is a hunter leading a humble life in a small village, while Asa is being held behind a cage in town for unclear reasons. From there, the show rather abruptly takes a pivot, so there’s not much I can say about what journey Yuru will go on. But the first episode is promising: the stakes are clear, the animation by Bones is crisp, and the fight scenes are pleasingly tactile.
Probably the most anticipated anime of the Spring, “Witch Hat Atelier” is an adaptation of a manga by Kamome Shirahama, which has been running since 2016 and has received tons of honors in that time, including an Eisner Award here in the states. It’s maybe not a surprise it’s taken so long to receive an adaptation, though, as what makes the manga so acclaimed is also very particular to the medium. Shirahama’s detailed etching and line work make the manga feel like an old picture book come to life, and her paneling and layouts are astonishingly detailed and gorgeous. For a story that’s essentially a modern fairy tale, it’s the perfect use of form and craft to set the tone.
The anime, from relatively new studio Bug Films, can’t really replicate that art style completely. The animation is crisp and gorgeous, and there are a few moments of stylization — such as when the main character Coco floats in the air with her mentor Qifrey and the world around them fades from frame — that captures a taste of what makes the manga such a visual triumph. Still, this is definitely a story best told in its original form, as for 90 percent of the time, the series mostly just looks like another very well-animated anime.
But that doesn’t mean the show isn’t worth checking out. Set in a medieval, Art Nouveau-styled world where only those born with an innate use of magic can become witches, the show follows dressmaker Coco as she discovers the secrets of the practice. When she accidentally unleashes a spell that turns her mother to stone, she joins Qifrey’s atelier as an apprentice to learn more about magic and save her mother. It’s an open-hearted story about self-discovery and fulfilling your dreams that’s appropriate for all ages — kids would love this one.
“Drops of God” (April 10)
If you’re someone who doesn’t watch anime but has read this far: first off, thank you. Second off, you might think the title “Drops of God” and the general premise, about a competition for the inheritance of a world-renowned wine critic’s estate, feels strangely familiar. That’s because this anime is actually the second series adaptation of the manga by sibling duo Yuko and Shin Kibayashi; the first, a French-American-Japanese co-production, premiered on Apple TV+ in 2023 and just wrapped up its second season this March. The live-action show is a rather loose adaptation of the original manga, presenting itself as a glossy prestige drama, a bit more serious than its source material.
In contrast, the anime “Drops of God” fully plays the premise as the out-of-this-world soap opera it is. Following Shizuku Kanzaki, the estranged son of a wine critic who has never so much as tasted wine but has such strong senses he can master the art of wine tasting almost immediately, the show sets up his rivalry with Issei Tomine, a wine critic his father allegedly adopted a week before his death. To gain their inheritance, the two must solve the mystery of 12 wines known as “the Apostles” and a thirteenth known as the “Drops of God.”
It’s a wildly ridiculous story, but “Drops of God” embraces it, with such sincerity and unwinking earnestness that it wraps around to endearing. My favorite moments in the pilot are when Shizuku and Issei drink wine and experience near psychedelic visions of bright flashing colors and Renaissance-era art, describing the taste as bringing to mind “’70s soft rock” and “the opera ‘Salome,’” respectively. The animation is a little rough around the edges — there’s a shot of wine being poured down a sink where the red liquid is depicted in CGI, for some reason — but the slightly retro style with the characters’ prominent lips and sharp chins added to the camp appeal. I don’t know if “Drops of God” will stay satisfying across a whole season, but the first taste was as satisfying as a nice glass of pinot noir.
