The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Keroro Gunsō ☆

Sergeant Keroro comes to conquer Earth, only to get captured and stuck living with the Hinata family!

Keroro Gunsō ☆ is based on the Sgt. Frog manga by Mine Yoshizaki. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

While I may be living a life that will almost certainly have me visit—and could potentially have me living in—Japan for a significant length of time, a thing I love about writing about Japanese media without ever having visited the country is that I can be surprised by a popular series that's apparently been running for twenty plus years.

Sgt. Frog, depicted in this series with the Japanese name of Keroro Gunsō ☆, has more than thee-hundred manga chapters and about just as many anime episodes across seven-plus seasons. Aimed at young children, the franchise follows the exploits of the Hinata Family who find themselves entangled with anthropomorphic alien frogs who are trying to invade Earth, but are largely goofy, chill little guys who are down to hang out and use their advanced technology to punch up Earth's cultural institutions. This episode in particular features the aliens building a miniature city and shrinking various characters so that they can experience being alone in the urban space—though that might have all been an excuse for Sgt. Keroro to better admire the Zaku II Gunpla figures he built earlier.

Graded on the curve of children's media, this opening episode of this new installment in the franchise is pretty good! There are plenty of good-natured hijinks and cool moments featuring robots, mech suits, and other anime iconography that helped me fall in love with the medium when I was a kid. There's even a quiet moral about how cops kind of suck and how people should be cautious around them—which is a nice break from the casual copaganda I'm used to seeing in media geared towards young audiences.

My biggest critique, though, is that it's not entirely clear to me who Keroro Gunsō ☆ is for in 2026. While kids don't care about continuity as much as adult viewers, there isn't much of an onboarding to these characters and this story, and you're really expected to go with the flow as a viewer. There's also a gag referencing Mother Brain from the Metroid series in this episode which, while hilarious to a thirty-one-year-old nerd like me, feels like it'd be nonsensical to this anime's intended audience. The last time Mother Brain showed up as an active antagonist in a Metroid game was in 2004's Metroid: Zero Mission, which was a remake of the original 1986 game. Maybe this is a gag for the parents of the kids watching this, but even then this feels like a stretch.

Regardless, Keroro Gunsō ☆ is a pretty fun show for young audiences, and I hope this leads to more young people getting into the medium.

It's wild that I am watching a brand new episode of Sgt. Frog. For full disclosure, I should probably mention that my exposure to this very long-running franchise is quite limited. I checked out the manga some back when I was a kid over twenty years ago (and don't you dare try to mention that this makes me sound old as hell; I know, already). I also caught a stray episode here and there over the years, but I've never sat down to properly watch a run of the series, so my familiarity with its story and characters mostly boils down to recognizing the different Sgt. Frog Variants that I'm sure all have names and backstories. Still, with the state of the modern world being a near constant state of chaotic freefall, it is somehow comforting to put on an episode of Sgt. Frog in 2026 and find that nothing at all has changed.

Okay, well, a few things are different. The character designs have been spruced up a little, and the animation is all shiny and high-definition now (though it might be missing a certain grit that cartoons had back in the good ol' days). At the end of the day, though, this is Sgt. Frog, so anyone who is even as marginally aware of this franchise as I am ought to know to expect wacky antics, failed plots of world-domination, and plenty of references to Gundam and Gunpla. I will say that, having only really discovered the joy of building model kits long after my initial exposure to the little green guy and his hobbies, I do feel a newfound kinship to ol' Kerokero. At first, I was wondering what the hell the deal was with this cockamamie scheme to shrink the Hinata siblings down to the size of a model city, but as soon as the Gunpla appeared, I understood completely. It is the only rational choice to make if you possess the capacity to shrink people down to 1/144 scale with alien technology.

Some of you might be wondering if now, several hundred episodes and two decades into its run, is a good time to jump onto the Sgt. Frog bandwagon. On the one hand, this show is absolutely a continuation of the original show, with all of the backstory and lore in tow, and I honestly did start to check out once the episode became positively stuffed with humans and frogs that I only vaguely recognized as separate entities from our core trio. That said, let's all be real here and admit that this show is, first and foremost, silly entertainment meant for middle-schoolers, so nothing happening is so complicated or obtuse that anyone couldn't just figure out as they go along. I don't plan on keeping tabs on the next three-hundred episodes of Sgt. Frog myself, but it is comforting to know that, should I ever wish to get a straight shot of pure mid-2000s nostalgia injected into my eyeballs, a brand new batch of Keroro Kontent is only a click away.

Were you hoping that this was an entirely new Sgt. Frog reboot that would explain the series from the beginning and be newbie-friendly? Then I have some bad news for you – it's not. Or at least, it doesn't start at the beginning of the story; I'm not convinced that things won't backtrack in episode two. Either way, this premiere assumes familiarity with the characters and the setup, and while it's easy enough to follow, it also throws a lot at you fairly quickly.

As someone who somehow missed the first series and the manga, I found this pretty middle-of-the-road. The basic idea – vaguely humanoid frogs have invaded Earth from outer space and befriended kids – comes through decently. We're not sure why these frogs are so terrible at invasion, but honestly, if a giant talking frog wants to clean my house and do my laundry, I'm not going to object. Each frog has its own dedicated color, speech tic, and human pal(s). In this episode, they spend most of their time fighting off the military police, led by supercomputer Mother Blackstars, who took over after all the amphibian cops resigned.

I can see how, if you were more familiar with the characters, this could be very, very funny. It's the sort of children's media that relies on absurdity and loud exclamations for humor, and both are abundant in this episode. Admittedly, just the concept of a ninja frog is funny to me, but it was Giroro, the gun-forward tsundere (I assume) burgundy-colored frog who won me over. He seems like he could actually take over the planet if he could stop getting worked up over things or crushing on (human) Natsumi. The action is fast-paced and gleeful, reveling in its goofy plot developments and assorted cast of insane frogs and kids. It's so fun that it's hard not to get pulled in, even as you try to figure out why Koyuki is a magical girl and why Keroro thinks cleaning is a great invasion strategy.

It certainly helps that it looks good. The simple character designs contrast nicely with more complex visual elements, like Keroro's beloved gunpla and the immaculate details of the town model he unveils. Lines are clean and clear, and colors are bright but not loud, making this a picture-perfect children's cartoon; if it had an English dub, I'd be very quick to recommend it for younger viewers; as-is, if you have a little subtitle reader, I'd still give it a whirl with them. Despite not fully understanding what's going on, this is a lot of fun – a madcap, zany take on an alien invasion.