The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Tank Chair

Living on Guicheng Island, called "the most dangerous town in the universe," is no easy task. Genetic doping is common for gangs to gain ultimate power. Shizuka, a young girl, takes on the most dangerous of assassin jobs, but she's not the one doing the killing. Rather, it's her brother, Nagi, a strong assassin who took a bullet to protect his sister, leaving him in a comatose state and having to use a wheelchair. However, Shizuka has figured out the key to waking her brother up: he must be faced with murderous intent.

Tank Chair is based on the manga series by Manabu Yashiro. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Sundays.

Content Warning: Flashing lights

Maaaaaaaaaaaan~ this is such a bummer. Tank Chair was quietly one of my most anticipated releases of the season, but so much of this premiere seems like it's designed to bum me out specifically. Getting a dub from the infamous Transperfect Media studio means that the English dub is functionally unwatchable, with the cast sounding like they're reading the lines phonetically rather than understanding the tone and intent they're meant to be delivered in. Furthermore, the choice to render the blood in this anime as Danganronpa pink undercuts the viscerality of what's happening onscreen, and makes this work feel “edgy” rather than brutal and badass.

To be clear, the premise of Tank Chair whips and the events of this episode are unimpeachable on paper. After a brain injury, the world's greatest assassin Nagi is rendered inert and wheelchair bound. However, his sister Shizuka discovers that the presence of danger and killing intent jolts Nagi awake and temporarily allows him to engage with the world around him. This motivates Shizuka to find the most dangerous assassination jobs around, as they are functionally a form of physical and mental rehabilitation for her brother.

Outside of the show being pretty informed and sympathetic in its depiction of what it's like to both be and care for a differently abled person, every other part of Tank Chair's execution was disappointing. The antagonists of this episode are a group of monkey people who are just kind of around I guess, and I'm supposed to accept that this is a universe that can create monkey people but can't do anything for a person with a brain injury. It's also a little bit of a bummer that the solution to Nagi fighting the big gorilla boss is just to drop in an even bigger wheelchair for him to smush him with. An assassin in a wheelchair is a really fun situation for a writer to explore, but Tank Chair seems to be content in just dropping MacGuffins that resolve the constraints of this premise rather than finding more creative solutions.

Maybe Tank Chair will help people scratch their Dorohedoro-style gore itch this season, but this should have been a home run and is instead a disappointment. It also seems like Amazon agrees with me, as this anime is absolutely buried on Prime Video. If you're not able to find it, don't worry, you're not missing much and I think it's safe to skip this one unless it improves tremendously in the second episode.

I would like to begin this preview of Tank Chair by offering Polygon Pictures a hearty congratulations, because it seems like they might finally be cracking the code on their particular use of computer-generated animation. Now, we're still not going to be confusing this with a Studio Orange joint or anything like that, but when I compare Tank Chair to some of the older PP series that I'm familiar with—like Ajin - Demi-Human or the Godzilla animated movie trilogy—I think there's been some clear improvements to their house style. The limited frame-rate of the character movement seems less choppy and more like an intentional alignment to the look of traditional 2-D anime; the really detailed and lush backgrounds give every scene a lot more depth and weight, and the direction of the action is solid. Not amazing, but good enough to be entertaining and not distracting. The actual cinematography is still the roughest part of the whole affair, with a lot of strange and seemingly random shot placements that don't always complement the action on screen, but we're still making headway.

I think it helps that Tank Chair is just the kind of bizarre and kinetic story that demands an adaptation that is as creative and lively as possible. Our heroes Nagi and Shizuka are young contract killers in a grime-punk dystopia that is equal parts Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, and Garbage Pail Kids—and their primary death-dealing mechanism is a tricked out wheelchair. To capture the madcap tone of this tale, Polygon needed to bring their A-game, and I think they've risen to the challenge, mostly. The big action scene, which sees Nagi using his wheels to mulch up a gang of murderous apes, illustrates the primary challenge of this whole adaptation. You have to make sure the animation of Nagi using his chair is appropriately hefty and laborious so that we can appreciate the immense strength that our anti-hero must possess to even get around on the battlefield. At the same time, we're displaying gravity-defying spectacles of ultraviolence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush—so the framing of the action and the editing has to keep things really snappy and visceral.

I don't know if this show is 100-percent there, since there are still occasional brief cuts that look more goofy than impressive, but that Tank Chair works as well as it does is still a commendable achievement. I am not yet convinced that the story is anything more than a thin framework of nonsense that exists merely to justify a bunch of crazy action scenes, but I don't know if it needs to be more than that. At the very least, the the Taira siblings' dynamic is darkly sweet enough that it might be enough to carry us through from one setpiece to the next. At the very least, I'll certainly be tuning in for a few more episodes to see what wild sights Tank Chair has to show us.

Brains are amazing. My mother suffered a TBI (traumatic brain injury) after a freak accident several years ago, and watching her work with therapists to essentially rewire the damaged parts has been astounding. All of that is to say that there are parts of Tank Chair that don't feel all that far-fetched to me – if my mother retains her personality and most of her function after getting a stick in her frontal lobes, why couldn't Nagi have a trigger word that could essentially revive him from his catatonic state? (I'm sure there's science that says why, but let me have this.)

Unfortunately for this episode, that's really the only part I found interesting. Otherwise it feels like it's trying way too hard to be super gritty and dark. The premise is simply that after taking a bullet to the head while rescuing his little sister Shizuka, Nagi Taira was rendered catatonic and paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors told Shizuka that he'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life, but she discovered that if she says the word “kill” in his presence, he returns to his normal self…for a time. To this end, Shizuka has continued his work as an assassin, finding jobs and having Nagi carry them out in his heavily modified athletic wheelchair, all in the name of getting her brother back for a bit. It's a tragic scenario that the episode does acknowledge at the end, but that pathos is largely lost in the madcap lunacy of fight scenes and adult men and gorillas who all talk like two-bit thugs who have been smoking fourteen packs a day.

Yes, there are talking gorillas in this dystopian world, and no, we don't know how or why. It looks like the main gorilla villain had brain surgery at some point, so maybe it's just science at work; it's actually less important that they talk because they also murder. Goro even wears a necklace of his victims' skulls, just so that you get the idea of how evil he is. Everything is completely over the top, from Goro's design to the modifications on Nagi's wheelchair, and every stylistic choice clearly serves a purpose. In the case of the hot bubblegum-colored blood, that purpose may well be “get away with lots of violence without making it look like there's blood everywhere.” Unfortunately, this lighter-colored blood also means a lot of flashing lights, as the shade against the uniformly dark backgrounds gives blood spatter a strobe effect. If you're light-sensitive, beware.

I'm all for stories that show that the disabled aren't “stuck” in wheelchairs or otherwise hobbled by their bodies. In theory, I like what Tank Chair is bringing. But in practice, I was underwhelmed, torn between a mediocre sub and dub, and a bit put off by the gorillas who don't serve much purpose except to be evil. If you don't want to think, this might fit the bill, but otherwise, it just exists as an ultraviolent cartoon with a sad backstory.