The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Welsh & Shedar

Welsh is a teenage boy from the country who loves to cook, and Shedar is a young prince who is destined to become king one day. When the two young men with very different lives are thrown together by a chance encounter, the wheels of fate begin to turn, and soon they must work together to bring about a peaceful future by stopping a cruel despot from conquering the world.

Welsh & Shedar is an original anime series produced by French entertainment company Ankama and animated by Studio Massket. The anime is streaming on the Krosmoz YouTube channel on Thursdays.

Does it make me unforgivably hypocritical to roll my eyes at the nonsensical parade of proper nouns that Welsh & Shedar subjects us to, even though I am a longtime defender of Final Fantasy XIII's particular brand of JRPG bullshit? Perhaps it does, but the fact remains that Welsh & Shedar does not make for the most inviting introduction to the Dofus universe of multi-media fantasy projects. Then again, everything about this premiere leads me to believe that all of the lore and obscure terminology is a smokescreen meant to distract from the otherwise deeply generic story we're dealing with, so maybe it's silly to expect anything sophisticated or nuanced from this show to begin with.

I've never seen Wakfu or played any of the Dofus games, so I apologize if I am slandering a shockingly deep and beloved property that I am simply ignorant of, but something tells me that Dofus isn't operating on the level of, say, Dune or The Wheel of Time. The opening scene is a completely perfunctory battle between loud, overdesigned villains, and then we immediately skip to a sequence of obnoxiously twee domestic bliss that feels ripped straight from the opening levels of a forgotten PS2 RPG that has been stuck in the bargain bin all these years for a reason. If there is a reason for anyone to be deeply compelled by the adventures of Welsh, a dweeb who seems pathologically compelled to talk to his “Mama” like he was still in kindergarten, it has not been presented just yet.

To be clear, the cheapness of Welsh & Shedar mostly has to do with its rote and unambitious storytelling. As a work of animation, this show is just fine. The character designs really don't do much for me, looking only a draft or two removed from those generic How to Draw Anime models that used to clog up the shelves at all of the school book fairs, but the art and animation from Studio Massket is very colorful and appealing. If I was a preteen who had never been exposed to Avatar: The Last Airbender or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, I'd probably be very impressed by what Welsh & Shedar has to offer.

As it stands, this is yet another Fall series to toss into the Pits of the Agonizingly Mediocre. It doesn't do anything horribly wrong, but it also fails to stand out in basically every way. Maybe future episodes will flesh out the story enough to make the experience more worthwhile, but I fear there is only so much more we can expect from a project like Welsh & Shedar.

There are two things that jumped out to me while watching this first episode of Welsh & Shedar. The first is, hidden beneath the annoying case of proper-noun-itis (you know, where the show makes up words for things that already have words to describe them) is about the most bog standard heroes journey beginning out there. With a hero that is a literal country boy peasant who is the secret son of the deposed true king, I wouldn't be surprised to hear Joseph Campbell rose from his grave to point an accusing finger the moment this anime hit the airwaves.

And beyond that, we even have an evil queen trying to avert her own prophesied downfall—which will no doubt end up making her downfall come to pass as her attack will serve as the hero's call to action. Simply put, this is a plot so wholly unoriginal that it's basically a novelty in this day and age. So, good job, I guess?

The other aspect that jumped out to me was that this episode feels like a demo reel—like an advertisement for the studio. In a vacuum it looks great. Rare camera angles and tricky animation are used throughout the episode—but not only in places where they would actually elevate the story or the emotional impact. Any place where some non-standard technique could be used, it was—simply because it could be. It's similar to the feeling I get when I watch GoHands anime for the preview guide (though not nearly to that eye-bleeding, nausea-inducing degree).

All in all, the only thing about this show that really interests me was Zabelle herself. While she is cast as the evil queen, nothing we see marks her as stereotypically evil this episode. We know nothing about her rule but we see that, rather than send her injured dragon or her armies to fight, she does so herself instead. Even her darkest moment in the episode, almost killing Shedar, is not born of hate or emotionless self-interest but out of fear. She fears that, due to the dragon's meddling, her beloved son will turn on her and kill her. Sending her dragon to kill Welsh is done for the same reason. She is a terrified woman not a mustache-twirling villain. I look forward to episode 2 just to learn more about her character.

I do appreciate the bait and switch that happens in this premiere. After a dramatic buildup and a pretty solid fight scene between Queen Zabelle and giant beast of a man, I was not expecting the sudden subversion that I was inadvertently cheering for the bad guy throughout the first third of this episode.

The pacing of this episode definitely could've been better as that initial fight scene was bogged down with a lot of random talking that disrupted the flow. This is also true of the every day slice-of-life scenes—particularly the scenes where Welsh did not need to go on nearly as long as he did.

There's already a lot of good set up here. The show is teasing ideas of a self-fulfilling prophecy, horrific power struggles, and a lot of lore involving dragons. I like the contrast between Welsh's life and Shedar's as it's clear that they live on opposing rungs of the social ladder. I do feel bad for Shedar, especially since his supposed mother tried to smother him, but the premiere plays a lot of cards very close to the chest. A lot of things happen, but the reveal for why they're happening the way that they are has yet to be seen.

The presentation is solid with good use of contrasting colors as well in order to portray that dichotomy. I would've loved to have seen a bit more action from that initial fight, but the show looks very solid throughout. Even the image of a wounded black dragon spilling blood everywhere as he flies through the sky is very striking. And considering that the episode ends on a cliffhanger gearing up for another major fight, I'm hoping episode two will deliver more on that front. I also hope the episode will have better voice acting because the dub for this episode sounded rough. There are a lot of moments where a character will stress the wrong syllable in a sentence, the performance will be underplayed, or the timing with the lip flaps will just seem off. I think the actual writing for each line is solid, however, as it doesn't feel like the actors are buckling under the stress of the script. It just feels like a lot of actors needed to do an additional take. Maybe it'll take time for the actors to grow into their roles, but I'm hoping I can enjoy things a lot better in future episodes.