The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Red River

One day, while walking home, Yuuri Suzuki is magically pulled through a puddle of water and finds herself in the past, or more precisely, 1500 B.C. Location: The Hittite Empire, Anatolia. There, the queen was to use her as a sacrifice, but she was saved by the queen's stepson, who is also an heir to the throne. Now she must try to stay alive and return to her time, hopefully without altering the future.

Red River is based on the manga series by Chie Shinohara. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of my heart shattering into a million pieces while I watched Red River.

After the heartbreak that was Hana-Kimi, I tried to be optimistic for this. I reread the manga, pored over the wikipedia pages for the historical figures the characters were based on, and looked up the credits for everyone that was involved in the production. I watched the trailers, telling myself that maybe the limited animation wasn't totally representative of what was to come and that the opening song was really good. “This could still work,” I told myself and my friends who had loved the manga for at least as long as I had and had similar apprehensions.

While I suppose this isn't the worst possible outcome, it's still pretty bad.

Part of the issue has to do with the source material – it just takes a while to get rolling. You might be wondering if you need to care at all about Himuro, Yuri's boyfriend in Japan that she spends the first half of the episode thinking about, and the answer is a firm, “No.” This is very much a coming-of-age story, and while Yuri grows to be one of my favorite heroines of the genre, she reacts to the situation just like any teenage girl would: horror, confusion, and fear. While Kail is generally acting to help Yuri, it's also undeniable that it involves him pulling her into sexual contact that she's just not comfortable with. Never forget: Red River is, in many ways, a bodice ripper.

But man, just the way it looks. I wasn't thrilled with the character designs from the start; while I understand that Shinohara's original art wouldn't translate well to animation, the pointy chins combined with modern anime features feels like the worst of both worlds. But that's nothing compared to the actual animation, which is stiff at best and often amateurish. Nothing moves quite right, either too fast, off-model, or both. The shortcuts are frequent and obvious, like using identical postcard shots of Yuri's features multiple times in the episode and holding them for long periods of time. It destroyed me to see such a beautiful manga, famed for its attention to historical detail, subjected to this kind of treatment. Hana-Kimi is a school story; its setting is familiar and mundane. The soul of historical fiction lies in the exoticism of the eras, and Red River has been stripped of its soul.

The Red River anime adaptation is not putting its best foot forward. To be clear, it's also opting to start exactly where the manga does; it's just that with the manga you can get past the first couple of chapters and start to see why Yuri is a great heroine and why Kail isn't as big a 90s-era romantic lead as he seems here. But with anime, we're stuck with just what's available, regardless of when the source material originated, and I'm a bit concerned that this may turn people away from this series.

Or, you know, the lackluster animation with its overreliance on still shots or manga-style close-ups of Yuri's face, and the weird, weird proportions on Queen Nakia and sometimes Yuri, with her matchstick legs. One of the two.

Yuri's perpetual state of distress makes sense, though – the poor girl has just been snatched by an evil priestess-queen and yanked thousands of years back in time, from modern (well, 90s) Japan to the 14th century B.C.E. She has no idea what's going on, clearly hasn't studied the Hittite Empire in school, and can't speak the language; it's a terrifying situation for anybody, much less a fifteen-year-old. The fact that she's so confused may feel a little refreshing in today's isekai landscape, though – unlike her modern counterparts, she has no cheat skills. She doesn't gain the ability to speak the language until Prince Kail forcibly kisses her, which is just another indignity among the many she's suffered. He comes across less as Prince Charming and more as Prince Smarmy. Again, this makes sense – he's in a privileged position as the third prince of the Hittite Empire; by the standards of the time, he could kiss anyone he damn well pleased.

What he doesn't please is letting Queen Nakia do what she likes with Yuri. It seems to be a bit of an impulse, stopping her ritualistic sacrifice of Yuri, and while she's glad not to be killed, she's also too confused and scared to really focus on what's going on. She does realize, when Kail mentions Tutankhamen, that she's somehow ended up in the ancient Middle East, but processing that is another story. I like that the plot gives her time to figure this out; it feels like it respects her confusion and fear in a way we don't see in similar stories today.

Original creator Chie Shinohara conducted extensive research, including trips, while publishing the Red River manga. While that doesn't fully come across here, there are still plenty of details you might recognize from museum collections, and if you know your history, you'll recognize more than a couple of names. (Nakia's has been changed, though. Her historical counterpart is Malnigal.) Even though this doesn't look great, I'm excited to see it adapted. I hope that it manages to live up to its source material going forward.

You can tell that Red River is a proto-isekai written in the '90s because, from the beginning, it's clear this is an actual story with, like, a plot that matters and characters you care about. It's crazy, I know, but we were just built differently back in the day, I guess, and our standards for manga fantasy weren't drowning in the gutters of light-novel slop. I was impressed enough that the premiere took its time with the inevitable trip to the ancient past, treating protagonist Yuri's experience of being dragged away from her life and everything she's ever known like the horror-movie premise it really is. Then there is the appeal of sending Yuri to live in the era of the Hittite Empire. Despite its surface-level resemblance to the generic fantasy RPG video game worlds we've all grown resigned to, this is a place with real history and culture to draw upon. It's almost like fantasy settings, whether rooted in history or drawn from pure imagination, benefit from being fleshed out and developed with attention and care. Who would have thought?

I think Red River is going to hit home with viewers who are nostalgic for a time when most fantasy anime and manga gave a damn about more than just pandering to the lowest common denominator within their demographics. Sure, Yuri may have been a fairly typical shōjo-manga protagonist back in the days of Lisa Frank notebooks and the plastic Dixie cups with those Jazz swirlies all over them, but in the age of the Overlooked RPG Class Hero and the Cinderella Saintess, Yuri is a veritable treasure trove of personality and depth. She takes the bizarre and dangerous circumstances of her situation seriously, and she behaves with a believable mix of intelligence and naivety as she navigates the foreign world of ancient Anatolia. While this particular time period isn't the first I would have added to the top of my Historical Fantasy Wish-List, Red River gets you invested in the personal stakes of Yuri's adventure, and I'm more than happy to learn all about the Hittites alongside her.

What you may not find yourself so nostalgic for are the more limited production values befitting such a throwback adaptation. The pointy chins and floofy hairdos are mostly a matter of preference, and I think they're charming, but there's no denying that the animation and storyboarding of Red River leave something to be desired. A quick glance at some of the manga's lush artwork tells me we're missing out on a certain lushness that would contribute a lot to this epic story.

Despite its shortcomings, I had a really fun time with Red River's first episode. Our girl Yuri just wanted to go on dates with her new boyfriend, and now she has to fend off all of the literal and metaphorical plagues that made life in Anatolia so interesting, at least for us history buffs. I'm looking forward to seeing more of where this story goes from here.

Wow, that opening gave a very different vibe from the premiere that I just watched. I'm happy we're getting all these modern adaptations of older manga from the 90s because they legitimately give modern-day audiences a chance to check out series that might've been overlooked or not given as much attention back when they were still in circulation. The trade-off is that sometimes I come across a show like this and all I can think about is how intrinsically dated it is. This whole first episode was just an elongated damsel-in-distress story about a typical modern-day girl being kidnapped into the ancient Middle East. I don't really get a feel for Yuri as a character outside of her dire situation, but that is how a lot of stories back in the day that featured female leads were. On its face, this premiere wasn't particularly strong because it focused on establishing the unfortunate circumstances and the twist about where Yuri is. Personally, I need a bit more meat to chew on than just an inciting incident unless said incident is really pushing the envelope.

Now it looks like the show is promising something a little bit less typical moving forward, as Yuri might be a character who goes from being helpless and scared of her circumstances to being empowered by them. If that is the show I eventually end up getting, it could actually be interesting, rather than just a series solely focused on feeling bad for this young woman. I'm also curious just how dated some of the tropes and archetypes of this type of story will be.

I do like the style in a lot of the designs. They feel very vintage and nostalgic. Setting up this kind of political infighting among the various princes can also be an interesting angle, even if it looks like the show is going to lean into a lot of supernatural magic. I swear the queen that summoned Yuri to this world looks like a character ripped straight out of Sailor Moon. I'm feeling very middle-of-the-road here because I wasn't sold on the premiere and thought many of its elements were just OK. I'm really gonna have to watch another episode or two to get a better idea of the direction the show is definitely going. Is the opening a red herring, or did this series actually define something in a way that is worth revisiting almost thirty years later?