The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Cat and the Dragon

Deep, deep within the forest, a fire-breathing dragon lives with cats who wield magic. Having lost his biological parents before birth, the dragon was raised by a mother cat he met by chance. The cats welcomed the dragon into their family, seeing him as a "slightly unusual cat" who could fly and breathe fire. Each of the curious forest cats has their own unique way of life. As if to repay his debt to the mother cat, the dragon stays close to the forest cats and watches over them. The cats affectionately call him "Uncle with Wings," while humans, with awe, refer to him as the "Cat Dragon."

The Cat and the Dragon is based on the light novel series by author Amara and illustrator Mai Ōkuma. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Content Warning: Animal death

Pairing up cats with dragons is such an obvious and perfect idea that I cannot believe another anime hasn't tried this before. Both creatures are, after all, vicious apex predators that will drown their fields in rivers of the blood of any creatures unfortunate enough to wander into their hunting grounds. At the same time, dragons and cats are also perfect little snuggle-muffins who must be loved and protected at all costs. It just makes sense.

The Cat and the Dragon is exactly what it says on the tin, which is what makes it such a delightful anime to kick off the summer season. A colony of magical cats adopts a stupefyingly adorable little dragon hatchling, and together they work to survive their fraught fantasy setting. Humans, more than any other strange beast, pose the greatest threat to this family's peace, as we see when a summon spell separates the kittens from their mother, and when a band of bastards start skinning all of the cats and lighting them on fire, Holy Sweet Mother of—

Er, so if you are, like me, sensitive to violence against felines, then you will likely be filled with as much destructive rage against the whole of mankind as our dragon hero. It's a bit grim for such a cute-faced series about frolicking fantasy creatures, but this also means that the show might have a genuine plot to develop beyond the hangout vibes we all could have expected going into this premiere. There is a kind prince who befriends the Cait Sith and persuades our noble Cat Dragon to give humanity one last chance, which leads us to an interesting hook for future episodes. While I cannot help but wonder what kind of show this might have been if we had been given more time to spend experiencing this world from the POV of natural and magical creatures that live apart from mankind, I admit that there are just as many fun dramatic possibilities to explore now that Cat Dragon has made his tenuous peace with the people he has feared and hated for so much of his life.

The fanatical part of my brain that is devoted to my cats wants to give The Cat and the Dragon ten stars or more, but the critical part of my brain knows that this premiere is “just” very good, though it hasn't quite yet proven itself to be must-watch television. I've seen enough shows like this to know that adorable cat protagonists can only get you so far. If The Cat and the Dragon can live up to shows like Tonari no Yōkai-san and deliver a well-developed story that takes advantage of its magical setting, then we really could have a hit fantasy anime to liven up this summer.

What if a cat were a dragon? What if a dragon were raised by cats?? What if a big, scary dragon protects small, little cats???

These are the questions raised and answered in the first episode of Studio OLM's The Cat and the Dragon, which is an early frontrunner for the cutest anime of the summer season. Focusing on the dragon mentioned in the title, this ferocious embodiment of power and avarice is raised by a Cait Sith mother alongside the rest of her litter when his own mother is slain by humans before he hatches. Most of this episode focuses on this adoptive family unit, with the cats learning how to do cat stuff from their mother, and the dragon trying to get the hang of most cat stuff — like hunting for mice — but also learning how to do dragon stuff — like flying and spitting fire.

What seems like it will be the narrative focus of the series beyond this episode occurs when the dragon warns a nearby human community not to attack his cat family, which sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads to the Cait Sith cats teaching humans magic as an alliance between their communities takes shape over generations. I imagine future episodes will explore the exploits of the royal family and their magical cat companions across generations, but we don't see much of that in The Cat and the Dragon's first episode. Though I can't really complain about this premiere being less than representative of the series' overarching narrative, it absolutely sets this show's wholesome tone beautifully.

Even with more limited animation, The Cat and the Dragon manages to evoke an almost storybook quality. Even if still images and minimalist animation segments are plentiful, they're always rendered in a warm or adorably simple way that makes it easy to overlook that these are pretty obvious animation shortcuts. These cute moments make an even bigger impact thanks to the brilliant choice to juxtapose them against some more graphic imagery, that being a group of human hunters that had killed several forest cats and were in the process of skinning them for their meat and fur. I was not expecting such a direct acknowledgment of death in an anime that otherwise comes off as a comfort show, and that makes me hopeful that a broader range of storytelling is in store as the show goes on.

The Cat and the Dragon probably won't receive too many flowers this season, but this first episode is interesting enough that I hope more people check it out.

Is there anything cuter than when an animal adopts a baby of another species? Possibly, but there's still something delightful about it – before I was born, my parents' cats taught their puppy to use the litterbox, assuming he was just a really weird cat. That's essentially what happens in the opening moments of The Cat and the Dragon: a mother cat (or cait sith, a Celtic cat fairy) accidentally hatches an orphaned dragon egg and just raises the hatchling alongside her kittens. He and his siblings just assume that he's a large, scaly cat with wings who can breathe fire, and his entire life, my parents' dog thought much the same – that he was just a German Shepherd-sized cat. So even though this is a fantasy series involving dragons and cat fey, it's grounded in something very like reality.

That's part of what makes this work. The opening half of the episode reminds us of the casual cruelty humans can commit: Cat Dragon's mother meets the same fate as Bambi's, the cat mom is summoned as a familiar with no regard for whether or not she might have kittens, and Cat Dragon discovers that humans wantonly hunt cats for their fur. (This is the single most disturbing scene in the episode, so if you're sensitive to animal deaths, be aware.) It isn't until they're threatened by a large, angry, scaly-winged cat that the humans realize that they need to shape up, and even then, they're only spared because a kitten comes forward to protect his little girl. That one small gesture convinces Cat Dragon to spare the city, and he makes sure the humans know it.

In many ways, this episode tells a complete story. It feels like a picture book adaptation (a grim one, but remember that Bambi and Old Yeller are considered children's books), complete with a gentle narrator, kings, and princes, not to mention talking animals. It feels like a preface to what may well be an anthology series about human/cat interactions, watched over by Cat Dragon, and I honestly won't be sorry if that's what it turns out to be. It helps that the artwork doesn't try to make the animal characters too humanoid or cutesy. They're still clearly cartoon characters, but also unmistakably cats, mice, and dragons – even with the proper teeth, which is a nice touch. While I'd hesitate to recommend this for family viewing because of the cat hunt (and because I don't know where this is headed), it's still a nice change from the usual fantasy fare and has a lot going for it. I'm definitely interested in seeing where it goes from here.