The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Thunder 3

Thunder 3 is a story centered on the unbreakable bond between three childhood friends as they embark on a desperate search for a missing girl. The series follows Pyontaro, an ordinary middle schooler, and his two best friends, Tsubame and Hiroshi—a trio known as the Small 3. Their lives are upended when Pyontaro's cheerful younger sister, Futaba, suddenly vanishes. As they join forces to find her, their search quickly escalates into a profound adventure that takes them far beyond their wildest imagination.

Thunder 3 is based on the manga series by Yuki Ikeda. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Wednesdays.

Fair Warning: The only way for me to talk about this show is to spoil the heck out of this first episode, so stop here if that kind of stuff matters to you. For what it's worth, I recommend this show to folks with more adventurous tastes, and I think it's best to go into it blind.

Thunder 3's premiere is, without a doubt, one of the strangest I've ever covered in the ten years I've been doing the Preview Guide. Everything about its execution is just off-putting as hell, and it's truly difficult to tell how much of it is intentional. The CGI artwork is simplistic and limited to the point that it will probably alienate most viewers from the get-go, with the whole show looking like a cheap afterthought thrown together for tiny kids. Our heroes Pyontaro, Hiroshi, and Tsubame are all adolescent boys in the throes of puberty, though, with a lot of this episode's jokes dealing with their newfound obsessions with women's underwear and online pornography, so right away there is a tonal disconnect going on.

The same disconnect applies to the voice acting in the English dub I watched, which is actually quite good, just…weird. Abby Trott, Ryan Bartley, and Brenna Larsen all play Pyontaro, Hiroshi, and Tsubame with the familiar cadences of the usual anime vocal archetypes, but the direction of their delivery is pitched toward maybe 20% more naturalism than usual.

When you combine those performances with the way Risa Mei plays Pyontaro's tiny sister, Futaba, with such accurate precociousness, I was halfway convinced for a moment that this was one of those productions that employed actual child voice actors. The closest approximation to the overall effect of the show's stylistic and performance choices that I can come up with here on the fly is to the edgy, borderline inappropriate young-adult fare that Hollywood produced in the late '80s and early '90s. I'm talking about movies like The Monster Squad, where you go back and watch it as an adult only to discover that the script is filled with so many more sex jokes, homophobic slurs, and casual child endangerment than you remembered.

Anyway, the point is, I honestly didn't know what to make of this show for the entire first half of its premiere. That's around when little Futaba ends up crawling into the television, Poltergeist-style, after the boys try to test an experimental game given to them by a weird professor-type. The world of the “TS5” game that Futaba finds herself in is also computer-generated, but the environment is (comparatively) hyper-realistic and filled with human characters styled after more mature anime and more naturally proportioned. When these other people see Futaba, they are completely freaked out because it turns out that she and all of the other Thunder 3 characters are supposed to look ripped straight from the pages of a comedic children's comic. Little Futaba even carries a shadow of manga screentone with her wherever she walks.

When the boys figure out what is happening and chase after Futaba, it is already too late. She has been trapped in the middle of a sci-fi alien invasion plotline already in progress, and while none of the animation is ever “great”, there is a very stark and intentional shift that occurs when the evil spaceships arrive and start launching missiles at the freaky comic-book children. This is when I truly got what Thunder 3 was going for, and suddenly I couldn't stop cackling like a madman. At least some of that bizarre stylistic and tonal discombobulation that I was experiencing was definitely on purpose, and it put me in the perfect headspace to appreciate the reveal of what kind of show Thunder 3 is really going to be.

Well, okay, I still don't know if I can actually tell you what kind of show Thunder 3 is really going to be, but it sure is a hell a lot more interesting than those utterly strange opening ten minutes led me to believe. This series might turn out to be absolute nonsense by the time things wrap up, but there's no way I'm going to pass up at least another episode or two to see just how it all shakes out.

When most stories do parallel worlds, the realities are similar on most levels. Oh sure, there might be strange creatures, magic, advanced technology, or the like, but objects still fall at 9.8 meters-per-second squared. The basic laws of physics and the nature of the material world are the same. Likewise, rarely does just being from a parallel world in and of itself grant new innate powers—i.e., most powers are granted by an outside force or are learned in the isekai world. This is not the case with Thunder 3.

The main middle schooler trio of Thunder 3 come from an all-ages manga with a sci-fi twist (think Doraemon or Crayon Shin-chan). Pyontaro is obsessed with boobs on the down low, Tsubame is obsessed with panties on the “up high” and Hiroshi… I'm not actually sure what his deal is yet. When they cross over into a “serious sci-fi world” chasing after Pyontaro's sister, Futaba, they quickly discover that they are equivalent to Superman arriving on a world with a yellow sun.

And when you think about it, this makes total sense. The boys are from a world where matter is simply harder and people stronger. (After all, how often do people get seriously hurt in Doraemon or Crayon Shin-chan?) Not to mention, they are from a world where people have names like “Dr. Doc” and a sketchy PS5 disc you buy online works as a doorway to other universes. The laws of reality clearly aren't the same as our own.

Long story short, I am impressed by the creativity on display. It reminds me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—two different realities clashing even as they exist alongside one another. Will I keep watching? I'm not sure. But I'm happy that I'll have the excuse to watch the second episode next week.