Everyone you loved in 1979 is back, and most of them have brought a mecha (anime and manga news roundup).

We have not run a proper anime and manga news roundup since last October, which turns out to have been a scheduling error of some magnitude, because the industry has spent 2026 quietly digging up every single thing you watched as a teenager and putting it back on a cinema screen. Ghost in the Shell. VOTOMS. Galaxy Express 999. Patlabor. Yamato. If you are of a certain vintage, the release calendar currently reads less like a schedule and more like an intervention.

Here is what actually matters, arranged so you can find the bits you care about without reading the bits you do not.

Ghosts in shells, and other things living in your head

Science SARU’s The Ghost in the Shell is the big one, and it has been running since 7th July, exclusively on Prime Video outside Japan. Crucially, this is not another sequel to Stand Alone Complex or 2045. It goes back to Motoko Kusanagi, the Puppet Master and Masamune Shirow’s original manga, which is either heresy or the first sensible decision the franchise has made in fifteen years, depending on which forum you frequent. Science SARU being Science SARU, it looks nothing like anything that came before, and we mean that as a compliment.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 finally has a date: 20th October, ten episodes, on Netflix. Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red have wisely left the first cast where they fell and built a standalone story around a new lot, including a de-chromed former legend and a nomad netrunner with a revenge problem. Given what Trigger did to the collective emotional stability of the internet last time, we suggest you clear the following day.

Mobile Police Patlabor EZY has crept back without much fanfare, relocating the franchise to an AI-automated 2030s Japan, which is a premise that has aged from “amusing satire” to “documentary” in roughly the time it took to animate. It is being released as three theatrical collections: May and August this year, with the final File landing on 5th March 2027. Patlabor was always the anime that understood that the future would mostly be paperwork, and it appears to have lost none of that.

Mecha corner, where the old guard reports for duty

Mamoru Oshii is directing new VOTOMS. We will give you a moment. Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe is a two-part theatrical war story from Sunrise with help from Production I.G, original creator Ryosuke Takahashi supervising, and Kenji Kawai on music, which is to say the band is back together and they have all remembered how to be miserable in exactly the right way. Part one opens in Japan on 20th November, with a new trailer and principal cast revealed across August and September. If you have ever had to explain to a younger relative why Chirico Cuvie is not, in fact, having a nice time, this one is for you.

Gundam has been busy on two fronts. Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe opened in January and proceeded to out-gross the entire Japanese run of the first film in twenty-nine days, finishing at ¥2.24 billion and 1.34 million admissions. It turns out audiences will pay handsomely to watch a terrorist have a nervous breakdown in a very expensive suit.

Meanwhile Kenji Kamiyama is directing the newly announced Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO, which involves alien technology, gravity control, faster-than-light communication and a silicon-based “Apocalypse”. Gundam has traditionally kept its science fiction to a strict diet of Newtypes and colony drops, so the arrival of actual aliens and FTL is either a bold expansion of the canon or someone at Bandai losing a bet. We are, obviously, watching.

Space opera’s institutional pension scheme

Galaxy Express 999 is going back to the cinema. Toei has announced an entirely new theatrical production with Rintaro, director of the 1979 film and of Metropolis, supplying the story concept, and Leiji Matsumoto’s daughter has described it as a project her father long wanted made. No release date yet. Nothing else this year is likely to make quite so many middle-aged people stare wistfully out of a train window.

Space Battleship Yamato 3199 is nearly done. Chapter six, The Azure Labyrinth, opened in June; the seventh and final chapter, Rainbow Reincarnation, arrives on 30th October. The remake project has been running long enough that some of its original audience have retired, which feels thematically appropriate for a ship that spends most of its time being heroically on fire.

And for something genuinely new, Reborn as a Space Mercenary: I Woke Up Piloting the Strongest Starship! begins in October, with a title that took longer to read than some episodes take to watch. Yes, it is power-fantasy isekai. Yes, it will probably be daft. But it has a cockpit, a mercenary contract and space combat in it, and we have never once claimed to be above that sort of thing.

Also worth a look: Snowball Earth, the SF-kaiju-robot adaptation that started streaming worldwide in April, about an astronaut who comes home to find the planet frozen solid. Its official site now carries a season two trailer, so somebody is enjoying it.

Suffering, elegantly animated

Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising finally, actually, genuinely opened in Japan on 28th August after a development period best measured in geological terms. It topped its opening weekend and passed ¥1 billion in four days. Dolby Cinema screenings start on 18th September. There is still no British date, which is the sort of detail that makes one want to write a strongly worded letter to somebody, if only one knew who.

Dorohedoro season two arrived on 1st April, six years after the first, and is on Netflix. Six years is a long time to leave a man with a lizard head standing in a doorway, but here we are.

Chainsaw Man: Assassins Arc is in production at MAPPA, continuing directly from the Reze Arc film, with another trailer in June. Format and release date remain unconfirmed, which is Chainsaw Man’s way of maintaining the correct level of ambient dread.

Sekiro: No Defeat opened in Japan on 4th September for a three-week run, and it deserves your attention for one reason above all others: it is fully hand-drawn 2D. In 2026. It keeps the game’s Japanese principal cast and uses Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Blu” as its theme. Crunchyroll has international rights but no British date, so file this under “things to be quietly furious about until further notice”.

The very large franchises do very large things

• The One Piece – WIT Studio’s remake from the very beginning reaches Netflix in February 2027: seven episodes, roughly five hours, covering the first fifty manga chapters. At that rate the remake will conclude at some point during the reign of Charles V.
• One Piece Film: God Valley opens in summer 2027, with One Piece Film: BAAD following in 2029, per Oda and Shueisha. Yes, they have announced a film for 2029. Yes, we will still be here.
• Dragon Ball Super: Beerus begins on 11th October, and please read this bit carefully, because the marketing rather hopes you will not: it is an “enhanced edition” of existing material, with new cuts, redubbing, fresh music and rebuilt footage, and not a new story. The genuinely new continuation is Dragon Ball Super: The Galactic Patrol, adapting the post-Universe Survival manga, and it has no premiere date at all. Toriyama would have found this funny.
• Black Clover has managed the neat trick of ending and returning simultaneously: Yūki Tabata’s manga concluded in May, while the anime’s second season starts in October after five years off television.
• The Apothecary Diaries season three starts on 2nd October, with the original-story film Treasure of the Late Empress on 11th December. It is historical mystery rather than genre, strictly speaking, but Maomao solves problems through applied pharmacology and relentless rudeness, and we consider that close enough to science.

The manga desk

• Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo – Gege Akutami and Yūji Iwasaki’s short sequel ran from September 2025 to March 2026 and is set sixty-eight years after the original, at which point the series introduces extraterrestrials and an arriving spacecraft. Jujutsu Kaisen has gone full science fiction and nobody outside the fandom seems to have noticed. Chapter one is legally readable here.
• Kagurabachi – Takeru Hokazono’s sword-and-sorcery revenge manga, the internet’s favourite running joke turned genuine hit, gets its television adaptation in April 2027 with worldwide Crunchyroll distribution already arranged.
• The Eisner Awards had a notably Japanese year: Akira Toriyama and Go Nagai into the Hall of Fame, Shintaro Kago’s “Blood Harvest” taking Best Short Story, and Kodansha’s AKIRA hardcover set winning the archival category.
• The Promised Neverland returns for a tenth anniversary with a new bonus one-shot and assorted anniversary projects, presumably including therapy for anyone who watched the second anime season.
• Please Save My Earth is becoming a worldwide Prime Video live-action series in autumn 2027, starring Alice Hirose. Saki Hiwatari’s manga is nominally about teenagers with feelings, but it is actually about a doomed multi-species research team on a lunar base reincarnating into modern Japan, which is a far better pitch than anyone gives it credit for.

Dates for your diary

• 18th September – Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising, Dolby Cinema screenings (Japan)
• 2nd October – The Apothecary Diaries season three
• 11th October – Dragon Ball Super: Beerus (the remaster, not the sequel)
• 20th October – Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 on Netflix
• 30th October – Space Battleship Yamato 3199, final chapter
• 20th November – Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe part one, and Witch on the Holy Night from Type-Moon and ufotable
• November – Expelled from Paradise: Resonance of the Heart, reuniting Seiji Mizushima and Gen Urobuchi for more digital humanity and escaped artificial bodies
• 11th December – The Apothecary Diaries: Treasure of the Late Empress
• February 2027 – The One Piece on Netflix
• 5th March 2027 – Patlabor EZY, final File

One caveat before you commit any of that to ink: Aniplex One Focus has promised fresh announcements on 12th September covering Madoka, Witch on the Holy Night, Expelled from Paradise and the space mercenary business, so several of these entries may sprout new trailers, dates and, dare we hope, overseas releases within the week. We shall report back, assuming we have recovered from the news about VOTOMS.