If the embed above misbehaves, the original series’ promotional video is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USuhlt9q07s
Some fandoms wait a while for a second season. Yona of the Dawn fans have waited long enough to watch the manga it was adapting carry on, keep going, and finally finish. The good news, confirmed by the anime’s official X account and timed neatly to the release in Japan of the manga’s 48th and final volume today, is that the long-promised sequel now has a studio: Pierrot Films.
Pierrot Films is Studio Pierrot’s second studio, rebranded and relaunched in 2024 with the motto “Make Anime That Wows”, and the Pierrot offshoot that has been animating Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War. More reassuringly for the shoujo faithful, its executive producer, Yoshihiko Tominaga, was the animation producer on the original 2014 series and its OVAs. So this is less a stranger picking up the keys and more the family coming home to find the furniture exactly where they left it, if a little dusty.
For anyone who missed it the first time round, Mizuho Kusanagi’s manga began in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume magazine in 2009. It follows Yona, the sheltered princess of Kouka, whose life of hair-related anxieties ends abruptly on the night her cousin Su-won murders her father and takes the throne. She flees with her bodyguard Hak and sets out to find the four legendary dragon warriors. Pierrot’s 24-episode adaptation, directed by Kazuhiro Yoneda with character designs by Maho Yoshikawa, ran from October 2014 to March 2015, followed by three OVAs, and it stopped almost precisely at the moment the band was finally assembled. It was the fantasy equivalent of a heist film that spends an hour recruiting the crew and then rolls the credits before anybody touches a vault.
Kusanagi wrapped up the main story in December 2025, after a sixteen-year run, and the sequel was announced in the same issue of Hana to Yume that carried the final chapter. Volume 48 gathers up those last chapters along with a closing side story, and Viz Media continues to publish the series in English for anyone who would rather not wait for the anime to find out what happens next. Given that the adaptation only got through the early volumes, the new series will not be short of material. The danger is not filler. It is that there is now so much story that the dragons may need a considerably bigger cart.
What we do not yet have is a director, a cast, confirmation of returning voice actors or a release window, all of which are promised at a later date. After more than eleven years of waiting, “later” sounds positively brisk. By Yona standards, it is practically next Tuesday.
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