Atashin'chi NEXT gets new episodes and a new director

Shinei Animation is making more Atashin'chi NEXT. The studio announced new episodes in production at its 50th-anniversary stage event at Abema Anime Matsuri on 19 September, alongside a teaser trailer and a change in the director's chair.

Taku Kimura takes over direction. Kimura is currently directing the television anime Yanineko and is attached to Studio Lemon; the studio describes the new episodes as the baton passing to him rather than a reset.

The family is unchanged

The four leads are all returning: Kumiko Watanabe as the mother, Fumiko Orikasa as Mikan, Daisuke Sakaguchi as Yuzuhiko and Kenichi Ogata as the father. For a sitcom that has been running in one form or another for three decades, keeping the voices together is the whole point.

Eiko Kera's manga began in the Sunday edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1996 and ran there until 2012, picking up the 42nd Bungeishunjū Manga Award along the way; it resumed in AERA in December 2019 and is still running. Atashin'chi NEXT started in 2024 as the first completely new anime series in about eight years, built from manga episodes that had never been animated.

What has not been announced

There is no date, no episode count, no broadcaster and no streaming platform attached to the new episodes yet, and Shinei has not said how many chapters of the manga the run will draw on. The teaser is deliberately about the announcement rather than the material: a title card, the returning cast and a promise that the Tachibana family is moving again.

Our opinion

Handing Atashin'chi to a director whose calling card is Yanineko is a quietly interesting hire. Kimura's current show is a scrappy cat-and-bar comedy with an edge that Atashin'chi has never really had, and the unadapted Kera chapters that NEXT exists to animate are often the drier, more observational ones. The studio is not asking for a change of tone, and it would be a shame if it got one – the appeal of the Tachibana household has always been that nothing much happens and it is still worth watching. What this announcement really signals is a studio in its 50th year spending its birthday money on the shows it is known for, which is a more useful piece of news than another teaser would have been.