Obocchama-kun Reborn revives the 1989 gag comedy for 2027

TV Asahi has confirmed that Obocchama-kun is coming back as a fully new anime. A teaser for Obocchama-kun Reborn is live, and the series is set to broadcast on the TV Asahi network in 2027, forty years after Yoshinori Kobayashi's manga began serialisation.

Who is behind the revival

Chie Kojiro returns as Obocchama-kun, the role she has voiced since the original anime began in 1989. Kobayashi, who created the manga, supervises the new material. TV Asahi produces the show, Green Gold Animation is the production studio, and Shin-Ei Animation and Sony Pictures Networks India provide production cooperation, making this a Japan-India co-production for a property with a large Indian following.

The line-up mixes manga episodes that were never adapted with original stories written under Kobayashi's supervision, so the revival is not simply a re-run of the 1989 run with new paint.

What the teaser shows

The teaser leans hard on the character's invented wordplay, running through Obocchama-speak puns including "gobusa-tango" and "ohayogurt". It closes on a line from Kojiro herself: "Pokkun kaette kita bai! Minna de mite kurikuri!"

That wordplay is the franchise's engine. Obocchama-kun is the heir to the vast Gobu fortune, and the comedy comes from his family's wealth behaving as though normal rules do not apply to it.

Our opinion

Reviving a 1989 gag manga is a much stranger bet than the current remake economy suggests. Most of these projects come with a built-in audience that grew up with the original; Obocchama-kun's hook is a pun-based dialect that has to be rebuilt from scratch for viewers who have never heard it.

The Indian angle is the genuinely interesting part. That the property became a phenomenon in India, and has now come back to Japan as a co-production with Green Gold Animation, is a reverse import of exactly the kind Japanese animation rarely gets credit for. Whether the jokes survive the round trip is the open question.