📜 The manga Japanese fans voted they most wanted to see animated is finally getting its anime. Several headlines introduced the director first, as the man behind a gentle cafe comedy.

The October 12, 2026 announcement came with a full staff list. Many Japanese anime fans read a list like this the way sports fans read a team sheet, treating each name as a prediction. This one also hides a studio that many overseas viewers already know under another name.

The most-wanted adaptation, finally confirmed

Kota Kawae's Nue's Exorcist has run in Weekly Shonen Jump since May 2023. It's a school-set dark fantasy: Gakuro Yajima, a high schooler who has always seen spirits called gen'yo, meets Nue, a pop-culture-loving female spirit, in a room at school nobody knows about. Her power pulls him into hunting the dangerous ones.

The manga is at 16 volumes, with more than 1.6 million copies in print as of April 2026, solid but not huge numbers for Jump. What set it apart was demand: in 2025 it topped AnimeJapan's "Manga We Want to See Animated" fan poll.

The anime will air in summer 2027 on TV Asahi's nationwide network, animated by Studio Hibari. Kaito Miura, in his first lead role in an anime, plays Gakuro. Saori Onishi plays Nue, and Sayumi Suzushiro plays Kazusa Suo.

In Japan, the staff list reads like a forecast

Series composition: Hiroshi Seko. He decides how the manga is divided into episodes. His series-composition credits include Jujutsu Kaisen (2020), Chainsaw Man (2022), Attack on Titan: The Final Season and Dandadan, a solid track record with Jump-style battle manga.

Music: MONACA. The composer collective headed by Keiichi Okabe is best known abroad for the NieR games. Okabe commented on behalf of the music team: in his view, the manga sets a dark, serious world beside the light, pop side of school life, and that range suits MONACA's varied style. The teaser's main theme is theirs.

Character design: Shunpei Mochizuki. Kawae says Mochizuki draws so well that he now uses the character sheets as reference himself.

Director: Hiroyuki Hashimoto. Several Japanese outlets, including MANTANWEB and PASH! PLUS, introduced him in their headlines as the director of Is the Order a Rabbit? (Gochiusa), a gentle comedy about girls working in a cafe and one of the best-known titles in Japan's "healing" slice-of-life genre. That framing invites an obvious question: can the Gochiusa director handle exorcist battles?

Comments under the news on Yahoo! News Japan went in several directions. Some readers simply wanted to see Nue move and talk. One doubted an anime would lift a series that, in their view, rarely sits near the top of Jump's reader rankings. Another said the early chapters were the strongest. None of the comments we read mentioned the studio.

What the "Gochiusa director" label leaves out

Hashimoto has worked with this studio for a decade. In 2016 he directed Magical Girl Raising Project there, a ruthless survival story about 16 magical girls drawn in a cute style. The headline announcing that show also introduced him as the Gochiusa director.

In 2017 he co-directed Classroom of the Elite with Seiji Kishi, a psychological school drama that has since reached a fourth season. He is also credited as "composition coach" on Tougen Anki, Studio Hibari's dark action series that began in 2025 and is now in its second season. Kaito Miura, the new Gakuro, is in that cast too.

On paper, then, Hibari has handed the job to a director it has relied on for ten years.

Hashimoto seems aware of how the pairing looks. In his announcement comment, he joked that he figured the offer came to him because the manga has so many cute characters, then promised to handle both the cute moments and the action without breaking the original's mood.

A more personal endorsement came from the author. Kawae wrote that Hashimoto's Gochiusa had saved him in his office-worker days, before he became a manga artist, and that he was moved to have Hashimoto reach out to him again, this time as the director of his own story. None of this guarantees how the anime turns out, but it says more than a single show title does.

Studio Hibari is Lerche

Studio Hibari was founded in 1979 by Sachiko Mitsunobu, a former Tsuchida Production staffer, as a studio specializing in ink-and-paint, the coloring stage of cel animation. From 1980 it produced whole episodes of other studios' shows as a subcontractor, and it helped with ink-and-paint on Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). It began producing series as lead studio in the late 1990s.

Around 2011, producer Yuji Higa formed an in-house team called Lerche, and most of the company's lead TV work carried that name from then on. Lerche is German for skylark, which is what hibari means in Japanese. Lerche-credited series include:

  • Danganronpa: The Animation (2013)
  • Assassination Classroom (2015)
  • Classroom of the Elite (2017)
  • Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun (2020)

In other words, the studio animating Nue's Exorcist also adapted Assassination Classroom, another Weekly Shonen Jump series set in a school.

Why does the announcement say Studio Hibari, not Lerche? According to the company's Japanese Wikipedia entry, since 2023 Hibari has released new work under its own name again, keeping Lerche mainly for World Dai Star and sequels. The company is based in Nerima, Tokyo, and has run a Vietnamese subsidiary, HIBARI VIETNAM, since 2022.

Two Jump adaptations, one year

Nue's Exorcist won't be the only Jump series making its anime debut in 2027. Kagurabachi, which began as an internet meme and became a genuine hit, is due in April 2027 from Studio Cypic (our report). There, fans argued over whether a relatively new studio could carry a heavily hyped title. Here, the headlines went to the director, and the studio slipped by under a name few overseas fans recognize.

As of October 12, 2026, neither the time slot nor an overseas streaming partner had been announced. English readers can follow the manga in Viz Media's official English edition.

Judging an anime by its staff before it airs is a common habit among Japanese fans. It can be a sharp read, or it can shrink a career to one famous title. When an adaptation of a manga you love is announced, what do you check first: the trailer, the studio, or the people making it?

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