BODY: A yokai sealed in a high school classroom for sixty years is finally getting out. Nue's Exorcist, Kota Kawae's school dark fantasy running in Weekly Shonen Jump since May 2023, has been confirmed for a TV anime, with a teaser visual, teaser PV, and the bulk of its creative team announced on October 12.
The series follows Gakuro Yashima, a pushover of a teenager who has seen spirits called genyo since childhood, and Nue — a mysterious, subculture-obsessed entity sealed inside a room at Kita High for six decades, waiting for someone to find her. The adaptation lands at a moment of obvious momentum: Nue's Exorcist topped AnimeJapan's 2025 "Manga We Want to See Animated" ranking, the industry's most closely watched fan poll.
Animation production falls to Studio Lerche, with Hiroyuki Hashimoto (Is the Order a Rabbit?) directing, Hiroshi Seko (Attack on Titan, Jujutsu Kaisen 0) on series composition, Shunpei Mochizuki handling character design, Takayuki Yamaguchi as sound director, and music by Keiichi Okabe of MONACA — the composer behind the NieR series. Kai Miura voices Gakuro in his first leading anime role, with Saori Onishi as Nue and Sayumi Suzushiro as classmate Nanasaki Suo. Broadcast is slated for summer 2027.
Kawae's own announcement comment was disarmingly personal: he wrote that Hashimoto's Gochiusa got him through his years as a salaryman, and that having the same director now extend a hand to his manga left him overwhelmed.
The insider take
The Hashimoto pick reads strange from outside Japan and shrewd from inside it. He is known for soft, slice-of-life comedy, not exorcism horror — but Nue's Exorcist has always sold on character warmth as much as on monsters, and Hashimoto said as much himself, joking that the job probably came his way because the cast is so cute. Pair that with Lerche, which built its reputation on Jump-adjacent school ensembles like Assassination Classroom, and Okabe's melancholic sound, and the shape of the adaptation is already legible. The nearly two-year runway to summer 2027 is simply the current reality of Tokyo studio capacity — the good teams are booked years deep.
Originally reported by GIGAZINE (Japanese).