Blue Box Season 2 Changed Studios, and the New One Was Founded by TMS's Former President

Blue Box Season 2 has a date. October 4, 2026, on TBS and 27 affiliated stations, with Netflix carrying it globally that month. That part is straightforward and good news, since Kouji Miura's manga wrapped at chapter 250 earlier this month and the anime now has a complete story to work from.

The part that got less attention is that the show changed studios.

Telecom Animation Film made season one. Season two is being animated by Electric Circus, directed by Daisuke Sako, who takes over from Yuichiro Yano. If you have never heard of Electric Circus, that is reasonable. It was founded in 2024.

Who founded Electric Circus

Yu Kiyozono, the former president of TMS Animation.

Telecom Animation Film is a TMS subsidiary. So this is not a case of a production committee shopping a sequel around and landing somewhere cheaper. The man who used to run the parent company started a new studio, and one of that group's higher-profile recent properties moved over to it.

That reframes the whole thing. A studio change on a hit anime usually reads as a warning sign, because it usually means one of three things: the original studio was overbooked, the committee was unhappy, or the budget went somewhere else. This looks like a fourth thing, which is a new studio being stood up with real leadership and being handed a proven property to establish itself with.

Daisuke Sako's most visible credit is Lupin Zero, which is also TMS material. The talent moving here is moving inside a familiar orbit, not across an unfamiliar one.

What actually carries over

The staff list is where you should look, because directors get the headline and series composition does the work.

Yuko Kakihara returns on series composition. Miho Tanino returns on character design. Those two people are, functionally, what Blue Box looks and feels like. Kakihara's adaptation choices in season one were the reason a sports romance that could easily have been thirty percent training montage instead spent its time on the specific silences between Taiki and Chinatsu. Tanino's designs are why the show reads as gentle without reading as soft.

New to the production are art director Azusa Ishii, editor Yumika Okazaki, sound director Jin Aketagawa, and composer Takashi Ohmama. Aketagawa is a significant addition. He is one of the most prolific sound directors working, and Blue Box is a series where the sound design carries real weight, because half its emotional beats are a gym at night with nobody in it.

The main cast is unchanged: Shoya Chiba as Taiki Inomata, Reina Ueda as Chinatsu Kano, Akari Kito as Hina Chono.

Why continuity matters more than usual here

Blue Box is not a show with a signature action style to preserve. Nobody is going to compare sakuga cuts across seasons. What it has instead is a tone, and tone is the hardest thing to hand between studios.

Season one worked because it refused to accelerate. It let the badminton and basketball scenes be competent rather than spectacular, and it spent its animation budget on faces reacting to things that had not been said. That is a directorial temperament as much as a technique, and a new director at a new studio is exactly the variable that could break it.

The counterweight is that Kakihara and Tanino staying means the scripts and the designs will land the same way even if the shot language shifts. In practice, most tonal drift in a studio handoff comes from a new writer reinterpreting what the show is about. That is not happening here.

What season 2 has to adapt

The manga finished at chapter 250, which means the season is working with a known endpoint for the first time. Season one covered the early stretch and left off well before the story's back half.

Season two is heading into the material where the love triangle stops being comfortable and the sports plot stops being background. Whether it goes all the way to the ending or stops at a natural break, this is the section where Blue Box gets harder to make. The comedy thins out, the emotional register gets less forgiving, and there are stretches that depend entirely on the audience believing an unspoken thing between two characters.

That is the material you would most want an experienced series composer for. Kakihara being on it is the single most reassuring fact in the announcement.

The broader pattern

Studio handoffs on sequels used to be a scramble. Increasingly they are structural. Ascendance of a Bookworm moved between studios. Plenty of long-running properties now change hands between cours without anyone treating it as a crisis.

What is new is studios being founded specifically to take work like this. Electric Circus in 2024, and a stream of similar boutique studios spun out by veteran producers over the past few years, all exist because the production pipeline is oversubscribed and the bottleneck is not talent but scheduling capacity. If you are a producer with relationships and you cannot get a slot at the studios you trust, starting a studio is a rational move.

The risk in that model is obvious. A studio founded in 2024 taking on a two-cour-adjacent Netflix title in 2026 has a very short track record to judge, and Blue Box season one set a bar that was about restraint and consistency rather than peaks. Consistency is the hard thing for a new house.

The trailer that came out of AnimeJapan looks right. That is a teaser, and teasers are made by the best people available at the best possible ratio of effort to seconds, so it proves less than it appears to. October 4 is when we find out.

For now the honest read is this: the studio change is real, the reason for it is more interesting than alarming, and the two people most responsible for what Blue Box feels like are still on the show.