Ninjas Fighting Dinosaurs: Why 2026 Became the Year of the Original Anime

Norihiro Naganuma stood up at his Anime Expo panel on July 4 and announced an anime about ninjas fighting dinosaurs. Not adapting a manga about ninjas fighting dinosaurs. There was no manga. He made it up.

This is the director of The Apothecary Diaries, one of the safest bets in the medium right now, a show with a massive light novel readership and a film arriving in December. He could adapt anything he wants. Instead his first full-scale action project is Jurassic Shadows, an original, and the manga is being made from the anime rather than the other way around.

He is not alone, and that is the actually interesting part.

The pileup

Look at what has landed in the last few weeks. Kinema Citrus built its entire 15th anniversary around Goodbye, Lara, an original that premiered July 6 on Tokyo MX and Crunchyroll, plus a second original called Ninja Skooler announced alongside it. Kyoto Animation put out Sparks of Tomorrow on July 5, an original directed by Minoru Ōta. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premiered at the Crypto.com Arena. And now Jurassic Shadows.

That is a lot of studios simultaneously deciding not to adapt something, in an industry that spent the last fifteen years adapting nearly everything.

Follow the rights

The unglamorous explanation is the correct one. When a studio adapts a hit manga, it is renting. The publisher owns the characters, controls the merchandising, and holds the sequel rights. The studio takes a production fee, does the labor, and watches someone else monetize the result for a decade. Do brilliant work and the reward is that the publisher's asset is now worth more.

Adaptation rights for anything with a proven readership have also been bid into the stratosphere. Streamers with real money showed up, competition for the same finite pool of hit manga intensified, and the price of a safe bet went up accordingly. At some point the math flips: paying a premium to rent someone else's IP starts costing more than the risk of building your own.

An original inverts the whole structure. Goodbye, Lara is Kinema Citrus' property. If it lands, the studio owns the merch, the sequels, the games, and the licensing in perpetuity. Jurassic Shadows has a Kodansha manga in production off the back of the anime, which means the anime is the parent asset and the manga is the derivative. That is the reversal, and it is the whole point.

Studios watched their adaptations enrich publishers for years. They learned.

What Naganuma is actually attempting

Jurassic Shadows deserves a closer look because it is the least safe thing on the list. The Japanese title is Ryugeshō no Shinobi, and the premise is genuinely unhinged in a way that only an original can be.

Tokyo, 2029. The dinosaurs were never wiped out by the asteroid. They survived by pushing their DNA into humanity through interbreeding, and now they hide inside ordinary people and eat them. Against them stands a covert order of ninjas who use Ryugesho, a pigment infused with ancient memories that awakens dinosaur powers in whoever wears it. The pitch combines dinosaurs, ninjas, and kesho, the Japanese word for make-up.

No adaptation committee approves that. It only exists because there was no committee, just a director with enough credit to spend.

The staff list is where it stops being a joke. Kenta Ihara of Saga of Tanya the Evil and Ishura on screenplay. Yukiko Nakatani from The Apothecary Diaries on character designs, with original designs by manga artist Yoichi Amano. Yusuke Takeda of Chainsaw Man as art director. Makoto Honda of GATCHAMAN Crowds on 3DCG. Shuhei Mutsuki of Lycoris Recoil on music. That is a serious crew, and Naganuma is reuniting much of his Apothecary Diaries team.

The risk sits with the studio. Cannon Code is handling animation production, and this is reportedly its first major work, with SlowCurve and Avex Pictures on development and production. A wildly ambitious original at a young studio is exactly the combination that produces either a breakout or a cautionary tale. No premiere date yet.

Kinema Citrus made the clearest bet

If Jurassic Shadows is the loudest example, Goodbye, Lara is the most revealing. A studio hits its 15th anniversary with Rising of the Shield Hero and My Happy Marriage on the shelf. The obvious move is a prestige adaptation with a guaranteed audience.

Kinema Citrus announced two originals instead, back at Anime Central in 2024, in front of an American crowd.

Goodbye, Lara takes Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and continues it rather than retelling it. Lara becomes human for a prince, gets tricked into a potion that dissolves her into bubbles, and can only return if she finds true love. Two hundred years later she is reborn in Lake Biwa. Director Takushi Koide is from Shiga Prefecture, where Lake Biwa is, and this is his directorial debut after assistant director work on Revue Starlight and a key episode of Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun.

The execution backs the ambition. The opening, "Sayonara Lara" by Ikimonogakari, was done in cel-drawn animation, and early reactions single out the old-school aesthetic, describing something closer to cel than digital render. Hana Hope handles the ending, "Hearts Glow." A studio does not put cel work in the OP of a project it considers a hedge.

The part nobody should skip

Originals fail more. That is not pessimism, it is the trade.

An adaptation arrives with a story already stress-tested by thousands of readers across years of serialization. The weak arcs got feedback. The characters that did not work got cut. There is a built-in audience who will show up for episode one out of loyalty and drag their friends along.

An original has none of that. No pre-sold audience, no proof the third act works, no reader base to seed the discourse. It has to earn every single viewer from a standing start, and a lot of them do not. For every Cyberpunk: Edgerunners there is a pile of well-crafted originals that aired into total silence and never got a second season.

That is precisely why the current wave means something. These studios are not taking the risk because it is comfortable. They are taking it because the alternative, permanent contractor status on other people's properties, stopped penciling out.

What to watch for

The tell will be what happens to these shows in twelve months. If Goodbye, Lara gets a sequel Kinema Citrus fully owns, if Jurassic Shadows turns Cannon Code into a name, the wave accelerates and the next anniversary project at the next studio is an original too.

If they air into silence, the industry quietly returns to the manga pile and the window closes.

Either way, right now there is an anime coming about ninjas in war paint fighting dinosaur people in Tokyo, made by the guy who directed The Apothecary Diaries, and it exists purely because someone decided owning an idea beats renting one. Whatever else 2026 turns out to be, it is the year that calculation changed.