A Little Mermaid retelling nobody asked for just humiliated Re:ZERO, Bleach, and every sequel on the chart. Goodbye, Lara — Kinema Citrus’s original anime about a resurrected mermaid princess searching for true love in modern-day Japan — just claimed the Number 1 spot on Anime Corner’s Week 7 Summer 2026 rankings, beating out Re:ZERO Season 4 and Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 in what might be the biggest upset of the entire summer season.
The Show Nobody Saw Coming
When Kinema Citrus — the studio behind My Happy Marriage — announced a Little Mermaid reimagining at Anime Central 2024, most fans shrugged. A fairy tale retelling? In 2026? Against Mushoku Tensei, Chainsaw Man, and Bleach? Good luck.
They weren’t just wrong. They were spectacularly wrong.
Directed by Takushi Koide with series composition by Anna Kawahara and character designs by Shiori Tani, Goodbye, Lara follows Lara, a mermaid princess who drinks a forbidden potion from the witch Grace to live as a human — only to be rejected by the prince she loved, dissolve into foam, and wake up two hundred years later in Japan’s Lake Biwa with a second chance to find true love and restore her fallen kingdom.
It’s Hans Christian Andersen meets modern Tokyo, and the internet absolutely cannot stop talking about it.
Why It Topped the Charts
Anime Corner’s Week 7 poll results dropped on August 22, and the numbers were brutal for the competition:
- Goodbye, Lara — Number 1
- Re:ZERO Season 4 — Number 2 (despite the legendary Subaru-Rem reunion episode)
- Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4 — Number 3 (even after Ichigo’s Blood Chains Bankai debut)
Over on IMDb, Bleach TYBW Part 4 has been dominating the episode ratings for four consecutive weeks. But Anime Corner measures a different kind of excitement — fan engagement, emotional impact, and weekly buzz. And on all three fronts, Goodbye, Lara has been quietly destroying the competition.
The show currently has 8 episodes streaming on Crunchyroll with a same-day English dub, and social media engagement has exploded. On X (formerly Twitter), posts tagged with the show have crossed 53,000, with fans praising everything from the handcrafted animation style to the emotional depth of Lara’s journey.
What Makes It Special
The secret sauce is in how Goodbye, Lara handles its source material. Instead of a one-to-one Disney retelling, the series takes Andersen’s original, much darker story and refracts it through a modern Japanese lens. Lara isn’t a naive girl chasing a boy — she’s a princess who lost everything, was resurrected under a trial, and must learn what love actually means before her time runs out again.
Voice actress Hana Hishikawa (Lara in Japanese) delivers a performance that critics have called “heartbreaking and fierce in equal measure,” while Brianna Knickerbocker brings the same energy to the English dub.
The music by yuma yamaguchi blends orchestral fantasy with lo-fi J-Pop sensibility, and the animation — despite being an original series with no manga source — has been compared to early Studio Ghibli in its attention to emotional detail.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just a feel-good underdog story. It’s a signal that the anime industry is shifting. In a season absolutely stacked with sequels — Mushoku Tensei Season 3, Jujutsu Kaisen, Solo Leveling — an original anime with no built-in fanbase just proved it can win.
Crunchyroll clearly agrees: the show received a same-day English dub from episode one, a treatment usually reserved for major franchise releases. That bet is paying off in ways nobody predicted.
As the Summer 2026 season heads into its final stretch, the question isn’t whether Goodbye, Lara belongs at the top — it’s whether any of the big-name sequels can catch up.
What Do You Think?
Has Goodbye, Lara earned its Number 1 spot, or is this a temporary fluke before the sequels dominate the final rankings? Are original anime finally getting the respect they deserve, or is this a one-off miracle from Kinema Citrus?
Drop your thoughts below — and if you haven’t started Goodbye, Lara yet, now might be the perfect time to catch up before the finale breaks the internet.
