Chiikawa Film Passes 15.84 Billion Yen as English Dub Sets YouTube Debut
The franchise’s official English YouTube channel opened September 19, with full dubbed episodes arriving October 1.
Chiikawa’s first film has earned over 15.84 billion yen and sold about 10.86 million tickets in Japan, making it the country’s top film this year. The TV anime’s English dub begins streaming on YouTube October 1.
The official X/Twitter account for Chiikawa’s first anime film announced Monday that its Japanese earnings exceeded 15.84 billion yen, about US$100 million. The film sold roughly 10.86 million tickets, securing its position as Japan’s highest-grossing film this year.
Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island (Eiga Chiikawa: Ningyo no Shima no Himitsu) adapts Nagano’s manga. Its reported earnings now exceed those of both The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You (Tenki no Ko).
Separately, the franchise launched its official English YouTube channel on September 19. The channel announced that full English-dubbed episodes of the TV anime, also adapted from Nagano’s original manga, will begin streaming October 1.
The film opened in Japan on July 24 and topped its opening weekend. Its early box-office results were:
- Opening day: 990 million yen, about US$6.05 million.
- First three days: 1,508,500 tickets sold and 2,240,333,500 yen earned, about US$13.70 million.
Kōgyō Tsūshin reported September 7 that the film had reached 9.60 million tickets and 13.9 billion yen, about US$89.1 million. That put it ahead of Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway (Detective Conan: Highway no Datenshi), the franchise’s 29th film, as Japan’s biggest film this year.
The Detective Conan film’s cumulative earnings stood at 13.7 billion yen, about US$87.8 million.
The Chiikawa TV anime debuted in April 2022. It initially aired Fridays within Fuji TV’s morning news and entertainment program Mezamashi Terebi, then expanded to Tuesdays and Fridays in April 2023.
Sentai Filmworks licensed the anime and streams it on HIDIVE with English subtitles. In August, ODK Media’s North American streaming platform Amasian TV began offering 20 selected episodes in the United States with Japanese audio and English subtitles.
A new anime series premiered in July 2025. The previous series stopped regularly airing new episodes in April 2025, after which the anime rebroadcast older episodes described as “pivotal.”
Nagano began serializing the manga on X, then called Twitter, in January 2020 under the title Nanka Chiisakute Kawaii Yatsu.
Sources: Chiikawa film's X/ Twitter account via ANN
