Chiikawa Pauses New Episodes for 25-Episode Rerun Schedule

The Chiikawa anime’s official website announced Friday that regular broadcasts of new episodes will pause temporarily. A “revival” run of 25 older, influential episodes will air through December 25.

The selection will highlight early episodes and stories connected to the recent film Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island (Eiga Chiikawa: Ningyo no Shima no Himitsu).

The anime’s new series debuted in July 2025. Its previous series stopped regularly airing new episodes in April 2025, followed by reruns of older episodes described as pivotal.

Chiikawa premiered in April 2022, airing Fridays within Fuji TV’s morning news and entertainment show Mezamashi Terebi. In April 2023, it expanded to twice-weekly broadcasts on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Sentai Filmworks licensed the anime and streams it with English subtitles on HIDIVE. Amasian TV, ODK Media’s North American streaming platform, added a selection of 20 episodes on August 20.

The main voice cast includes:

• Child actress Haruka Aoki as Chiikawa, her first television anime voice role. She also voices Liza in the Japanese dub of Mighty Express.
• Child actor Makoto Tanaka (Okko’s Inn) as Hachiware.
• Ari Ozawa as Usagi.

Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island opened in Japan on July 24 as the first anime film adaptation of Nagano’s Chiikawa manga.

The film has earned more than 15.84 billion yen (about US$100 million) and sold approximately 10.86 million tickets in Japan. Those results made it the country’s highest-grossing film this year.

Nagano began serializing the manga on X, then called Twitter, in January 2020 under the title Nanka Chiisakute Kawaii Yatsu.