Minami-ke is coming back to television, and this time there is a date attached. At the Minami-ke Special Event 2026 on Sunday, the production showed a teaser video, a teaser visual and character art for Minami-ke: Korekara, and confirmed the new series will premiere in April 2027.
The reveal also answered the two questions fans had been asking since the project was first floated at the franchise's 20th anniversary event in July 2024: who is animating it, and who is coming back to voice the sisters.
LIDEN FILMS takes over, Jun'ichi Kitamura directs
LIDEN FILMS is handling animation on Minami-ke: Korekara, the fifth television series in the franchise. Jun'ichi Kitamura directs. His recent credits include Catch Me at the Ballpark! and Fluffy Paradise, plus episode direction on Cells at Work! Code Black.
Takamitsu Kōno returns to oversee the series scripts after working on earlier Minami-ke adaptations, which is the single most reassuring line in the announcement. A comedy like this lives or dies on how the scripts pace a joke, and Kōno has already done it four times with these characters.
Nobuhiro Andō designs the characters. His credits include Agents of the Four Seasons: Dance of Spring and Hell's Paradise, along with episode animation direction on My Deer Friend Nokotan.
Masaru Satō and Midori Kikuchi are the art directors. Satō worked on the Case Closed films The Bride of Halloween and The Fist of Blue Sapphire, and on Komi Can't Communicate. Kikuchi was assistant art director on Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster.
The rest of the crew is Saki Kurata on color design, Yuuki Tsuchimoto as director of photography, Yasunori Ebina as sound director, Naoto Yamatani on sound effects, and Yasuhiro Misawa composing the music. Ebina's credits include Hell's Paradise and Misawa scored My Deer Friend Nokotan, so the comedy timing has support on the audio side too.
The cast is unchanged
Rina Satou, Marina Inoue and Minori Chihara are all reprising their roles as the three Minami sisters.
That continuity matters more here than it would in a plot-driven show. Minami-ke is a hangout comedy where almost nothing happens and the entertainment comes from how the sisters talk to each other, so the voices are most of the joke. Recasting would have been a bigger creative risk than changing studios.
A fourteen-year gap
The last Minami-ke television anime aired in 2013, which makes Korekara the first new series in the franchise in at least fourteen years. The history is spread across four studios: Daume animated the first 13-episode season in fall 2007, asread handled the second and third seasons in winter 2008 and 2009, and feel. produced the fourth in winter 2013. Three OVAs followed in 2009, 2012 and 2013.
LIDEN FILMS becomes the fifth studio to take a run at it. The project was announced in July 2024 at the Mixa Animation Diary "Minami-ke" 20th Anniversary Tanabata Festival, and the Korekara subtitle was revealed at a later event in November 2025.
The manga is still going
Coharu Sakuraba launched Minami-ke in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine in 2004 and has never stopped. The 29th collected volume shipped on November 6, two days before the teaser went live, which is a tidy bit of scheduling on Kodansha's part.
The series follows Haruka, Kana and Chiaki Minami, three sisters who live together with no parents in the picture and not much money. Sakuraba's other long-runner, Kyo no Gononi, was adapted as an OVA in 2006, a television anime in 2008 and another OVA in 2009.
Why it matters
Spring 2027 is already filling up with long-running franchises coming back after years away. Laid-Back Camp season 4 is confirmed for April 2027 with a new studio, and The Dangers in My Heart season 3 lands the same month. Minami-ke fits that pattern exactly: a title with a devoted older audience, a manga that never went away, and a gap long enough that the announcement reads as a reunion rather than a routine sequel.
The risk is real too. Fourteen years is long enough for a comedy's rhythms to feel dated, and LIDEN FILMS inherits a show that three other studios shaped. But the returning script supervisor and the returning cast cover the two things that would have been hardest to rebuild.
Source: Anime News Network.
Featured image: Teaser promo thumbnail for Minami-ke: Korekara, via Anime News Network.
