JH’s webtoon The Boxer is getting a TV anime. Crunchyroll revealed the adaptation with a special announcement trailer, the main cast, and the production staff during its panel at New York Comic Con 2026.
Koki Uchiyama voices Yu, the protagonist, a boxer whose raw talent lets him move up the sport faster than anyone around him can handle. Kensho Ono plays Ryu, a gifted boxer who becomes Yu’s first opponent. Tomokazu Seki voices K, the veteran trainer who spots Yu’s potential, and Toshiyuki Toyonaga plays J, a famous boxer who has already retired.
The cast list alone tells you where the show is aiming. Uchiyama and Ono are both leads in heavy demand, and pairing Seki with Toyonaga gives the older generation of the story two well-known voices.
What it is about
The setup follows K, a boxing trainer who has built world champions and is looking for one last student. He finds Yu standing in a back alley, taking punches without fighting back and without showing any anger or will to hit back. K sees something in him that goes past ordinary talent.
Yu starts training and climbs through the boxing world with a strength that other characters describe as monstrous. Standing against him are champions who rely on polished skill and fighters who have beaten their own limits through effort. Each of them is chasing a dream they refuse to give up. What Yu himself is looking for at the end of all of it becomes the central question.
Staff and studios
Yudai Kubota and KANG Wonyeong are directing. Masahiro Suwa handles character designs, and Toshiya Ono is in charge of series composition and scripts. Animation is split between breccia, a new studio founded by Kinema Citrus founding member Muneki Ogasawara, and the South Korea-based STUDIO JEMI.
breccia is a young studio, so this is one of its first major credits, and a co-production with a Korean studio fits the source material’s origins.
Where the webtoon stands
The Boxer began on South Korea’s Naver Webtoon in 2019 and ran on Japan’s LINE Manga from 2020 to 2022. It has passed 1.06 billion cumulative views worldwide. A print edition, reformatted from the original vertical full-color webtoon presentation, has been published in Japan under Shueisha’s Jump Comics label, with six volumes out so far.
Part of a bigger push
The anime is one of the titles being developed under a partnership between HAYATE, LINE Digital Frontier, and Crunchyroll. That deal is meant to produce anime adaptations of around 15 webtoon series, and The Boxer is among the first to be confirmed.
That context matters for what to expect. These adaptations are being planned as a slate rather than one-offs, so the quality of this one will say a lot about how the rest of the lineup is handled.
No release window or streaming date has been announced for the anime yet. For another Crunchyroll webtoon adaptation, see our report on Overgeared’s English dub cast and same-day simulcast, and for more from the platform, our coverage of The Mafia Nanny live-action series.
Source: Anime Corner
Featured image: The Boxer TV anime announcement visual, via Crunchyroll / Anime Corner.
