The television anime of Chie Shinohara’s Red River (Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori) has unveiled the full promotional video and the main visual for its second part. Both arrived on Friday through the show’s official website, and the trailer previews the new opening theme, “Akatsuki no Hoshi” (Morning Star), performed by Nana Mizuki.
Mizuki is not only singing the song. She is also joining the cast as Ursula, a false goddess impersonating Ishtar — a role that places her directly in the story’s political and religious intrigue rather than on the sidelines.
The second part’s new theme songs
The second part gets a fresh opening and ending. Alongside Mizuki’s “Akatsuki no Hoshi,” Ryu Matsuyama performs the new ending theme, “flow feat. Yūko Andō.” Rotating theme songs between cours is standard practice, but pairing a veteran like Mizuki with a voice role is a notable piece of casting for a series whose first part already had a strong musical identity.
Staff and production
The adaptation remains at Tatsunoko Production, keeping the team behind the first part largely intact:
- Director: Kōsuke Kobayashi (Waccha PriMagi!, Alice or Alice)
- Series scripts: Yoriko Tomita (The Elusive Samurai, My Dress-Up Darling)
- Character design: Kenji Fujisaki (YU-NO, Blood Lad)
- Music: Yoshihisa Hirano
- Sound director: Hiroto Morishita, with Team Kawadon on sound production
The production also keeps two credited historical researchers, Kimiyoshi Matsumura and Daisuke Yoshida, who are members of the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology at the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan. That kind of credit is unusual for anime and reflects the story’s setting in the ancient Middle East.
Where the anime stands
The first part premiered in NTV’s “AnichU” programming block on July 7 at 25:35 — effectively 1:35 a.m. on July 8 — and on BS NTV on July 8. Crunchyroll is streaming the series as it airs in Japan, so international viewers have a legal route to follow both parts.
The adaptation tells the story of Yuri, a Japanese student who passes her university entrance exam and shares her first kiss with the childhood friend who has become her boyfriend — and then finds her luck turning. Water reacts whenever she is near it, and one night hands reach out of a puddle and drag her under. She wakes in an ancient Middle Eastern village, is captured by soldiers, and is taken to the Queen’s palace as a human sacrifice.
The manga behind it
Red River is one of the better-regarded shōjo manga of the 1990s. Shinohara serialized it in Shogakukan’s Shōjo Comic (Sho-Comi) from 1995 to 2002. Viz Media began releasing it in English in 2004 and published all 28 volumes between 2004 and 2010. The publisher started re-releasing the series in 3-in-1 omnibus editions in October 2024 and shipped the eighth omnibus volume on July 21.
The manga also inspired a stage play by the all-female Takarazuka Revue in 2018, which is a strong sign of how the series is regarded domestically.
Why it matters
A 30-year-old shōjo manga getting a full television adaptation with two cours is genuinely notable, and doing it with a production this careful suggests the committee expects a long tail rather than a short seasonal bump. The historical research credits are the clearest signal that the show is treating its ancient Hittite setting as more than scenery.
For viewers already following the summer lineup, our Fall 2026 anime ranking puts the current season in context, and our report on the Psyren anime’s October 4 premiere covers another series arriving in the same window.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Main visual for the second part of the Red River anime, via Anime News Network.
