A gorgeous, big-hearted circus drama that soars on its animation — even if the story is still finding its footing under the big top.
Summary
If you loved the found-family warmth of Kaleido Star or the “performers pouring everything into a fading art” melancholy of Shouwa Genroku Rakugo, Grow Up Show: Himawari no Circus-dan is the summer 2026 original you should be watching. This is A-1 Pictures flexing through its new Psyde Kick Studio label, and it shows: the trapeze sequences have real weight and danger, and the character designs are refreshingly grounded for a show full of teenage girls. The writing hasn’t fully matched the visuals yet — the early episodes lean a little too hard on comedy and setup, and there’s less actual circus performance than you’d expect. But as an underdog story about a broke troupe chasing one impossible dream, it already has its hooks in me. Anyone burnt out on isekai and looking for something original this season should give it three episodes.
Plot
Set in Japan during the economic boom of the late 1950s, when the circus was king of popular entertainment, the story follows the Sunflower Circus — a small, financially struggling all-girls troupe led by its pint-sized ringmaster Maria. Every troupe in the country is fighting for a spot in the prestigious “Circus Collection” festival, and Sunflower is nowhere close. That changes when they cross paths with Mizuka Tsurumaki, a circus prodigy who wants absolutely nothing to do with the circus after growing up in one under her estranged performer father. Dragged into the troupe almost against her will, Mizuka’s arrival gives the Sunflower girls their first real shot at the big stage — if their finances, their rivals, and their own limitations don’t crush them first.
Review
Context
Grow Up Show is an Aniplex original anime — no manga, no light novel, no safety net — and it’s the debut flagship project of Psyde Kick Studio, the new creative label A-1 Pictures spun up in 2025 to give younger creators more freedom. The pedigree behind it is serious: director Kanta Kamei, original character designs by Kurehito Misaki (the artist behind Saekano), and a score from Yugo Kanno (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Psycho-Pass). It premiered on July 5, 2026 and airs Saturdays, with a same-day English dub — a level of confidence Aniplex usually reserves for shows it believes in.
Tone and audience
Despite the all-girls troupe premise, this isn’t really a “cute girls doing cute things” show. The tone is warm but grounded: empty seats, tight budgets, patched-up costumes, and a group of orphaned and cast-off girls holding a dying dream together with rope and stubbornness. It’s aimed at viewers who want an earnest underdog sports/performance drama with period flavor — closer in spirit to a showa-era Kaleido Star than to a slice-of-life comedy. There’s humor, sometimes too much of it early on, but the emotional core is sincere.
What works
The animation is the headline, full stop. This is one of the best-looking shows of the season. Trapeze and acrobatics are notoriously hard to animate because everything depends on a sense of weight and momentum, and the aerial sequences here genuinely feel dangerous — bodies swing, snap, and hang in the air the way real performers do. The character designs deserve special mention too: instead of the usual rainbow-haired anime lineup, everyone looks like a person who could actually exist in 1950s Japan, which makes the world feel lived-in.
The cast dynamic is the other big win. Maria running the whole operation like a five-foot general, Rin handling the money and the cooking and the bandages, Imari the illusionist whose tricks keep failing but whose charm keeps winning crowds anyway, ace acrobat Isuzu, and prickly, reluctant Mizuka at the center — it’s a proper found family, and the show nails the bittersweet feeling of chasing a dream the world stopped caring about. Yugo Kanno’s score and the excellent opening theme “Yurari Yureru” by NOMELON NOLEMON round out a very polished package.
What doesn’t
For a circus anime, the early episodes are surprisingly light on actual circus. Long stretches are spent on comedy bits and character introductions when what the show does best — performance — stays off-screen. Mizuka’s “I hate the circus” resistance is played mostly for laughs at first, which undercuts what should be a genuinely painful family wound, and the story only sharpens when it gets serious in the back half of episodes. There’s also some noticeably choppy CGI in a few trapeze shots, and the girls’ outfits feel more 2010s idol than 1950s Japan, which occasionally breaks the period spell. None of this is fatal, but the writing needs to catch up to the visuals.
One moment worth calling out
The standout so far is the rivalry reveal with the Sumeragi Circus — the polished, lavender-branded troupe that steals Sunflower’s booked venue out from under them in Toyokawa. It’s a small, dirty piece of circus politics, but it instantly reframes the whole series: this isn’t just girls chasing a festival, it’s a scrappy little troupe being actively squeezed out by a bigger machine. The moment lands because the show doesn’t over-dramatize it — it just lets the unfairness sit there, and suddenly you’re all-in on Sunflower.
Verdict
Four episodes in, Grow Up Show: Himawari no Circus-dan is the most promising original anime of summer 2026. It’s not yet as emotionally devastating as Shouwa Genroku Rakugo or as spectacle-driven as Kaleido Star, but it splits the difference in a way nothing else this season is attempting, and the production quality alone makes it worth your Saturdays. If the writing tightens up in the second half, this could quietly become the sleeper hit of the year.
If you want to check it out yourself, you can watch Grow Up Show: Himawari no Circus-dan free on animeflv.or.at along with the rest of the summer 2026 lineup — new episodes drop weekly as it airs.