Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026 Predictions: Who Will Win Each Major Category?

Eight days. That's all that's left before the 10th annual Crunchyroll Anime Awards ceremony goes live from Tokyo on May 23, 2026, and the fandom is already losing its mind. This year's Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026 field is genuinely stacked: Dandadan Season 2 leads all nominees with 20 nods, Gachiakuta and Apothecary Diaries are right behind it, and the Film of the Year race between Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc and Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle might be the most contested head-to-head in the show's history. Fan voting closed April 15, but the discourse never did. Here's a category-by-category breakdown of who should win, who probably will, and where the fandom is loudest about getting robbed.

The 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards: What You Need to Know Before the Ceremony

The 10th annual Crunchyroll Anime Awards takes place on Saturday, May 23, 2026, at the Grand Prince Hotel Shin Takanawa in Tokyo. Pre-Show kicks off at 5:00 PM JST with the main ceremony at 6:00 PM JST, which translates to 4:00 AM EST for anyone in North America committed to staying up for it (and plenty will be). The show streams live on Crunchyroll and on their official YouTube channel.

The milestone anniversary has the ceremony leaning into nostalgia hard. Dean Fujioka opens the night with "History Maker" from Yuri!!! on ICE, the first-ever Anime of the Year winner. PORNOGRAFFITTI will play a tribute to My Hero Academia's 10th anniversary. ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION brings "Haruka Kanata" for Naruto. Yoko Takahashi performs with the Tokyo Philharmonic for a Neon Genesis Evangelion 30th-anniversary tribute. Presenters include RZA, Winston Duke, Rashmika Mandanna, and cosplay icon Enako. It's a whole production, and it's clearly meant to position this ceremony as a genuine global cultural event, not just a fan poll in a nice venue.

"The Crunchyroll Anime Awards is a global celebration where fans share their love and appreciation with the creators behind their favorite titles. This year's slate of nominees represent nearly 50 unique series and films, all chosen by fans as the most beloved over the last year."

Anime of the Year: Who Actually Has a Shot at This?

Six nominees. One trophy. Let's run them all.

DAN DA DAN Season 2

Leading all 2026 nominees with 20 nominations, Dandadan Season 2 comes in as the statistical favourite. Science SARU's animation continues to be completely unhinged in the best way, and the show's chaotic energy, heart, and genuinely great horror-comedy balance have made it one of the most talked-about series on any platform. This is also its second straight Anime of the Year nomination after 2025, which means the fandom is organized and knows exactly how voting works. If there's a coordinated campaign here, Dandadan wins.

Gachiakuta

Studio Bones (via Studio A, the team behind Noragami and Carole & Tuesday) absolutely delivered. Gachiakuta was the breakout new title of 2025, earned 16 nominations, and has the kind of passionate niche fanbase that shows up for awards season. The character work, the action direction, the color palette, everything about it screams "this should win something important." The argument against: it's a newer property without the franchise army behind it. That matters in fan-vote formats.

My Hero Academia: Final Season

15 nominations and a genuinely emotional farewell season make MHA a legitimate contender. The animation in the final act was some of BONES' best work in years, and long-time fans showed up. PORNOGRAFFITTI performing a tribute at the ceremony is basically a marketing push for this specific win. The MHA fandom is enormous, old enough to know how to vote, and emotionally invested in seeing this property go out with a crown. Don't count it out.

The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

17 nominations, a massive female-skewing fanbase, and some of the best character writing in recent memory. Maomao's return expanded everything the first season did well, and Jinshi's continued arc gave the story actual dramatic weight. The argument for Apothecary Diaries is the same one Frieren fans made last year and the year before: this is the kind of careful, intelligent storytelling that should win. It lost both years anyway. Whether that changes in 2026 depends on whether its fandom has gotten tired of organizing or finally gets motivated by seeing the same snub happen twice.

Takopi's Original Sin

Seven nominations for a short anime is remarkable. The critical reception was genuinely extraordinary, and the story hit harder than most full-length series. But "short anime wins Anime of the Year" has never happened, and it's almost certainly not happening here. The nomination is the win for Takopi. Take the recognition and be grateful for it.

The Summer Hikaru Died

Eight nominations and a genuinely beautiful, unsettling series that proved atmospheric horror doesn't need jump scares to work. The Paul Castro Jr. voice performance is one of the year's best. Being here at all is meaningful, and the nomination represents something important: genre diversity in a category that usually rewards action and spectacle. Realistically, not winning, but exactly the kind of title that should always be in this conversation.

Film of the Year: Does Chainsaw Man Have This, or Is Demon Slayer the Safe Bet?

The Film of the Year race is the most genuinely compelling head-to-head of the 2026 awards, and it comes down to two titles: Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle.

Chainsaw Man: The Movie: Reze Arc

13 total nominations, including two Best Anime Song nominations for Kenshi Yonezu's "Iris Out" and his collaboration with Hikaru Utada on "Jane Doe." The cinematography in this film was legitimately discussed in terms usually reserved for live-action prestige filmmaking. MAPPA's direction gave Reze one of the best character arcs in the franchise, and the English dub performance from Moshe Singh as Denji earned a Best English Voice Artist nomination. The film did something the Chainsaw Man TV series couldn't quite achieve: unified the fanbase. Critics loved it. The audience loved it. Even people who bounced off Season 1 were moved by this.

Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle

Eight nominations including Best Score, and nearly $740 million in global box office. The scale of what Ufotable pulled off is undeniable: the Infinity Castle sequences are among the most technically complex theatrical animation ever produced. The argument for Demon Slayer winning is simple: it's the biggest anime film ever made by most metrics, it has a fanbase of tens of millions, and those fans vote. The argument against: "biggest" and "best" aren't the same thing, and even within the Demon Slayer fandom there was acknowledgment that Chainsaw Man did something more artistically distinct.

Supporting Categories: Where the Real Predictions Are

The headline categories get the discourse, but the supporting categories often tell you more about what the fandom actually values. Here's a rundown of the major supporting races and where I think they land.

Best Continuing Series

Nominees include Dandadan Season 2, Kaiju No. 8 Season 2, My Hero Academia Final Season, One Piece, Solo Leveling Season 2, and Spy x Family Season 3. One Piece is the sentimental pick and frankly the correct one. The Egghead arc delivered some of the best episodes in the show's 20-plus year run, and the series is actively in its most narratively rich final chapter. Solo Leveling Season 2 is the conventional choice but feels a step below what it did in Year 1. One Piece by a nose.

Best New Series

Gachiakuta, SAKAMOTO DAYS, Takopi's Original Sin, and The Summer Hikaru Died are the notable names here. Gachiakuta is the obvious pick. Sakamoto Days has a massive fanbase from the manga, but the anime adaptation's reception was good rather than great. The Summer Hikaru Died is the prestige choice. Gachiakuta wins this.

Best Animation

This is where Dandadan should absolutely clean up. Science SARU's visual language is a full level above most seasonal competition. But Gachiakuta's Bones Studio A team pushed hard, and Takopi's Original Sin did more with stylistic restraint than most shows do with unlimited budget. Dandadan wins this and deserves to.

Best Score

Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is nominated here and Kensuke Ushio's work for The Summer Hikaru Died is exceptional. Hiroyuki Sawano has nominations across multiple projects. Kensuke Ushio has been quietly building one of the best discographies in anime for a decade. If The Summer Hikaru Died doesn't win this, Ushio's work is still the most distinctive score in the nominee pool.

Best Anime Song

Kenshi Yonezu has two nominations here ("Iris Out" and "Jane Doe" from Reze Arc), and one of them probably wins. "Jane Doe" with Hikaru Utada is the one. Having two of the biggest names in Japanese music co-write a song for what is arguably the most culturally significant anime film of the year is a combination that's hard to beat. LiSA's "ReawakeR" for Solo Leveling is the competition, and she remains one of the most beloved anime song artists in the fandom, but this is Yonezu's year.

Notable Snubs and Why the Fandom Is Already Mad

No awards season is complete without the discourse about who got left out. This year's version kicked off immediately after the April 2 announcement.

The loudest conversation: Solo Leveling Season 2 not receiving an Anime of the Year nomination. Last year's winner only gathered eight nominations this cycle, which for a show that swept nine categories at the 2025 ceremony felt jarring. The drop-off in nomination count suggests either quality regression (which some fans do argue) or the committee simply moving on to newer titles. Either way, Solo Leveling stans are not happy.

The secondary discourse: Frieren fans still processing the fact that their show dominated nominations two years running and walked away with relatively little to show for it. The 2025 ceremony saw Frieren nominated 20 times and win four, losing Anime of the Year to Solo Leveling in what remains one of the most controversial outcomes in the show's history. The pattern of "most nominated doesn't mean most rewarded" is now fully established and shapes how fans approach voting strategy.

There's also a legitimate structural conversation happening on forums about whether fan-only voting is the right format for something presented as a celebration of craft. Coordinated fandom voting campaigns across Discord servers and time zones mean the results can reflect organizational strength as much as actual quality. It doesn't make the awards meaningless, but it does mean the "who will win" and "who deserves to win" discussions have to stay separate.

Speaking from experience watching these ceremonies annually: the year Jujutsu Kaisen won Anime of the Year in 2022 felt earned, but even then you could see the machinery of organized voting at work. This year, with Dandadan's fandom coming in with 2025 voting muscle already built, I'd be genuinely surprised if the numbers run any differently than they did in that cycle. The question is whether MHA's emotional farewell season breaks through the organizational advantage.

Dark Horses Worth Watching on May 23

A few nominations outside the headline categories that could make noise:

• The Rose of Versailles (Film of the Year): The legendary 1972 manga finally received a modern theatrical adaptation, and the nomination for Film of the Year is genuinely historic for a title that old. It probably doesn't win, but seeing it on the list next to Chainsaw Man and Demon Slayer says something meaningful about the scope of what the awards are recognizing this year.
• Turbo Granny (Best Supporting Character, Dandadan S2): Dandadan's nomination for Turbo Granny in the supporting character category is the kind of pick that should win just on the strength of how unhinged and beloved that character is. It's facing competition from Jinshi (Apothecary Diaries), which is the more "serious drama" pick. Turbo Granny would be the fun win.
• Reina Ueda as Reze (Best Japanese Voice Artist): If there's a performance-based upset in the Japanese voice acting categories, Reina Ueda's work in Reze Arc is the one to watch. The emotional range she brought to a character who exists entirely within one film arc is remarkable.
• Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II (Film of the Year): The most artistically unconventional nominee in the film category. It won't win, but its presence is a signal that the committee hasn't completely abandoned visual experimentation in favour of franchise blockbusters.

Nomination Count at a Glance

The Night Arrives May 23

The 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards is shaping up to be the most contested in years. Dandadan has the nomination lead and the organizational advantage. Gachiakuta has the critical momentum and the breakout energy. MHA has emotion and franchise loyalty. Apothecary Diaries has consistent quality and a patient fanbase that is long overdue. None of these outcomes would be wrong. Some would be more right than others.

On the film side, Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is the pick that would make me personally most satisfied, but Demon Slayer's sheer size means this is genuinely a coin-flip depending on how the fan mobilization broke.

The ceremony streams live from Tokyo at 6:00 PM JST on May 23. Set your alarms, make your predictions in the comments, and try not to be too insufferable if your pick wins.