As the weekend approaches, it's time once again for the Bam Smack Pow team to bring you the biggest anime news of the past week. This week, we're ramping up to the Summer 2025 anime season with new trailers and information, and taking a look at a showcase of the career of the one of the most important figures in the history of anime.
More information about Dan Da Dan season 2
Last week, Bam Smack Pow reported that the Dan Da Dan movie Evil Eye trailer went live. The movie itself will be a special early look at the first three episodes of the anime's second season, released as a compilation movie. This week, the official trailer for the full season of the anime has been released, which you can watch above.
Also notable is the announcement from Netflix that "On The Way", the opening for Dan Da Dan season 2 will be performed by AiNA THE END, whose songs have previously been featured in anime including The Apothecary Diaries, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury and Phantom in the Rain, the first movie in the Mononoke film trilogy.
Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye will be released in North American theaters on June 6. The full second season of the anime is set to debut not quite a month later on July 3. The first season is currently streaming on Netflix and Crunchyroll.
Studio Ghibli founder Isao Takahata gets gallery exhibition
Crunchyroll is reporting that one of the co-founders of the legendary Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata (seen at left in the picture above), will be the focus of a special exhibition running this summer at the Azabudai Hills Gallery in Tokyo. The exhibition is titled Takahata Isao Exhibition - The Man Who Planted Japanese Animation and will showcase production drawings and documents used for the Ghibli movies helmed by Isao — including the infamously grim Grave of the Fireflies. Among the drawings on display will be a production schematic by Hideaki Anno, now best-known as the director of Neon Genesis Evangelion and 2016's Shin Godzilla.
Takahata was born in 1935 and after getting his start working with other Japanese animation studios, co-founded Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki and Yasuyoshi Tokuma. At Ghibli, Takahata directed the aforementioned Grave of the Fireflies, Pom Poko and the Academy Award-winning The Tale of Princess Kaguya. He died in 2018 at the age of 82.
Trailer & visual reveals for several upcoming anime
With the Summer 2025 anime season rapidly approaching at the beginning of July, an increasing number of new anime series set to debut in the year's next anime season, or else set to return with new seasons, are revealing trailers and visuals so anime fans can get hype. We've compiled a list of the most noteworthy new anime to reveal trailers or visuals this week, as reported by Crunchyroll — which will be the streaming home of the bulk of these new series for Summer 2025 and beyond.
• Otherworldly Munchkin: Let's Speedrun the Dungeon with Only 1 HP! (debuting October 2025) has shared a trailer and a key visual on its official website and social media platforms. Crunchyroll's announcement also includes the cast and crew announcements thus far.
• Detectives These Days Are Crazy! (debuting in July 2025) has shared its latest character trailer.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: A Lonely Dragon Wants to Be Loved (premiering in Japanese theaters June 27) has shared a series of character visuals.
Finally, a quick reminder that the 2025 Anime Awards are going live from Tokyo this Sunday, May 2025 from Tokyo. We'll have all the winners and biggest news from the Anime Awards after the ceremony airs.
Weekly Anime Recommendation: Ya Boy Kongming!
Thanks to his depiction in the 14th-century Chinese epic historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the real-life strategist Zhuge Liang (who historically lived 181-234) has gone down as one of the most well-known figures in East Asian folklore, remembered as a military genius with an almost sorcerous cunning and strategic mind. He was also known by the name Kongming, which is where this one gets its title.
Ya Boy Kongming! is a Reverse Isekai series, flipping the genre on its head by having a character from another world (in this case, another time period) transported into our present day. The series opens with Zhuge Liang dying of illness in the middle of a decades-long period of warfare, unable to realize his dream of bringing peace to the land. He is reincarnated in the middle of a street party in Shibuya. Since this happens on Halloween, he gets a lot of praise for his excellent Zhuge Liang costume.
He encounters the aspiring singer Eiko, who helps him adjust to suddenly jumping forward about 1800 years in time. In return for her help, Zhuge Liang offers to become Eiko's manager and help her grow her fanbase. The comedy of Ya Boy Kongming! is driven mostly by the fact that Zhuge Liang approaches his role in helping Eiko's musical career with the exact same self-seriousness and tactical mind as he would the battlefield of the Three Kingdoms. Many of his ideas to help Eiko are based on his strategies from Romance of the Three Kingdoms and either the narration or the other characters — especially Eiko's boss, a huge history nerd — directly spell out these parallels for the benefit of the viewers.
Originally based on a manga series that is still running, Ya Boy Kongming! got a 12-episode anime series and a feature-length movie from animation studio P.A. Works. Both the series and the movie can be streamed on HIDIVE.