Blue Box

Blue Box (Ao no Hako) is a sports romance anime based on Kouji Miura's Weekly Shonen Jump manga, with a first season from Telecom Animation Film that began in October 2024. The romance starts in a school gym before lessons. Taiki Inomata, a badminton player at Eimei, a sports-mad combined junior and senior high, comes in early to train and keeps finding Chinatsu Kano, the girls' basketball star a year above him, already practising. They have only just started talking when her parents move abroad for work and, because the two mothers are close friends, she moves into his family's house instead of going with them. Hina Chono, Taiki's longtime friend from the rhythmic gymnastics club, completes the trio of Blue Box characters the story turns on.

What sets it apart is that the sport is never an afterthought. Taiki and Chinatsu are both chasing nationals, and Season 1 director Yuichiro Yano gives a badminton rally the same weight as a glance across the dinner table. The music bench is strong too: Official Hige Dandism and Eve sang the first cour's themes, Macaroni Enpitsu and TOMOO the second. The honest caveat is pace. The second cour hands Hina far more of the spotlight, a gift to her large fanbase, but even sympathetic reviewers concede the situation barely moves for several episodes. It still won Best Romance at the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards.

As of October 2026 the anime has two seasons, the second airing now. The first ran 25 episodes from 3 October 2024 to 27 March 2025, ending around chapter 80 of the manga. Season 2 began on 4 October 2026 with a new studio, Electric Circus, and a new director, Daisuke Sako, while series writer Yuko Kakihara and character designer Miho Tanino stay on. In Japan it moved from TBS's late-night Thursday slot to Sundays at 4:30pm, and Netflix streams it worldwide. The manga is finished: chapter 250 ran in Jump on 13 July 2026, so roughly two thirds of the story was still unanimated when Season 2 began.

It suits viewers who like a romance built on small gestures and shared routines, with athletes who actually train. See why we count it among the best romance anime ever made, or how it compares with the big tournament shows in our best sports anime ranking.