I love the Zombieland Saga series and the Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon series. Maid Dragon is effortlessly joyful, fun and beautiful while giving you thematic bones to chew on about family and adult life. Zombieland Saga is hilariously zany, conceptually genius, occasionally touching, and really makes you want to check out Saga in Japan.

Both of these series have two seasons of TV shows, and they both had a movie released in 2025:

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: A Lonely Dragon Wants to be Loved and Zombieland Saga Movie: Yumeginga Paradise

If for some reason you didn't know, Maid Dragon's anime is made by Kyoto Animation. In terms of animation quality, unarguably among the absolute best in the entire anime industry (in my opinion, clearly and definitively so.) Zombieland Saga, despite being produced by Cygames, (the Uma Musume people who now have their own fantastic animation studio) is animated by MAPPA: one of the hottest studios in the scene right now between JJK and Chainsaw Man. While they contract out a lot of their animation (unlike KyoAni which has full in-house animation staff), I can personally attest that they did fantastic work in the Zombieland Saga movie.

So, these movies sound intriguing right? Maybe if you didn't like either of the original series you might not care too much - totally understandable. Or maybe if you're a total normie brand new to anime, they probably aren't the best starting spot. The movies also initially came out in Japan only, only ever got a limited theater release in the west for one day so if you're living in America they would have been easy to miss. Fortunately, they're available on Crunchyroll now so if you're at all interested please go check them out!

However,
if you happened to run an anime podcast
and you definitely know about these series
and you know how good these animation studios are
and you happened to be living in Japan when they came out in theaters
and you made like, 3 different lists talking about the best stuff from 2025
AND YOU NEVER EVEN ONCE MENTION EITHER OF THESE AMAZING MOVIES
AND YOU NEVER MENTION EITHER OF THEM IN YOUR MAIN YOUTUBE CHANNEL EITHER

That would be pretty crazy.

It's not just big community members who should know better though. I don't keep very plugged into social media, but my outsider impression is that these movies have been heavily under discussed for how good they are.

On the one hand, that makes me kind of upset. Both series are dear to me, and I want them to get the praise and recognition they deserve.

On the other hand, it feels a bit nice to have something so amazing feel relatively underground - at least here in the West.

I have no audience, so I'm not having an impact either way regardless lol. But if you happen to stumble across this article somehow and haven't watched either movie, they're worth your time in my opinion. :]