Today, fans learned that the third season of Beastars will be its last. Orange, the studio behind the popular Netflix exclusive anime, posted the season’s new logo on Twitter along with a brief message.
“There must be many questions but this is all we can reveal at the time,” the tweet reads. “We hope everyone can join us for the show til the end.”
Mangaka Paru Itagaki’s Beastars was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Champion from 2016 through 2020. The series, about anthropomorphic high school animals navigating the cultural divides of herbivores and carnivores, won the young artist numerous industry awards, including the Kodansha Manga Award in shōnen. Itagaka has since worked on various short-lived serializations and is currently illustrating Sanda.
The announcement has some fans raising their eyebrows. At 10 volumes, or 96 chapters, the final two arcs left to be animated make up roughly half of Itagaki’s original story. But while each season of Orange’s Beastars has been just 12 episodes long, it is not unprecedented that a sequel season expands from a 12 to 24 episode production. K-On! is just one such example.
Beastars‘ first season premiered in English on Netflix in 2020. A second season was released on the streaming platform in July of this year. Orange and Netflix first announced in July that Beastars would see another season, though no release date has been announced.
Original artwork for the upcoming season’s Japanese website provided by Itagaki shows the series’ protagonist, the grey wolf Legoshi, poised to jump.
You can stream the first two seasons of Beastars on Netflix now.
