Some stories spark on contact; others smolder slowly. The Summer Hikaru Died does both, even as it narrows to something far more intimate. Set in a small mountain town, the manga follows high schooler Yoshiki, who realizes the boy at the center of his world, Hikaru, has returned from an accident—recognizable but not quite right. He stays close anyway. It’s inherently eerie, yes, but just as much about connection, which is why, for many readers, it lands as both heartwarming and heartbreaking. Fortunately, the 2025 anime treats that duality as its north star.

Rather than recreating the manga panel by panel, the adaptation pays attention to breath, to negative space, and to the way two boys keep choosing each other at the edge of something wrong. In doing so, it carefully preserves the intimacy of Mokumokuren’s lines and still builds a new world around silence—letting the rural hush and human hesitation carry as much weight as any reveal. That being said, it tracks that director Ryōhei Takeshita’s first attraction was to the book’s design intelligence. “The first thing was the visuals—the freshness of the panels and page design,” he tells us. “That was the biggest reason I felt compelled to adapt it into anime. The storytelling techniques are so innovative, and the way emotions are portrayed is just incredible. The artwork is drawn in a way that can only be conveyed through manga, with a strong sense of design woven into the direction. That made me think that adapting it into animation—and adding sound and visuals to the direction—would be an incredibly rewarding challenge.”

The anime’s setting, the town of Kibogayama, is depicted as a place where rumors travel quickly and being recognized is routine. In horror, that closeness typically becomes a pressure cooker. Here, it closes in on Yoshiki and the person wearing Hikaru’s shape, amplifying micro-choices: whether to look away, whether to smile back, whether to greet an old neighbor as if nothing has shifted.

Takeshita understood the texture he was chasing, so he went straight to the source. “We went on multiple location scouting trips to the village that inspired the setting,” the director says. “The first time, I stayed for three nights on my own, observing the landscapes and the vibe of the countryside, and worked on incorporating those impressions into the work. I live in Tokyo now, but I used to live in a rural area, so I was able to draw from real experiences too—like how people tend to be more intrusive, or how the sense of personal distance between people is much closer in the countryside. Running into acquaintances at the supermarket, tight-knit bonds with neighbors—these kinds of things typical to the countryside are woven into the series.”

His fieldwork also sets the tone for how the show handles fear. There are shocks in The Summer Hikaru Died, but the lasting discomfort comes from the way ordinary rural moments bend. A familiar laugh, a smile holding one beat too long. It’s a defining strand in the show’s DNA. The animation makes room for those beats to register. “It all comes down to ‘ma,’ or the pauses—the spaces between,” he says. “That’s something I’ve focused on very carefully. For The Summer Hikaru Died, we actually edited the animation twice: once before the voices were recorded, and again afterward. That’s how delicately we adjusted the timing of the pauses. By varying the pacing across the whole anime, we’re able to express Hikaru and Yoshiki’s emotions without relying solely on just the visuals or voice acting.”

That penchant for pacing keeps the focus at a human scale. You can feel Yoshiki choosing to stay, not because he’s oblivious, but because leaving would mean naming a loss that doesn’t fit into language. And early on the manga’s late Volume 1 eruption—when Hikaru’s emotions spill over at Yoshiki—became a compass point for the creative team. “Scenes where a character’s emotions explode are exactly the kind that, as a director, make me want to go beyond the original and take on the challenge of creating something even more powerful,” Takeshita says.

Ma is only one lever. The frame is just as crucial—the architecture of where bodies sit, how color leans, where a line holds. “I think visual elements like the layout of the scenes also play a major role,” Takeshita explains. “Especially in scenes involving Hikaru and Yoshiki’s emotions, the layouts, compositions, colors, and backgrounds of each scene are all meticulously directed by the episode director. By controlling every element that makes up the scene, we’re able to heighten the tension.” That control requires a shared vocabulary across departments. “Of course, many people are involved—color designers, art directors, voice actors, cinematographers—but the director is the one who oversees everything. To maintain quality, I make sure to clearly verbalize the reasons behind the characters’ emotions and actions, so that everyone is on the same page, knowing what we want to express.”

The designs keep the same ethos; instantly legible, still deeply nuanced. “For character design, we reduced the number of lines and instead emphasized using bolder strokes while minimizing shadows to give the silhouettes a more design-oriented look,” Takeshita tells us. You can feel it in the way Yoshiki holds himself—contained but very readable—and in how “Hikaru” comes off a little too composed to feel fully real. This logic extends past linework; even proportion gets the same attention. “Another big decision was how to portray Yoshiki and Hikaru’s proportions,” he adds. “In the early chapters of the manga, their builds were a bit shorter, but in the end, we decided to use taller proportions for them to align better with the current art style of the manga.”

Then there’s the matter of what the series refers to as the “DORODORO,” the seething, viscous interior that sometimes pushes past the boundaries of the boy on-screen. Many productions would hand that problem to the same team that handles everything else. Takeshita went another route. “Depicting the ‘DORODORO’ insides that come out of Hikaru was vital in winning over fans of the manga,” he says. “That’s why, instead of assigning it to a regular animator, we had someone specialized in art animation handle it. Thanks to that, I think we were able to preserve the artistic quality of the manga while adapting it into animation.”

Those choices all matter because even its strangest images are in service of the unbreakable bond at the center. As Takeshita puts it, “I believe the core of the story is Yoshiki and Hikaru trying to understand each other,” he admits. “I made sure to never lose sight of that, and I always engage with the manga with that in mind. Even with horror elements or design-driven aspects, I made sure never to forget that, ultimately, the story’s about two people with different values striving to understand one another.”

Naturally, that clear conviction shaped the series’ workflow. “In practice, that meant re-reading the manga countless times during production, and whenever something was unclear, I consulted the author, Mokumokuren.” He continues, “We also added scenes in the anime to supplement the manga’s story so that the emotional complexity would come across even more clearly.” You feel the additions in small, effective ways—a clarifying cutaway, a held beat. The series trusts that if it stays with a moment, the audience will carry it.

Taken together, those choices protect the central relationship from flattening into archetypes. Yoshiki isn’t the kid who knows nothing until the plot tells him otherwise; he knows enough and chooses to stay. “Hikaru” isn’t a masked threat in a school uniform; he’s a presence learning how to fit—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Above all, the connection reads as natural even when the circumstances aren’t.

After such careful calibration, the ask is simple: “The Summer Hikaru Died is a truly remarkable manga that takes on many challenges, from its innovative forms of expression to the complex, unique relationship between Yoshiki and Hikaru,” he says. “We poured our pride as creators into bringing it to life on screen when adapting it into an anime. I believe it’s a series that not only fans of the manga but also those completely new to it can dive into easily, and I’d be delighted if you gave it a watch.”

The promise holds. It’s scary when it needs to be, tender when it matters, and meticulous throughout. To put it simply, The Summer Hikaru Died is one of the best anime adaptations out there.

The Summer Hikaru Died is streaming exclusively on Netflix.