BEASTARS ran for three seasons and 48 episodes, from October 2019 to March 2026. It ends as one of the strangest, most sincere things animation has produced this century — a high school murder mystery that turns into a crime saga, then a love story, without ever losing the thread of what it is actually about.
That thread is appetite. Not hunger as metaphor. Appetite as law, biology and shame.
Trailer, via Netflix Anime.
A Wolf at Cherryton Academy
The premise is simple enough to fit on a poster. In a modern world of anthropomorphic animals, carnivores and herbivores share cities, schools and subway cars. Eating meat is strictly illegal. The meat always comes from other anthropomorphic animals.
Legoshi, a timid gray wolf voiced by Chikahiro Kobayashi, attends Cherryton Academy. He lives in a carnivore dormitory with other students, including Jack, an extroverted Labrador. He works as a stagehand in the school drama club, assisting its members under the star actor Louis, a red deer voiced by Yuki Ono.
Then Tem, an alpaca, is murdered and devoured. The school fractures along the oldest line there is.
The murder is the engine of season one, but it is not the subject. The subject is Legoshi meeting Haru, a Netherland Dwarf rabbit voiced by Sayaka Senbongi. Haru has unrequited feelings for Louis. Legoshi develops feelings he cannot name and cannot trust. He is a predator. She is prey. Every instinct he has been taught to suppress points at her.
Orange, the studio behind the adaptation, animates this with weight. Bodies in BEASTARS have mass. Legoshi slouches. Louis stands like a statue with a crack in it. Haru is small in a frame that keeps reminding you how small. The show does not use stylization to escape anatomy. It uses anatomy to make the point.
The Shishigumi, the Black Market, and Gohin
Season one ends with Louis leaving school to lead the Shishigumi, a lion-dominated crime syndicate. Legoshi rescues Haru from them. Later, Louis relinquishes control to Melon, a leopard-gazelle hybrid.
This is where BEASTARS stops being a school story. The show follows Legoshi into the Black Market, where illegal meat is traded, and into the orbit of Gohin, a giant panda physician who operates there. Concurrently, Louis investigates Kines, an energy drink containing herbivore-derived substances.
The structure is dense. Here is how the seasons break down:
| Season | Premiere | Finale |
|---|---|---|
| Season 1 | October 2019 | December 2019 |
| Season 2 | January 2021 | March 2021 |
| Season 3, Part 1 | December 2024 | — |
| Season 3, Part 2 | March 2026 | March 2026 |
The first season aired on Fuji TV’s +Ultra programming block. Netflix licensed the series and released the third season worldwide.
The mystery resolves. The murderer is revealed to be Riz, a bear, whom Legoshi defeats after consuming Louis’s leg, leaving the deer with a prosthetic. Legoshi’s record as a devourer is what closes the case for him in the story’s terms: it nullifies his eligibility to marry Haru.
That detail is the whole show in one line. He does the right thing and the law marks him for it.
Gosha, Yahya, and the Deal
The final stretch introduces Legoshi’s Komodo dragon grandfather, Gosha, who once collaborated with Yahya, a horse. Legoshi confronts Yahya. After a violent altercation, Yahya offers a deal: arrest Melon in exchange for a cleared record and a monetary reward.
Legoshi agrees. He is shot twice during the mission and falls from a cliff. He survives. Melon attempts suicide and survives. Legoshi begins a relationship with Haru.
That is a lot of plot, and BEASTARS carries it. The show earns its escalations because every one of them is about the same question. What does a carnivore owe a herbivore? What does anyone owe anyone when the body itself is the threat?
The answers the show gives are not clean:
- Riz is revealed as the murderer and is defeated by Legoshi.
- Louis leads a crime syndicate, loses a leg, and keeps functioning.
- Legoshi wins his fight and carries a criminal record as a devourer for it.
- Melon attempts suicide and survives.
Why the Casting Matters
Chikahiro Kobayashi plays Legoshi as a held breath. The performance is not a growl. It is hesitation, apology and want, stacked on top of each other. When Legoshi finally moves, the shift registers because Kobayashi has spent whole episodes barely moving at all.
Sayaka Senbongi gives Haru a flat, practical register that keeps the show from tipping into melodrama. She is not a prize and she is not a victim. She is a rabbit with unrequited feelings for a deer, and then a wolf with complicated feelings for her, and she handles both with a shrug that reads as armor.
Yuki Ono’s Louis is the show’s best creation. He is a red deer who wants to be the predator in a room full of predators. Ono plays him with a stiffness that is not coldness. It is performance, and Louis never stops performing.
What Paru Itagaki Built
The manga, written and illustrated by Paru Itagaki, ran in Akita Shoten’s Weekly Shōnen Champion from September 2016 to October 2020, collected in 22 tankōbon volumes. Viz Media licenses it for English release in North America. Beastars shares a universe with Beast Complex, Itagaki’s earlier manga, which served as its predecessor.
By October 2021, the manga had over 7.5 million copies in circulation. In 2018 it won the 11th Manga Taishō — the first Akita Shoten title to take it — the New Creator Prize at the 22nd Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, and the 42nd Kodansha Manga Award.
Those awards were not a fluke. Itagaki built a world where the central conflict is not good against evil but appetite against law, and then refused to let either side win cleanly.
The adaptation understands this. Orange does not soften the carnivore designs. The teeth stay. The claws stay. The show wants you to look at Legoshi and see a wolf, not a boy with wolf ears.
The Third Season Split
The first half of the third and final season premiered in December 2024. The second half premiered in March 2026. That is a long gap between halves, and it is the one structural decision worth arguing about.
Splitting a final season across that stretch asks a lot. The show’s momentum is built on accumulation — Legoshi’s training, Louis’s investigation, the slow reveal of Riz. A pause of more than a year between the setup and the payoff is a real cost, and it is not clear the finale recovers all of it.
What it does recover is the ending. Legoshi and Haru together is not a reward. It is a truce. He still has the record. He still has the instincts. The show lets them have each other anyway.
Where This Lands
BEASTARS is a 9.4 out of 10.
It is not flawless. The Shishigumi arc sprawls. The Melon material in the final season leans on shock where earlier seasons leaned on dread. And the long split between the third season’s halves does the show no favors.
None of that touches what BEASTARS gets right. It takes the oldest premise in horror — the monster who does not want to be one — and refuses the easy exits. Legoshi does not get cured. Louis does not get redeemed. Haru does not get rescued into safety. They get a world that has already decided what they are, and they live in it anyway.
That is rare. Most shows about appetite end with the appetite defeated. BEASTARS ends with it acknowledged, named, and still there.
9.4 of 10.
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