Something is wrong with the class Kouichi Sakakibara transfers into, and nobody will say what. That is the engine of Another, a 12-episode anime that ran on KNB from January 10 to March 27, 2012, and it is a better engine than most horror series get.
Kouichi arrives at his new school, senses something frightening in the room, and fixates on Mei Misaki — the silent girl with the eyepatch whom the rest of the class treats as if she is not there. The show knows that a room full of people refusing to explain themselves is scarier than any monster, and it holds that tension longer than you would expect.
Trailer, via daniel burgos.
Kouichi Sakakibara and the Class That Will Not Talk
The premise is a closed loop of manners. Every student in the class has agreed to a rule, and the rule is that Kouichi cannot be told the rule. Atsushi Abe voices Kouichi as a decent, slightly slow-to-anger kid, which is the right read — he keeps asking polite questions while the audience screams at him to run.
Mei, voiced by Natsumi Takamori, is the show’s best asset. She is not a puzzle to be solved so much as a person who has already accepted an outcome. The eyepatch is not a gimmick; it is the one detail the series trusts you to sit with.
Around them, Madoka Yonezawa’s Izumi Akazawa runs the class’s social enforcement, Tomoaki Maeno’s Naoya Teshigawara plays the loud kid who talks too much, and Kazutomi Yamamoto’s Yuya Mochizuki is the nervous friend who notices things first. The cast is small and the show uses it that way.
A Single Season That Ends in Late March
Another aired 12 episodes in one season, and the schedule matters to how it plays. A winter run that finishes in late March means the series never had to fill a summer block; it could stay tight and end when it was done.
The genres listed are Animation, Drama and Mystery, and that is an honest label. The horror is mostly atmosphere — a hallway, a silence, a class that goes quiet when Kouichi walks in. When the show does turn violent, it turns fast and ugly, and the whiplash is the point.
This is the version of Another that matters most in the franchise’s history. The story began as a Japanese horror novel, and 2012 also produced a live-action Japanese film based on that novel. The anime is the adaptation that most people mean when they say the title.
Where the Series Slips
The middle stretch is the weakest. Once the central mechanic is explained — and it is explained — the show has to keep producing dread from a rule set the audience now understands, and it does not always manage it. Some episodes feel like they are treading water before the next death.
The supporting classmates are also thin. Izumi gets the most screen time of the group, and even she is defined mainly by her role in the class’s system rather than by anything she wants for herself. When the show needs you to care about a specific student, it sometimes has not done the work.
None of that breaks the series. It just means Another is a very good 12 episodes rather than a flawless one.
Why Another Still Holds Up
Here is what the show gets right, and it is the thing most horror anime get wrong: it understands that the scariest information is the information you are not allowed to have. Kouichi is not menaced by a creature for most of the run. He is menaced by a consensus.
The eyepatch, the empty desk, the way a conversation stops when he enters — these are cheap devices individually and effective together, because the show commits to them without winking. It never explains the mood away.
The live-action film and the novel share the title, but the anime is the one that turned the premise into a visual grammar. That is the real argument for its place in the conversation about horror animation from that era.
The Numbers
- Title: Another
- Format: Television series, 1 season, 12 episodes
- Network: KNB
- First aired: January 10, 2012
- Last aired: March 27, 2012
- Genres: Animation, Drama, Mystery
- Score: 8.3/10 (audience score, 1,088 votes)
Air Dates
| Episode block | Air dates | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Opening arc | Jan 10 – Jan 31, 2012 | Kouichi arrives, meets Mei, learns the class is hiding something |
| Middle stretch | Feb 7 – Mar 6, 2012 | The rule is explained; the class’s system starts to break |
| Closing arc | Mar 13 – Mar 27, 2012 | The season resolves its central mystery |
That middle stretch is where the show’s reputation gets made or lost, and it is the section worth arguing about.
The published audience score sits at 8.3 out of 10 from 1,088 votes, and that feels about right — high enough to signal a real following, short of the canon. Another earns that number on the strength of its first half and its central image. Mei Misaki standing in a hallway while her classmates pretend she does not exist is the shot the series will be remembered for, and it is a good one.
What holds the score back is the back half. Once the mystery is spent, the show leans on escalation, and escalation is a weaker tool than withholding. The final episodes are busier and less frightening than the ones that came before them.
Still, 12 episodes is a small commitment, and the series pays it off with a clean ending rather than a tease. For anyone working through horror animation from 2012, Another is a required stop, not a curiosity. The novel and the live-action film exist alongside it, but this is the adaptation that made the premise stick.
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