Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026 Winners: My Hero Academia Takes Anime of the Year

The biggest night in anime just wrapped in Tokyo, and the results are a mix of crowd favorites and a few quiet surprises. Here is the full rundown of the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, plus my own honest read on how it shook out.

The tenth Crunchyroll Anime Awards took place on Saturday, May 23, 2026, at the Grand Prince Hotel Shin Takanawa in Tokyo, with Sally Amaki and Jon Kabira back as hosts for their fourth year running. Fans turned out in huge numbers to pick the winners, with a record 73 million votes cast worldwide.

My Hero Academia takes Anime of the Year

The headline prize, Anime of the Year, went to My Hero Academia FINAL SEASON, handed over on stage by The Weeknd. It is a fitting farewell for a series that carried a whole generation of shonen fans, and you could feel the weight of the moment in the room.

The full list of major winners

• Anime of the Year: My Hero Academia FINAL SEASON
• Film of the Year: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle
• Best Continuing Series: One Piece
• Best New Series: Gachiakuta
• Best Original Anime: Lazarus
• Best Animation: Solo Leveling: Arise from the Shadow (Season 2)
• Best Action: Solo Leveling: Arise from the Shadow (Season 2)
• Best Director: Akinori Fudesaka and Norihiro Naganuma, The Apothecary Diaries (Season 2)
• Best Drama: The Apothecary Diaries (Season 2)
• Best Voice Artist Performance (Japanese): Aoi Yuki as Maomao, The Apothecary Diaries (Season 2)

Demon Slayer and Apothecary Diaries quietly cleaned up

While My Hero Academia took the top headline, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle actually walked away with the most trophies of the night, around seven in total, though most of those came from the voice acting categories across different languages. The Apothecary Diaries was the other real workhorse, picking up four awards in all, including Best Drama and Best Director for its second season.

Performances and a global stage

The show leaned into nostalgia too. Yoko Takahashi performed a thirtieth anniversary tribute to Neon Genesis Evangelion, and ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION played Haruka Kanata, the Naruto opening a lot of us grew up on. The presenters were a genuinely global mix, from Enako and Asuka Saito to RZA, Winston Duke, Young Miko, and K pop artists BamBam and TEN.

My take: Giving Anime of the Year to the My Hero Academia finale feels more like a thank you and a proper send off than a pick for the single best show of the year, and honestly I am fine with that. But if you read the whole board, the real star of the night was The Apothecary Diaries, which quietly won the categories that judge craft, like directing and drama. That tells you where the quality actually was. And 73 million votes is the number that stuck with me. Anime is not a niche anymore, it is one of the biggest entertainment scenes on the planet, and nights like this make that impossible to ignore.

Those are the headlines from anime’s biggest night. I will break a few of these winners down in more detail soon.