Every anime season throws up one show that nobody expected to hit as hard as it did, and in Summer 2026 that show is Goodbye, Lara (Japanese: さよならララ, Sayonara Rara). It is not adapted from a manga or a light novel. It is a completely original anime created and animated by Kinema Citrus to mark the studio's 15th anniversary, and it takes one of the saddest fairy tales ever written — Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid — and asks a question the original never dared to: what if the story did not actually end when she turned into sea foam?
Directed by Takushi Koide with series composition by Anna Kawahara, character designs by Shiori Tani and music by Yuma Yamaguchi, the series premiered on July 6, 2026 on Tokyo MX, BS Asahi, ytv and AT-X, with Crunchyroll simulcasting it worldwide. The show is running for 12 episodes. Its biggest talking point beyond the story has been the visual direction — Koide has deliberately gone for thick outlines and hand-drawn animation that feels like a 90s OVA rather than a polished modern digital production, and that texture gives the whole thing a strange, aching warmth.
If you are new to the series and want to know what the story is, who the main character is, and who the people around her are, this guide covers all of it.
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The setup is the fairy tale you already know, told fast and told cruelly.
Lara is a mermaid princess. She grows up loved — by her father Rowan, the King of the Sea, and by her older sisters. But in the mermaid kingdom, humans are not just forbidden, they are despised. They are treated as vulgar, filthy creatures, and any contact with the surface is against the law.
Lara breaks that law. She falls in love with a human prince and decides she wants to live on land with him. To do it, she goes to Grace, a witch, and drinks the potion Grace prepares for her. What she does not know is that she has been tricked. Instead of becoming human, Lara dissolves into bubbles and vanishes into the sea — cursed, with only one condition attached to her existence: she can be reborn, but only if she finds true love.
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Two hundred years pass.
Then Lara wakes up. Not in the ocean, and not in a fairy tale kingdom — she wakes up in Lake Biwa, in modern-day Japan. This is where the anime stops being a retelling and becomes its own thing. Lara is a mermaid princess from a dead era, dropped into contemporary Shiga prefecture with a curse still hanging over her head and one last chance at love and at life itself. She has to learn how to be human in a world of smartphones, high schools and lakeside towns, while a 200-year-old betrayal slowly catches up with her.
The location choice is not random, by the way. Lake Biwa and the city of Ōtsu are where director Takushi Koide grew up, and that lived-in local detail is a big part of why the show's setting feels so specific.
Who is the main character?
Lara (voiced by Hana Hishikawa) is the protagonist and the emotional centre of the whole series. She is the mermaid princess who was cursed by Grace, died as sea foam, and has been reborn 200 years later with a single objective — find her true love.
What makes her work as a lead is that she is not written as a tragic doll. She is curious, stubborn and completely out of her depth, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of a girl who once lived in a palace under the sea now trying to figure out modern human life from scratch. Her arc is less about winning a prince and more about whether love, for her, has to mean the exact thing she thought it meant two centuries ago.
Goodbye, Lara main characters and Lara's friends
Lara does not do this alone. The supporting cast splits cleanly into two halves — the human family who takes her in, and the sea world that is still chasing her.
Mari Otsu — the friend who changes everything
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Mari Otsu (voiced by Nana Kawaishi) is a high school girl living in Ōtsu, and she is the closest thing Lara has to a best friend. Mari is a proficient boxer, and she lost her mother when she was young — a wound the show handles quietly rather than loudly. It is Mari who lets Lara stay in her home, which is the single decision the entire plot rests on. The Lara–Mari relationship is the actual heart of this anime, and plenty of viewers have argued it lands harder than the romance does.
Luca — the face from 200 years ago
Luca (voiced by Ayumu Murase) is a boy Lara meets after her revival, and he bears a striking resemblance to the human prince she loved in her past life. Whether he is connected to that prince, or whether Lara is simply projecting a two-hundred-year-old memory onto a stranger, is one of the questions the series keeps deliberately unresolved.
The Otsu family
- Yoshihiro Otsu (Tomohiro Ōno) — Mari's older brother. He attends the same school as her, though he skips classes more often than he attends them.
- Makoto Otsu (Mitsuaki Madono) — Mari and Yoshihiro's father, a freelance photographer by hobby.
- Ema Otsu (Nanae Sumitomo) — their grandmother, who works as a church pastor and watches over the children gently alongside Makoto.
Together they give the show its warm, ordinary-life anchor, which is exactly what a story this melancholy needs.
The sea side
- Rowan (Masaki Terasoma) — the Sea King, Lara's father, and a man who deeply resents humans. His hatred is what made Lara's love forbidden in the first place.
- Lisa (Minami Tsuda) — Lara's caring older sister, who is searching for her after the revival and, unlike her father, is genuinely interested in humans.
- Grace (Rica Fukami) — the banished witch who cursed Lara. Her defining trait is a deep hatred of authority, which reframes her entire role: cursing a princess was not just cruelty, it was an attack on a king.
- Kota (Kazutomi Yamamoto) — an acquaintance of Lisa's who claims to know Lara, even though Lara does not recognise him at all.
Where to watch Goodbye, Lara
Crunchyroll is streaming the series worldwide (outside Japan and China) with English subtitles and an English dub, with new episodes weekly following the Japanese late-night broadcast. In Japan it airs on Tokyo MX, BS Asahi, Yomiuri TV and AT-X, plus domestic streaming platforms. The opening theme is "Sayonara Lara" by Ikimonogakari and the ending theme is "Hearts Glow" by Hana Hope.
Conclusion
Goodbye, Lara works because it refuses to treat The Little Mermaid as a romance. It treats it as a story about a girl who was punished for wanting a world she was told to hate — and then gives her two hundred years and a second body to figure out what she actually wanted. The fairy tale bones are all there: the sea king, the witch, the prince, the potion. What Kinema Citrus adds is everything after the ending, and a modern Japanese lakeside town full of people like Mari Otsu who have their own losses to carry.
With hand-drawn, thick-lined animation that feels pulled out of another decade, a genuinely strong central friendship, and a curse that keeps the stakes real, this is one of the most distinctive originals of 2026. If you have been putting it off, twelve episodes is a very small ask.
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