Planet With
プラネット・ウィズ
- Sci-Fi
- Mecha
- Episodes
- 12
- Duration
- 23 min per ep
- Aired
- Jul 8, 2018 to Sep 23, 2018
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
Souya Kuroi jolts awake from a vivid nightmare: a colossal dragon laying waste to everything in a burst of rainbow light. With his parents gone and his memories erased by a mysterious accident, that dream is all he has left to cling to. Now he lives under the watch of two unusual caretakers—the lively maid Ginko and a giant cat he calls “Sensei”—as he tries to make sense of a world that feels as unsettling as his sleep.
Peace in Saromisaka City shatters when a teddy bear-shaped UFO appears, and conventional military force can’t stop it. Seven enigmatic fighters step in and bring the threat down in the same rainbow radiance Souya saw in his nightmare. Once the invasion ends, Souya turns his attention to those celebrated “heroes,” convinced they’re tied to the destruction of his past—setting him on a path of revenge that draws him into a conflict far larger than his own lost life.
Otaku Consensus
Planet With has settled into cult-favorite territory rather than consensus-classic status, reflected by its MAL 7.13, AniList 69, and modest popularity despite unusually strong affection from mecha-focused viewers. What works is the authorial tightness: Satoshi Mizukami’s original concept, series composition, and storyboard involvement give Youhei Suzuki’s 12-episode J.C.Staff production a clear emotional throughline from anti-hero anger to found-family coming-of-age. The recurring criticism is the same thing that makes it distinctive: the pacing is so compressed that major turns can feel abrupt, and the TV production is more inventive in design and structure than in raw animation spectacle.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Planet With if you want super-robot escalation without franchise homework, recap bloat, or a 50-episode commitment. It scratches the same itch as Gurren Lagann’s hot-blooded genre logic and SSSS.Gridman’s modernized tokusatsu strangeness, but filters both through Satoshi Mizukami’s compact, character-first writing. The appeal is not “real robot” military detail; it is the way teddy-bear UFO imagery, alien ideology, school-life comedy, and a giant-cat guardian are treated as parts of one sincere moral argument. Viewers who like mecha as metaphor will get more out of it than viewers shopping for constant sakuga. At 12 finished episodes, it plays like a complete sci-fi novella: fast, odd, emotionally direct, and uninterested in padding.
Key Characters
- SSouya Kuroi
Souya is memorable because his role starts closer to an anti-hero than a conventional mecha lead, turning amnesia and anger into the engine of a coming-of-age story rather than a mystery box gimmick.
- GGinko
Ginko’s lively maid persona makes her a comic presence on the surface, but her real function is as one of the show’s found-family anchors in a cast built around damaged loyalties.
- SSensei
Sensei stands out as the giant-cat guardian whose very design captures Planet With’s taste for super-robot absurdity played with complete emotional sincerity.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
Planet With is an original anime rather than a standard manga or light-novel adaptation, with Satoshi Mizukami credited as original creator, series composer, and storyboarder. That level of creator involvement helps explain why the 12 episodes feel structurally purposeful despite the speed.
- 2
J.C.Staff’s production leans into bold silhouette and iconography over mechanical realism: the teddy-bear-shaped UFO, giant-cat imagery, and super-robot framing make the show instantly distinguishable from more hardware-obsessed mecha series.
- 3
The show’s tag profile is unusually specific for a mecha title: Super Robot at 84%, Aliens at 81%, Found Family at 79%, and Coastal at 79%. That combination signals a series more interested in ethics, belonging, and place than in battlefield procedure.
- 4
Kouhei Tanaka’s music credit is a major genre asset, since his orchestral style is well suited to old-school super-robot momentum and heroic reversals. The score helps the series sell its strangest images without winking at them.
- 5
Its 12-episode finished run aired from July 8 to September 23, 2018, giving it the shape of a closed seasonal statement rather than the first chunk of a longer commercial pipeline.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- Satoshi Mizukami holds three key creative credits on the anime: original creator, series composition, and storyboard. For viewers following staff authorship, Planet With is one of the clearest cases of a manga creator driving an original TV anime’s structure.
- Fun fact 2
- The mechanical design is credited to Yoshitsune Izuna, while Kazunori Iwakura handled character design, splitting the show’s identity between eccentric machine concepts and clean, expressive human designs.
- Fun fact 3
- The sound side pairs Yoshikazu Iwanami as sound director with Kouhei Tanaka as composer, a combination that supports the show’s mixture of slapstick timing and grand super-robot drama.
- Fun fact 4
- Its database footprint points to a niche but durable audience: MAL lists 24,696 votes with a 7.13 score and popularity rank #3245, while AniList records a 69/100 score and 175 favourites.
- Fun fact 5
- The series ran as a Summer 2018 TV anime from J.C.Staff, finishing at exactly 12 episodes between July 8 and September 23 rather than continuing into a split cour.
Studios
- J.C.Staff
