Beastars 2nd Season

BEASTARS 2期

9.2(3)

OtakuDen

7.8(264,210)

MAL Score

Ranked #1292

Popularity #530

Drama
Suspense
Anthropomorphic
Psychological
School

Episodes: 12
Duration: 22 min per ep
Aired: Jan 7, 2021 to Mar 25, 2021
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

In an anthropomorphic society where carnivores and herbivores struggle to coexist, the title of “Beastar” is reserved for those who can rise above prejudice and help bridge the divide. Cherryton Academy has gone five years without such a figure, and the unresolved murder of an alpaca on campus only deepens suspicion and fear among the students—making the need for a stabilizing leader feel more urgent than ever.

When Louis, long seen as the strongest contender, turns down the role and disappears from the academy, the student council offers the honor to whoever can identify and capture the killer. Legoshi, driven by a wolf’s strength and a growing sense of responsibility to protect others, throws himself into the investigation while trying to navigate his complicated feelings for Haru, a white rabbit who continues to unsettle and draw him in.

Otaku Consensus

Beastars 2nd Season is widely received as a stronger, sharper continuation, with Shinichi Matsumi’s direction and Orange’s upgraded full-CGI character acting giving the murder-investigation arc a denser noir charge than the debut season. Its genre blending works best when school politics, carnivore guilt, and crime-thriller tension collide, though the most persistent criticism is that the season’s dialogue and story structure can feel uneven, especially with Haru pushed into a thinner role than many viewers expected.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Beastars 2nd Season if you want a psychological school drama that treats animal instinct as social pressure rather than a gimmick. It scratches a similar itch to Odd Taxi in its animal-coded crime atmosphere and Psycho-Pass in its interest in moral self-policing, but it stays messier and more intimate: bodies, appetite, shame, and status all matter. Orange’s full-CGI production is a real selling point here, because the acting depends on posture, eye movement, and physical hesitation as much as dialogue. This is for viewers who like suspense built from character contradiction, not just clue-solving, and who want a sequel that leans harder into noir, philosophy, and psychosexual tension without abandoning the boarding-school frame.

Key Characters

L
Legoshi
Legoshi remains compelling because his gentleness never cancels out his physical danger, making every moral choice feel like a negotiation with his own body.
L
Louis
Louis is the season’s most politically charged figure, admired by fans for turning charisma, pride, and vulnerability into a constant power struggle.
H
Haru
Haru’s reduced presence became one of the season’s major talking points, because her independence in the first season made her absence from much of the sequel feel unusually conspicuous.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Studio Orange continues the series as a full-CGI production, with Eiji Inomoto credited as CG Director; this season’s animation was repeatedly singled out in viewer commentary as an improvement over an already distinctive first season.
2
The season shifts its center of gravity toward noir and crime, a direction reflected in AniList tags such as Crime, Noir, Psychological, Cannibalism, and Philosophy rather than relying on the novelty of anthropomorphic character designs.
3
Satoru Kousaki’s music supports the sequel’s tonal range, moving between school-drama unease, suspense, and action without flattening the show into a conventional mystery score.
4
The adaptation’s structure foregrounds Legoshi and Louis more heavily while giving Haru less narrative space, a choice that sharpened the season’s focus for some viewers but became the most common fan complaint.
5
The production credits emphasize visual calibration: Minami Kasuga handled art direction, Satoshi Hashimoto handled color design, and Bolun Cai with Shiori Furushou served as directors of photography, all crucial roles for making CGI animal characters read emotionally on screen.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Beastars 2nd Season aired as a compact 12-episode winter 2021 run, from January 7 to March 25, 2021, keeping the sequel tightly tied to a single cour format.
Fun fact 2: The anime is based on Paru Itagaki’s original work, with Shinichi Matsumi returning as director and Nao Ootsu credited for character design in the anime production.
Fun fact 3: Its database reception shows a strong but not unanimous sequel response: MAL lists it at 7.75 from 264,210 votes, while AniList records a 78/100 score and 2,481 favourites.
Fun fact 4: The season’s online reception is unusually split in a specific way: praise clusters around the animation, voice acting, fight scenes, and genre blend, while criticism centers on story messiness, dialogue, and Haru’s diminished role.
Fun fact 5: AniList’s tag profile captures how far the show pushes beyond school drama, with high-weight tags including Anthropomorphism, Full CGI, Cannibalism, Psychosexual, Crime, Noir, Boarding School, and Philosophy.