TANK CHAIR premieres on Prime Video: Polygon Pictures’ wheelchair

A wheelchair is the weapon in TANK CHAIR, the anime adaptation of Manabu Yashiro’s Kodansha manga, which has premiered in Japan with Prime Video as its first streaming home. Outside Japan, Prime Video also carries the series, with subtitles and dubs that include English, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. Polygon Pictures, the CG studio behind Knights of Sidonia and Ajin, animates it; Koki Uchiyama voices Nagi Taira, an assassin who cannot stay awake, and Minori Fujidera plays his younger sister and handler, Shizuka.

The premise runs on one absurd constraint. Nagi was the strongest killer in the business until he took a bullet meant for Shizuka and fell into a coma. His body has a single loophole: when someone directs intent to kill at him, he surfaces for a short time. Shizuka treats that as therapy. She takes contracts against dangerous targets as his “rehabilitation,” convinced that a big enough dose of killing intent will wake him for good, and Nagi fights them from a custom, heavily armed wheelchair. This is pulpy action anime, built to test how far one mechanical idea can stretch.

Two directors, one studio’s house style

TANK CHAIR is credited to two directors, and both are Polygon Pictures veterans. Tadahiro “Tady” Yoshihira directs, writes and handles series composition; his recent work includes Polygon’s short for Star Wars: Visions Volume 3 and the feature Knights of Sidonia: Love Woven in the Stars. Hiroaki Ando co-directs and co-writes, arriving from Ajin and Kaina of the Great Snow Sea.

For a studio whose name is better known than any of its directors, that pairing matters. The authorship here belongs less to one signature than to a production line that has spent more than a decade refining cel-shaded computer animation, from Knights of Sidonia and Ajin to the Godzilla animated film trilogy and Marvel’s Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Full-CG character animation is still a minority choice in TV anime, and Polygon’s series are usually judged on that choice before anything else. A story whose central image is a wheelchair rebuilt as a war machine plays directly to the studio’s strengths.

Who voices TANK CHAIR

Uchiyama, known as Tomura Shigaraki in My Hero Academia and Toge Inumaki in Jujutsu Kaisen, leads as Nagi. Fujidera voices Shizuka. Gakuto Kajiwara plays Naozumi Kurosaka, a former classmate who carries a fierce rivalry with Nagi, and Saori Hayami, the voice of Yor Forger in Spy x Family, plays Touko, Naozumi’s younger sister and partner. Yurina Amami joins as Dr. Radio and Gen Satō as Uzu.

Masaru Yokoyama, whose scores include Your Lie in April and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, composes the music, and Yūki Moriyama adapts the character designs. The rock band SiM, which wrote “The Rumbling” for the final season of Attack on Titan, performs the opening theme, “DALALA.” Singer-songwriter Daoko closes each episode with “SYNC.”

Where to watch TANK CHAIR and when episodes arrive

The first episode aired on Sunday, October 4, on Tokyo MX at 11 p.m. Japan time, with BS11 following later the same night. CBC and MBS added it on October 5 and October 6. In Japan, Prime Video holds the advance streaming window, posting each new episode on Sundays at 11:30 p.m.; other Japanese platforms follow afterward. TMDB currently lists a first season of 12 weekly episodes.

Yashiro’s manga began on Kodansha’s Magazine Pocket app in November 2022 and moved to Monthly Shōnen Sirius in November 2024. It has passed ten collected volumes, and Kodansha USA publishes it in English.

Early reviews: the animation wins, the script lags

The first critical response came from Anime News Network’s Fall 2026 preview guide, and it split along the line between image and story. James Beckett credited the studio, writing that Polygon “might finally be cracking the code on their particular use of computer-generated animation,” and described the setting as “a grime-punk dystopia.” He was also “not yet convinced that the story is anything more than a thin framework of nonsense that exists merely to justify a bunch of crazy action scenes,” though he questioned whether it needed to be more.

Lucas DeRuyter was harsher. He argued that the series keeps dropping “MacGuffins that resolve the constraints of this premise” instead of finding more creative solutions, and concluded that “this should have been a home run and is instead a disappointment.” Rebecca Silverman welcomed a hero who is not “stuck” in a wheelchair, but wrote that “in practice, I was underwhelmed.” DeRuyter also called the English dub, produced by TransPerfect Media, “functionally unwatchable.”

TANK CHAIR: quick answers

Where can you watch TANK CHAIR? On Prime Video, which streams it in Japan ahead of other services and carries it internationally with an English dub and subtitles.

Is TANK CHAIR based on a manga? Yes. It adapts Manabu Yashiro’s manga, known in Japan as 戦車椅子-TANK CHAIR- and

How many episodes does TANK CHAIR have? TMDB lists 12 episodes for the first season, released weekly.

Which studio made TANK CHAIR? Polygon Pictures, the Tokyo CG studio behind Knights of Sidonia and Ajin.

Nagi wakes only when someone wants him dead. The series faces the same problem in reverse: by the early reviews’ account it comes alive in the fights, and it still has to find a reason to exist between them.