It takes the dumbest-sounding logline in the season, a chubby middle schooler who hulks out into Santa Claus, and makes you sit up straight by episode three. Paru Itagaki's brain is all over this: the same Beastars instinct for bodies as arguments, so the transformation isn't a gag but a horror, a kid's frame stretched into something adult and enormous while the state hunts him with an actual Saint Nick Pursuit Unit. The worldbuilding is the flex. A Japan so starved of children it warehouses them in Daikoku Welfare Academy as protected assets, with every rule following that skewed logic straight down. Fuyumura cornering Sanda over a missing classmate is the engine, and she is written with teeth, not as a prize. Notably, a school anime with zero interest in leering at anyone. The animation wobbles and the last stretch idles, but nothing else this year looks or thinks like it.

In a future Japan where children are scarce and treated as the nation's most precious resource, Christmas survives only as a legend. At Daikoku Welfare Academy, a boarding school that educates, shelters and watches over its students, Santa Claus is a forgotten story, while adults see him as a real danger that the Saint Nick Pursuit Unit must stop if he ever shows up. Shiori Fuyumura wants to find her best friend, Ichie Ono, who was declared dead after six months missing. One morning she calls in fellow class representative Kazushige Sanda and attacks him with a kitchen knife. Sanda, a second-year middle schooler, at first puts it down to an odd adolescent phase, but Fuyumura believes he descends from Santa Claus, the one person who could grant her wish, and means to force his dormant true self out by any means. The show mixes action, drama and mystery.