Hello everyone~
Welcome back to the 11th annual r/anime Awards! It's once again time to watch a bunch of seasonals and argue about which one was best.
Category Changes in 2026
- Lead & Supporting Character of the Year have been merged back into Character of the Year.
- Movies are now eligible in Best Voice Acting.
- Sequels with heavily reused character design are no longer eligible for Best Character Design.
- Openings & Endings with very limited or no animation are no longer eligible for Best Opening & Ending.
Also, in case you missed it, here are last year's results.
The base format of the Awards still remains: The Awards are split into two groups, the Public and the Jury, who will each nominate anime and separately rank them.
The public is everyone on r/anime and are invited to participate in two voting stages. Between January 3rd and 10th, subreddit users can vote to select five nominations per category, which will be paired with the five chosen by the jury. Then, from January 18th to February 19th, the subreddit votes again to rank the ten final nominees for each category.
The jury consists of anime enthusiasts invited to the Awards based on their ability to analyze anime and communicate their thoughts through the Juror Application. Their role is to familiarize themselves with the anime in their assigned categories, select five nominations, and rank the ten final nominees through detailed discussions between November and March.
If you wish to know more or view all the available categories check out our Awards Overview document.
Category Allocations
Each anime gets assigned to only one genre category and either Best Character or Best Ensemble Cast. The hosts have taken a first crack at allocating all the eligible anime to categories, but we haven't completely seen every single anime so we'd love to hear from you if you think some of these ought to be allocated differently.
In addition, there are hundreds of new anime short films and music videos that come out every year which aren't catalogued on websites like Anilist. We try to scour Youtube/Twitter/etc to find as many as we can but it's easy to simply not stumble across them. If you know an anime short film or music video from this year that isn't on our list, then please tell us in the comments.
You can see all the current allocations and eligible shorts here
The Livestream
The annual livestream returns complete with commentary, clip reels, and guest appearances! As with everything else, we're working to make things even better this year, and the livestream team has lots of ideas that they'll be working on.
We'll have more information as we get closer to February, but for now you can check out the streams from previous years on our YouTube channel!
The Juror Application
Juror applications are now open until October 18th, 23:59 PDT (UTC-7) for primary allocation! Selected jurors will be invited to join the Awards by November 1st. It will reopen again for subsequent applications after initial invites and remain open until December 31st.
Open Categories can be freely joined by any juror. Jurors who have taken part in a category to completion in any previous years to join the Open Categories without needing to fill out the application. Note that Anime of the Year, Movie of the Year, Shorts, Opening, and Ending still require an application to join. You can read the Jury Guide for more information.
Applications will remain open after the initial jurors are invited for anyone still wishing to join.
If being a juror sounds like something for you, please click the link below and fill out the application.
JUROR APPLICATION
GENRE ALLOCATIONS
AWARDS OVERVIEW
ELIGIBILITY RULES
JURY GUIDE
Expect more news from the r/anime Awards near the end of the year, but we're off for now. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or message one of the Hosts:
/u/aniMayor, /u/CoolVidsFTW, /u/Kenalskii, /u/normalgrinn, /u/Protractror, /u/Schinco, /u/SiLeNTxTrYH4Rd, /u/Vaxivop, and /u/voidembracedwitch.
