For years, the question wasn’t whether David Production would adapt Steel Ball Run. It was whether anyone could. Hirohiko Araki’s seventh JoJo arc is a transcontinental horse race across 1890s America, and in fan forums it became a running joke that lasted the better part of a decade. The horses would be too hard. The scale too big. The thing couldn’t be done.

Steel Ball Run is the sixth season of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure anime, produced by David Production and Warner Bros. Japan, adapting the seventh part of the manga. Officially announced on April 12, 2025, during the JOJODAY event, the series premiered on Netflix on March 19, 2026 , as a single 47-minute episode labeled the “1st STAGE.” And the horses? They gallop. They thunder. They feel like they’re about to rip through the screen. Director Yasuhiro Kimura did something nobody expected: he made the impossible look stylish.

The Math That Killed the Dream

Before a single frame was drawn, Kimura sat down and did the arithmetic. Across the entire series, the team is expecting over 5,000 horse animation cuts, so it’s not realistic to handle everything with hand-drawn animation. That number is staggering. It means horses are not background decoration in this show. They are the show.

Every time Kimura looked at a horse galloping while studying its movements, it seemed to get more complicated. “It would be impossible to do by human hands,” he told Anime Trending. “Drawing horses is already considered to be difficult, and while there are people out there who could draw the animal, they wouldn’t be able to draw that many cuts. Maybe we’d get around a hundred over the series, but not the thousands we needed.”

A hundred cuts. Out of five thousand. That gap is where the hybrid pipeline was born.

Building the System

Kimura’s insight was that this wasn’t a quality problem. It was a systems problem. Since this series will continue, the priority was to build a system that anyone can draw and that keeps the quality stable. He wasn’t chasing a single breathtaking episode. He was designing something repeatable, something that could survive the long haul of a multi-year production.

The division of labor is elegant in its simplicity. When the horse is shown fully including its legs, the team often uses 3DCG. For specific angles where characters are visible, they use hand-drawn animation. By limiting hand-drawn work to necessary cuts and using 3DCG for the rest, they balance the workload. But the real revelation came from the official JoJo Portal interview, where Kimura described a more granular three-way decision: “Generally, we prepare the sketch for 3DCG, and depending on the cuts we decide whether we use the 3DCG, hybrid 3DCG with hand drawing or go with hand drawing from the beginning.”

Three tracks. One pipeline. Five thousand cuts ahead of them.

The Invented Gallop

Here is where Kimura’s approach stops being merely clever and becomes genuinely creative. He didn’t just solve a logistics problem. He designed a new way for animated horses to move.

The team studied how horses run, but the more they researched, the more complex it became. “It’s impossible to fully reproduce that, so we simplified the elements and pursued a style of movement suited specifically for Steel Ball Run.” Kimura ended up inventing “a totally new running style” for the show. “It’s not realistic, and it’s a little deformed, but I think it still looks like a horse, and people will think it’s cool.”

Cool is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it’s the right word. The horses in Steel Ball Run don’t move like nature documentary footage. They move like muscle cars. Kimura told Anime Trending that a horse’s top speed is about 50 km/h, and he thought that would look slow on screen, so the team animated them as if they were going 300 km/h. He watched the film Gran Turismo and studied F1 racing footage to capture the sensation of velocity. When the horses run, he said, they go “boom!” just like cars do.

This is the most JoJo thing a director has ever done: turn horses into Formula 1 machines through sheer artistic will.

Research, Wrong Turns, and Red Dead Redemption 2

Kimura personally went horseback riding. He was surprised by the animals’ height and the triangular shape of their backs. For further research, the team was scheduled to visit a horse farm in Tomisato, Chiba Prefecture, but a staff member entered the wrong GPS destination and they ended up at the wrong horse farm entirely , a similar name in the same prefecture, miles away. Even the research had a JoJo-worthy detour.

The visual references were just as eclectic. Kimura watched the film Far and Away with series director Toshiyuki Kato, but “most of all, I watched the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer over and over again and played a bit of the game. I find the coloring of these works really interesting,” he said, citing the contrast between red and black at twilight as something he wanted to bring to Steel Ball Run. The team also brought in experts on American culture from Japanese universities to advise on the production.

Between Golden Wind and Steel Ball Run, Kimura spent years leveling up his CGI skills. He studied 3D CGI extensively and worked on two other anime series as learning exercises, including 2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team. The volleyball work directly informed how he animated Gyro’s spinning Steel Balls. “I feel like all the learning I’ve done has led to what you’ll see in Steel Ball Run.” A volleyball anime teaching a man how to animate the Spin. You can’t script this stuff.

The Verdict, and the Wait

The premiere landed like a thunderclap. Steel Ball Run reached the top-rated spot on MyAnimeList in less than 24 hours. It beat Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End to claim the number one position. In fan communities, the years of anxiety dissolved overnight. The hybrid pipeline worked. The horses looked incredible. The thing that couldn’t be done had been done.

And then came the silence. After a week with no news, Netflix announced on March 28 that the next episode would be released sometime in 2026, with no other specifying information, leading to an uproar from fans. Fans took to flooding Netflix’s social media accounts with disapproving messages and even started unsubscribing from the platform. The irony is almost too perfect: the horse problem is solved, and now the distribution problem takes its place.

Kimura himself told Anime Trending, “It takes a lot of time to make just one episode, but production is going smoothly.” He sounded like a man who had built the machine and was now watching it run. The pipeline exists. The style exists. The invented gallop exists. What remains is time, and patience, and whether Netflix can get out of its own way long enough to let the race continue.

Five thousand cuts. A deformed, beautiful, 300 km/h gallop. A director who rode a horse in Chiba and watched Red Dead Redemption 2 trailers on loop. This is how you animate the impossible: not by pretending it’s easy, but by building a system that makes the hard part repeatable, and then making the repeatable part cool. (Full Anime Trending interview | ORICON NEWS interview | JoJo Portal interview)