Mob Psycho 100 has a new animated short by the original TV staff to celebrate 10 years since the debut of the anime. It debuted July 12 at a special reunion event in Japan before going live on the internet, and the plot wastes no time putting Reigen in real trouble.
The short premiered at the “Mob Psycho 100 Anime 10th Anniversary Event: Reunion” held at Fukagawa Mirai Hall in Kawaguchi City, Saitama. We’re back at the office of Spirits and Such Consultation, the base of operations for Reigen Arataka through all three seasons of the show.
The mob, Ekubo (aka Dimple), and the former president of the Telepathy Club at Salt Middle School, Tome Kurata, are there as well. The story begins on a regular day at the office. Then an unforeseen event lands Reigen in hot water.
No further plot details have emerged beyond that setup, which is presumably the point. It’s always been half the fun of a Mob Psycho cold open to see an ordinary afternoon curdle into disaster in a matter of minutes. That’s the whole premise, and that’s all this short needs to work.
This is no B-team victory lap of inferior quality. Yuzuru Tachikawa himself directed, wrote, storyboarded, and technically directed the anniversary short. Character designer Yoshimichi Kameda returned as animation director and drew a new illustration for the event.
Four different jobs on one short is the kind of hands-on involvement anniversary content doesn’t get much of, and it says something Tachikawa didn’t pass any of it off. Comparatively, Kameda’s new illustration is a smaller gesture, but it’s still the character designer showing up to draw the cast again, a decade later, instead of farming the job out to whoever’s available.
It took the entire original production staff reuniting to make it happen, Kameda said. He also said that rewatching the first episode made him remember just how unique Mob Psycho 100’s visual style is, and that tracks. Ten years later, the show’s scrawled, expressionistic eruptions of psychic energy still look like nothing else on TV.
The original Japanese cast returned, if only briefly. Takahiro Sakurai as Reigen, Setsuo Ito as Mob, Akio Otsuka as Dimple, Atsumi Tanezaki as Tome. They don’t get a lot of screen time.
But it’s the same four voices, not one or two of them doing a cameo while the rest get recast around them. Built over three seasons on this exact chemistry, even a few minutes of new footage from the original four weighs heavier than a full cast of strangers could ever do.
ONE’s original manga was serialized in Ura Sunday four years before it was adapted into a television anime by Studio Bones in 2012. ONE also created One-Punch Man, the manga that made him one of the biggest names to ever emerge from webcomics. Mob Psycho 100 has been that franchise’s weirder, quieter sibling for the last decade. The anime aired from July 11 to September 27, 2016, and the first season was announced in July 2016. It was followed by two more seasons, season two in 2019 and season three in 2022, which concluded the story.
The full anniversary celebration kicked off on May 12, which is also Mob’s birthday in the show’s universe. It’s a small, character-first detail, and building the celebration around it makes sense for a franchise that has always paid attention to those. That celebration is just one of the shorts.
The lineup also features a side story, Mob Psycho 100 II: The First Spirits and Such Company Trip – A Journey that Mends the Heart and Heals the Soul, a short form omake, Mob Psycho Mini, and a recap episode, Mob Psycho 100 Reigen: The Miraculous Unknown Psychic.
Crunchyroll, which is streaming the series, continues to describe Mob as “a boy who has trouble expressing himself, but just so happens to be a powerful esper.” The platform warns that when his emotions hit 100 percent, something awful happens to him. Ten years later, and that logline still does its job.
This is the part worth sitting with. Nothing here is confirmation of a new TV season or any continuation of the story. All the signs point to a one-off anniversary present, not the beginning of something bigger.
If there’s hope that this short is secretly teasing a fourth season, that’s speculation, not confirmation. Keep thinking of it that way, until something more concrete shows up.
The short itself isn’t long, and all accounts say the cast is only seen briefly. But brief isn’t skinny, not when the whole original crew signed on to make it happen.
But getting the actual director, the actual character designer, and the actual voice cast back for a few minutes of new footage is rarer than it sounds. Anniversary specials are farmed out more often than fans like to admit, or given to people with no real connection to the original show. This wasn’t it. And the people who made Mob Psycho 100 showed up ten years later to celebrate the occasion, which is better than a season announcement anyway.
