Horror Collector’s English Dub Starts Today, and Wishbone’s Voice Is the Dog With a Human Face
Horror Collector, NHK’s anime about a boy in a red hood who hunts urban legends that have come true, starts streaming in English on Crunchyroll today. Brandon Allan Majella voices the boy, Fushigi, and Rebecca Danae plays his twin sister Himitsu. His partner Jimmy, a dog with a man’s face, is voiced by Larry Brantley, who spent the 1990s as the voice of PBS’s Wishbone.
Crunchyroll named the English cast for the first episode on Friday, and Anime News Network carried the list the same day. Alongside the three leads are Patrick McAlister as Aoyama, Rowan Gilvie as the Crimson Woman, Lexa Childress as Hiromi, UkuLeili as Natsuna, Jonathan Lim as Raita, Jordan Chantha Weir as Rin, Chris Sanders as Sasaki, Zareen Afzaal as Yui and Jamie Lee as Yurie.
The show adapts a run of children’s horror novels by Midori Sato and Norio Tsuruta. Fushigi travels from town to town catching urban legends that have taken physical form and filing them away in a red notebook. He’s doing it to find Himitsu, the girl in the black hood whose power is to make those legends real. Yuki Inaba directs and writes the series at studio palette, and it has aired on NHK General since October 10, late on Saturday nights.
A Texas voice for an Osaka dog
Jimmy is the casting that will make some American viewers sit up. Brantley, a Houston native and former stand-up comic, voiced the Jack Russell terrier in Wishbone, the PBS children’s series that ran from 1995 to 1997. Now the voice of that famous terrier belongs to a human-faced dog in a yellow rain hood, chasing ghosts with a boy who barely talks. His anime credits include My Hero Academia, One Piece and Fairy Tail, according to his Wikipedia profile.
In Japanese, Jimmy belongs to Jun Fukuyama, who was born in Osaka. That matters: NHK’s official description says Jimmy speaks Kansai dialect, the warm, fast patter of Osaka and its neighbours. He’s soft-hearted and can’t walk past anyone in trouble. The official trailer calls him a former journalist turned dog. How Brantley’s Texas roots shape a Kansai dog is the first thing dub fans will be listening for this weekend.
Jimmy in NHK's official trailer, captioned as a former journalist turned human-faced dog. Image: NHK Enterprises
Fukuyama treated the role as a job of keeping the room light. “Because it’s horror, the story does get scary, startling and heavy,” he said in his cast comment. “And since the main characters change every episode, I thought I had to keep the fear and the tension but also make an atmosphere where people could breathe. So as the mood maker, I keep talking nonsense between takes, ha.” His screen partner keeps up. “Ishibashi picks up on all of it, so he’s turned out to be a good partner.”
Who else is in the English booth
Majella’s Fushigi is the quiet centre of the show. NHK describes him as a boy who takes no interest in anyone around him. Danae’s Himitsu is the mystery he’s chasing, rumoured in town after town as “the child with no face.” In Japanese she’s voiced by Saori Hayami, who plays Yor in Spy x Family.
Gilvie is having a busy weekend. Friday brought the start of the Firefly Wedding dub, with Gilvie as Satoko, the dying noblewoman who proposes to her own assassin. Today Gilvie turns up as the Crimson Woman in episode 1. Lim plays Raita, a boy in a white hood who has a little bit of a sixth sense and a younger sister he adores.
Helena Walstrom directs the English voices. Samantha Herek produces, Audrey Drake Rigg writes the adaptation under supervisor Jarrod Greene, Noah Whitehead engineers and Andrew Tipps mixes.
The Japanese cast was scared too
Hiiro Ishibashi, the Japanese Fushigi, admitted horror was new to him. “This is my first horror role, and the first time I’ve heard so much screaming acted out at a recording,” he said when NHK announced the cast in September. “Everyone watching will get the shivers in front of their TV or their phone.”
At a screening of episode 1 at NHK’s Shibuya broadcast centre on October 7, he added that the 11:45 p.m. slot is “a really perfect time,” and that “even going past midnight is a little scary.” The guest cast didn’t sound much braver. Yoko Hikasa, who plays the urban legend woman in episode 1, called herself a scaredy-cat who has spent a lifetime avoiding scary films: “I did my recording checks with my eyes half closed!” Yuma Uchida, a guest in episode 3, watched the first episode before recording. “It was so scary I could only watch through half-closed eyes,” Uchida said in a comment published by Animate Times.
Nobuhiko Okamoto, the voice of Bakugo in My Hero Academia and Himmel in Frieren, plays the Blue Umbrella Man, a smiling stranger who travels with Himitsu. Okamoto took the opposite line. At the screening the actor said rapping noises and doors that opened and closed by themselves were regular events in a house he used to live in, and that, apparently, 99 ghosts follow him around. Okamoto also asked fans to watch for the character from episode 2, since the Blue Umbrella Man doesn’t appear in the first. Okamoto turns 40 today, the same day the dub begins.
The Blue Umbrella Man and Himitsu in the official trailer. Image: NHK Enterprises
A J-horror director wanted a hero
Tsuruta is a horror film director whose credits include Ring 0: Birthday (2000) and Premonition (2004), plus an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror. At the screening Tsuruta explained why a horror director would co-write a children’s series. “Most of the popular J-horror characters were ghosts, and villains,” he said. “I started writing this 11 years ago thinking, ‘It’s J-horror, but I want to make a hero,’ and if I could, a GeGeGe no Kitaro for the 21st century.”
Sato said the aim was “the fear that’s close to home.” The two writers wanted something “scary but fun,” Sato said, and “it became an anime in its 11th year, so I feel it must have reached someone somewhere.” Kadokawa has published the novels under its Tsubasa Bunko imprint since June 2015, and the series reached its 28th volume this year. Yen Press publishes the books and the manga in English for younger readers.
An AI app with a cat’s face
Voice actors may want to stay for episode 4. It centres on MOMO, an AI secretary app with the face of a pink cat, which everyone in the story uses to talk through their worries. Sae Hiratsuka voices it in Japanese. NHK’s synopsis follows a university student whose studies, clothes and love life all improve on MOMO’s advice, until a quiet shadow starts to spread. It’s a plot that lands close to home in a year when talking assistants are everywhere.
MOMO, the AI secretary app, in the opening titles. Image: NHK Enterprises
Ryota Osaka, who plays Raita in Japanese, expected a gentle children’s show. “I thought it would be a soft horror that kids could watch easily, but it’s going to be a proper horror series, so I can’t wait to see the finished pictures,” Osaka said.
When to watch
The first English episode arrives on Crunchyroll today, Saturday, October 24. Crunchyroll streams the series worldwide outside Japan and China, and the subtitled version follows the Japanese broadcast, which airs on NHK General on Saturdays at 11:45 p.m. Tokyo time, across 12 episodes.
VoiceEditSuiteNewThe audio editor that learns how you breathe.Learns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.See how it worksShikao Suga wrote and sings both theme songs. In a statement read at the screening, Suga said that getting inside Fushigi’s head turned the opening, “Kageboushi,” into “an epic of more than four minutes” with an orchestra. “Only the first 90 seconds are used in the opening, but I think it’s still got plenty of punch,” the statement said. The ending song is “Meiro.”
Sources: Anime News Network (English dub cast announcement, October 23, 2026; Horror Collector theme song report); Animate Times (cast announcement, September 18, 2026; episode 1 screening report, October 8, 2026); NHK Enterprises official trailer and opening video; Wikipedia (Larry Brantley, Norio Tsuruta, Horror Collector). Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Hero image: NHK Enterprises, © Midori Sato, Norio Tsuruta/KADOKAWA/NHK, NEP.
Lee este artículo en español: El doblaje en inglés de Horror Collector se estrena hoy, y la voz de Wishbone es el perro con cara humana
Know something about this story, or spotted an error? Tell the newsroom.