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Why are there two Hunter x Hunter anime?

Because the first one ran out of manga. The second was built a decade later, from chapter one, with a decade more story to film.

The 1999 series was made by Nippon Animation, directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi, and aired on Fuji TV from October 16, 1999 to March 31, 2001: 62 episodes, covering a manga that had launched only the year before. When the television run ended, the manga had not. So the adaptation kept going where television could not: as home video. Three OVA series, 30 episodes in all, followed from 2002 to 2004, carrying the story through Greed Island. Then the animated Hunter x Hunter simply stopped, seven years before the second version began. There had been an even earlier screen version, too: a 26 minute pilot film by Studio Pierrot, shown on the 1998 Jump Super Anime Tour.

By 2011 the situation had inverted. A decade of manga now existed beyond the old stopping point, an entire generation of viewers had never seen the first series, and the OVAs had never been a broadcast event. The new production did not pick up where the old one left off. Announced on July 24, 2011, it was a complete reboot with no connection to the 1999 series: new studio, new director, new voice cast, and the story retold from the beginning.

HOW THE 2011 PRODUCTION DIFFERED

A new machine, built a decade later

Studio and director

Madhouse produced the 2011 series, directed by Hiroshi Kojina, with series composition by Atsushi Maekawa and then Tsutomu Kamishiro, character designs by Takahiro Yoshimatsu, and music by Yoshihisa Hirano. None of the 1999 principals carried over.

A new cast

The announcement was explicit that the new anime would have a new staff and cast compared to the 1999 to 2001 television anime. No voice roles were reprised; the characters were recast from zero.

Billed as the definitive retelling

Anime News Network's August 2011 report of the announcement describes a new anime that would retell the story from the manga from the beginning, and calls it, in the announcement's framing, the definitive new anime. It premiered on NTV on October 2, 2011, Sundays at 10:55 in the morning.

The move to late night

From October 8, 2013, deep into the Chimera Ant arc, the series switched from Sunday mornings to Tuesday nights at 1:29 a.m., the slot it kept until the end. The broadcast daypart changed mid run; the production did not.

How much further it went

148 episodes, October 2, 2011 to September 23, 2014, through the Chimera Ant arc and the Election arc, ending where the manga's own first great movement ends: Gon finally meeting his father, Ging. The 1999 line, television plus OVAs, had reached Greed Island.

Two films alongside

Madhouse also made the franchise's two theatrical films during the run: Phantom Rouge on January 12, 2013, built on an unpublished story Togashi had written about ten years earlier, and The Last Mission on December 27, 2013.

WHAT THEY DID GET

The second version's afterlife

The 2011 series is the version the decade canonized. Polygon named it one of the best anime of the 2010s, Crunchyroll ranked it among the 25 best anime of the 2010s, and IGN listed it among the best anime series of the decade. The 1999 version survives alongside it as the first telling, complete with its OVA continuation, a separate production with its own cast and its own stopping point. Two anime exist because the manga outgrew the first one, then outwaited it: a story still being written in 2001 had to be filmed in pieces, and a story with a decade more behind it in 2011 could finally be filmed from the top.

THE FIRST VOLUME

Hunter x Hunter, in print

Hunter x Hunter · Volume 1 · Japan

Gon on a frog on the first Japanese volume, the manga both anime adaptations, the two this page compares, were drawn from.

Why the manga pauses What inspired Hunter x Hunter Back to the Library

Why are there two Hunter x Hunter anime?

HOW THE 2011 PRODUCTION DIFFERED

WHAT THEY DID GET

THE FIRST VOLUME

THE FIRST WORD