Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!

By 2035, birth rates have tanked, schools are shutting down, and the students who remain have basically checked out emotionally. That's the world Manabi Straight drops you into — and then Manabi herself shows up, transferring into the all-girls Seioh Private High School on a futuristic scooter with enough energy to restart a dying planet. She's not brooding about the state of the world. She just wants school to be fun again. Within days, she's somehow become student council president alongside Mika, a soft-spoken girl who was running the whole council alone before Manabi arrived. Together they pull in a small crew of classmates — each with her own personality — and start trying to actually make things feel alive again, beginning with turning the student council room into something worth hanging out in. It's a 12-episode TV series from ufotable, and the animation has that warm, careful quality you'd expect from them even in their earlier work. The setting gives it a slightly different flavor than the usual school slice-of-life — there's a quiet melancholy underneath the cheerful surface that keeps it from feeling empty. If you liked K-On! for its low-stakes hangout energy, or Azumanga Daioh for its character-driven comedy, this fits right alongside those. It's got that same CGDCT warmth, but the declining-birth-rate backdrop gives it a little more texture than you'd expect going in.