Best Philosophical Anime

There is something about anime that has a way of making viewers think deeply about life, death, love, and everything in between. Since the first anime from the early twentieth century, for about a hundred years now, many series and films have provided their take on pertinent philosophical issues.

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With the introduction of new technologies during the 80s and 90s, these issues have expanded to exploring human beings' relationship with the cyber-realm. Still, other anime look deeper into spiritual questions of human existence, ethics and morals, and psychology. There are, out of these, shows and films that are deeply philosophical and are worth a watch.

Updated August 20, 2024 by David Heath: Movies, shows, books, and media in general don't have to be serious to have a philosophy. It can help, as seen in Ghost in the Shell, Psycho-Pass, Ergo Proxy, etc. But even the lightest story can have a meaning or message to it, which can be what brings people in and makes them a fan. Spirited Away is a coming-of-age tale with a lot of youkai-themed whimsies, which contrasts with My Neighbor Totoro's promotion of childlike innocence and the natural world.

Still, that doesn't mean this list is going to get all serious about preschool shows like Anpanman or Sgt Frog. It just means it's been updated with a few more anime that caught on through their philosophy, be they heavy crime thrillers and literal games of death, or wacky tales that spoof South Park and sci-fi B-movies. There's a method to their madness, and all their methods are intriguing.

24 Vampire In The Garden

MyAnimeList Score: 7.13

• Directed by: Ryōtarō Makihara
• Release: May 16th, 2022
• Studio: Wit Studio
• Streaming: Netflix

Vampire in the Garden is a Netflix release that, while only five episodes long, deals with complex themes such as love, friendship, and loss, in a very moving way. It's set in a world where vampires and humans are at war, and the humans are the underdogs. They've walled themselves off in their last safe haven, and avoid the arts like music in favor of survival. During one particularly brutal attack, a human girl called Momo forms an unlikely alliance with Fiine, the reluctant queen of the vampires.

In Fiine, Momo gets to enjoy new experiences like listening to music for the first time. While in Momo, Fiine finds someone who resembles her lost love, Aria. But their people are more willing to accept their own conflict than love between their different sides. On the face of it, it's a Romeo & Juliet-style story of forbidden romance, where two sides could find peace if they could overcome their bad blood, so to speak. Yet it also speaks of how far people will go to be compassionate, right down to offering themselves to others as feed.

23 Cat Soup

MyAnimeList Score: 7.32

Cat Soup, or Nekojiru, caught on in the 90s for its dark comedy and art style. Chiyomi 'Nekojiru' Hashiguchi's work was described by her husband, Hajime Yamano, as "cute, repulsive, and cruel-looking at the same time," and her stories weren't any different. They follow two cat siblings, Nyako and Nyatta, who go on different adventures due to the apathy of their parents. They're cruel, selfish, and brutal to whoever they come across, but they do it in a way that's zany and funny.

The manga's OVA adaptation captured this energy with a story about the siblings going to recover the rest of Nyako's soul after Death tried to take it. The idea behind it is that kids are, by default, selfish and inconsiderate until they're taught otherwise. Without such instruction, Nyako and Nyatta take advantage of others' generosity, beat others to death, or even chop them up into soup (albeit in self-defense). Children can be sweet and innocent, but darkness is just as inherent to them, if not more so, than good behavior.

22 Paranoia Agent

MyAnimeList Score: 7.66

A lot of Satoshi Kon's work goes beyond their surface readings, and this is just the first of many on this list. That said, Paranoia Agent is arguably one of the most interesting examples. It sees the inhabitants of Musashino City, Tokyo, fall victim to Li'l Slugger, a cap-wearing kid who rollerblades around town attacking people indiscriminately with a baseball bat. Many people claim to have been attacked by him, and their fates are altered by his strikes, but no one can find hide or hair of him. That's because Li'l Slugger isn't real.

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He was an excuse dreamed up by his first 'victim,' Tsukiko, during her childhood, and came back when she got struck. Like Perfect Blue and Paprika, the line between reality and fiction gets blurred as the hysteria over Li'l Slugger takes over the whole town. It shows how people can succumb to threats that aren't really there, as it resembles real mass-panic cases like Spring-Heeled Jack, the Mad Gasser of Matoon, and the Monkey Man of Delhi. Tsukiko ultimately has to own up to her mistake, which is a cleaner conclusion than its non-fictional counterparts.

21 Ergo Proxy

MyAnimeList Score: 7.90

Ergo Proxy heads into psychological sci-fi territory where, like many existential anime series, explores humans' co-habitation with artificial life. Only instead of cyborgs and AIs, they're straight-up robots called 'AutoReivs'. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where what's left of humanity lives in domed cities designed to protect them from the ecological disaster that made the rest of the planet inhospitable. In these cities, humans and AutoReivs live peacefully together, with the latter doing their day-to-day work.

Then some of the AutoReivs caught a virus that made them self-aware, with many committing murders or otherwise causing harm. Why? Because now they have to struggle with what it means to live, what purpose is there to their lives, and why it involves suffering and struggle. It's a more existentialist take on the genre, as its characters figure out their answers to these questions, with a little Gnostic twist, as Proxy's material world clashes with something more spiritual at its heart.

20 Penguindrum

MyAnimeList Score: 7.93

• Directed by: Kunihiko Ikuhara and Shouko Nakamura.
• Release: July 8th, 2011.
• Studio: Brain's Base.

Yes, the show about a girl who wears a penguin cap is philosophical. In fact, Penguindrum wears its philosophy right on its sleeve, and in its Japanese title: Mawaru Penguindrum ('Revolving Penguindrum'). 'Mawaru' is written 輪る, using the kanji for 'ring' or 'loop'. It represents how time and destiny work for the Takakura family: as a spinning loop or wheel where each joy is soon followed by equal sorrow, or vice versa, before moving on to the next hopeful.

For example, brothers Kanba and Shouma were able to take their sickly sister Himari to the aquarium as a treat. But then her condition worsened and she fainted. She's seemingly cured by wearing a penguin cap, but it actually got her possessed by an entity that'll only free her if the boys find the titular Penguin Drum. They're not the only ones looking for it, as others have wishes they want granted. It sounds fancy and fun, though to understand where their fate leads, they all have to come to terms with the past, and the traumatic event that connects them all.

19 Hyouge Mono

MyAnimeList Score: 7.96

Two of the key concepts in Confucianism are 'jen' (humaneness/benevolence) and 'li' (correct ceremony), where the former is a virtue innate in people, and the latter is essentially good manners. But what can a person do with manners if they lack benevolence? People can find an example of that in Hyouge Mono, where one man's love for art and ceremony clashes with his desire to rise up in the world of Japan's Sengoku era.

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Furuta Sasuke is a vassal of the notorious Oda Nobunaga who, alongside the tea master Sen no Soueki, taught Furuta how to appreciate the tea ceremony. Through this, he gains a love for tea, pottery, and architecture, appreciating their beauty and artistic merit. But it also makes him greedy, as he becomes more invested in tracking down and building up his collection of crockery over serving his lord. It's played for laughs, but Furuta's dedication to all things aesthetic could be as much a sign of his humanity as it is a show of his love of ceremony.

18 FLCL

MyAnimeList Score: 8.03

FLCL represents many things, like how some shows are probably better off with a single season instead of multiple sequels. On the face of it, it's about Naota, a boy left behind in his boring hometown looking after his big brother Tasuku's hand-me-downs while he's batting for a baseball team in America. Then he comes face-to-face with a guitar-wielding nutcase on a Vespa called Haruko, who crashes into his place and pulls him into an epic sci-fi clash that could threaten the entire universe.

It's played for yuks, with some scenes that are weird for the sake of weirdness (e.g. Amarao turning into a South Park character). It's postmodern in the sense that Haruko's search for Atomsk and Medical Machina doesn't really have any ultimate meaning to it. It's like the title, pronounced 'Fooly Cooly', no one can pin it down to a set definition. Stuff just happens and people learn different things from it. For Naota, he learns to appreciate what it means to grow up. That wasn't anyone's plan. It's just what he got from everything he went through.

17 Paprika

MyAnimeList Score: 8.04

• Directed by: Satoshi Kon, based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui
• Release: November 25th, 2006
• Studio: Madhouse
• Streaming: Netflix

Many have noted that the 2010 film Inception, a movie about diving into dreams, was heavily inspired by the 2006 Satoshi Kon movie Paprika. In it, a dream terrorist gets control of the DC Mini, a device that allows people to explore each other's dreams and uses it to generate nightmares to affect their targets. It is up to the device's co-creator, research psychologist Dr Atsuko Chiba, to find the culprit by diving into their dreams, becoming an alternate persona called Paprika in the process.

On one hand, Paprika deals with the subconscious and questions reality, as the dream world and reality eventually start to merge, and not just within the movie. Textually, Chiba is torn between the stern, mature identity she feels she should be in the 'real' world, and the more bubbly Paprika, based on who she'd like to be. She isn't the only one torn like this, as other characters are split on issues like gender identity, childhood, and adulthood, and whether dreams are sacred ground or an open realm of possibilities.

16 Serial Experiments Lain

MyAnimeList Score: 8.09

The cyberpunk psychological horror Serial Experiments Lain asks questions about transcendence and the Internet where, like Perfect Blue, the (at-the-time) new medium offered people a way to express themselves under different identities. The difference is, that while it caused Blue's Mima to dissociate, it makes the titular Lain go beyond her physical form. It all starts when she, an introverted junior high school student, and her classmates receive emails from a student who recently committed suicide.

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The deceased student claims not to be dead, but to simply have "abandoned her physical self" and to have found God through 'the Wired' (aka the Internet). So, Lain decides to investigate using her family's new computer. The results see Lain herself disappear between the shy girl viewers were introduced to, her more attitude-filled self from the Wired, and another form that affects the world outside cyberspace. As surreal as it gets, it holds up as a look into what the internet can do to loners and how they communicate.

15 Kaiba

MyAnimeList Score: 8.14

• Directed by: Masaaki Yuasa
• Release: April 11th, 2008
• Studio: Madhouse
• Streaming: Crunchyroll

Memory can be as integral to a person's identity as their physical form, if not more so. Such is the case in Kaiba, where humans can store backups of their memory on chips and install them in other bodies. As such, they could potentially live on past death, if they can afford the cost. Usually, this means the rich get to live on in new bodies sold to them by the poor, who get left as memory chips in the hope that maybe they'll get a new body too.

Though like SD cards, USB sticks, and other physical media, other people can use them to watch their memories, or even change them one way or the other. Such is the case with Kaiba, a man who wakes up in a dingy room with no memories, a hole in his chest, and the locket of a woman he supposedly knew once. Looking for answers, he goes off in search of this mystery woman, and to find out who he really is, whether from his missing memories, or the ones he'll make on his journey across the universe.