Netflix might not have HBO Max’s stranglehold on Studio Ghibli, but the streaming service’s anime movie offerings are still worth digging into if you haven’t yet pulled the trigger on a Crunchyroll subscription. There are still plenty of mechas, transformations and even Miyazaki (thanks, Lupin III!) to enjoy—and it’s even more exciting that some are Netflix Originals. Seeing the company invest into its own movies has been, politely, hit-and-miss, but its foray into anime has been largely positive.
While Netflix shines best with its extensive amount of anime series, there are still plenty of anime films to enjoy after binging JoJo’s or Demon Slayer. We’ve ranked the best 10 anime movies on Netflix, which includes familiar franchises, anthologies, Originals and hard-to-find favorites alike. The streamer’s library shifts all the time, with anime films suffering plenty of turnover, but this list is updated for July 2021.
There have been creepier things done in movies than magically turning into a cat in order to get closer to your crush, but those are few and far between. It’s not exactly standing outside a window with a boombox. But in directors Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama’s A Whisker Away, even this bonkers premise yields beauty and touching romance. Mari Okada’s script deftly leaps the anime through some emotional loops, running it through crinkly toy tunnels, ultimately landing its silly premise—replete with a troupe of angsty, depressed middle schoolers—in emotional honesty. A dash of otherworldly magic from the canon of Miyazaki (a corpulent face-dealing cat and an entire invisible cat-world) mixes well with some honest dives into the mental health issues of its characters (not quite as deeply and darkly as Neon Genesis Evangelion, but with a similarly stylish flair). While the characters are a little annoying when you meet them—they’re middle schoolers, after all—the truth behind the writing manages to shine through, all the while impressing us with its realistic animal animation and stunning depictions of smaller-town Tokoname life.—Jacob Oller
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Short film anthologies are some of the most impressive showcases of boundary-pushing visual storytelling in animation, let alone Japanese animation. A cursory glance of anime anthologies produced within just the last 30 years is enough: From Masao Maruyama and Rintaro’s 1987 film Labyrinth Tales (known in the West as Neo Tokyo), to Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1995 film Memories, to even the 2003 American-Japanese co-production Animatrix, anthologies stand the test of time not only as landmarks of anime history, but as a vital venue through which to facilitate the introduction of new and exciting talent into the animation industry. With this mind, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, along with former Ghibli animators Yoshiyuki Momose (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and Akihiko Yamashita (Howl’s Moving Castle), have pooled their significant creativity to create a new installment in the storied lineage of prestige anime anthologies: Modest Heroes, the first volume in Studio Ponoc’s series of animated short films. “Kanini & Kanino, ” directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, is the first and most explicitly “Ghibli-esque” of the anthology’s three shorts. Following the story of a pair of anthropomorphic crab children living at the bottom of a riverbed, the short could be interpreted as something of a reprise of Yonebayashi’s directorial debut, the 2010 film The Secret World of Arrietty, although this time conceived and written entirely by himself. The anthology’s second short, directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, is the volume’s most poignant installment and, arguably, the true namesake of Modest Heroes. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” tells of a young mother and her son Shun, a happy and otherwise unassuming little boy born with a debilitating food allergy to eggs. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” sets a high bar for the film going forward, but the anthology’s final short, “Invisible, ” manages to meet and yet even surpass those expectations. Directed by Akihiko Yamashita, known not only for his prior work on Howl’s Moving Castle, but also as a character designer on Yasuhiro Imagawa’s Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still, “Invisible” follows the story of a man who struggles with a condition that seemingly renders him completely unnoticeable to every person he comes across. Modest Heroes is a satisfying sophomore effort from Studio Ponoc, a collection of shorts that, together, resonate with the sentiment of that most joyous and courageous of adages made famous by the likes of Rod Serling: “…there’s nothing mightier than the meek.”—Toussaint Egan
Netflix series The Witcher was a rather massive hit for the streaming platform in 2019, introducing mainstream audiences everywhere to the dangerous world of Geralt of Rivia, a magically enhanced professional monster hunter known as a Witcher. Like a lot of prequels, the animated film Nightmare of the Wolf can often feel more interested in table setting for the next season of the live-action series than in telling a standalone story of its own. Your mileage will likely vary on whether you think that’s a good idea or not—hardcore fans will be delighted by the frequent namedropping and amped-up violence in the lead-up to the series’ return, while casual viewers may wonder what the big deal about any of this is. But Nightmare of the Wolf works because it unabashedly doubles down on much of what makes the original series so appealing, namely the rich lore that surrounds the existence of Witchers in general. And in doing so, it makes the original series feel like something much larger than one man’s story, expanding its world in a way that makes almost every aspect of it seem more complex and interesting than it did before. The film is technically a Vesemir origin story, but it’s also a crash course in how Witchers came to be, from the harsh conditions in which they are created to the uncomfortable position they occupy in the politics and cultural consciousness of the Continent. But most of all, Nightmare of the Wolf continues to muddy the moral waters of the Witcher universe, crafting complex characters in every shade of grey imaginable. Nightmare of the Wolf’s broader message about how we often create the monsters we fear the most certainly isn’t new. But those familiar beats ultimately help us see the world of the live-action series—and Geralt’s place in it—in a different way than we did before, one which both justifies the Continent’s distrust of Witchers and deepens our understanding of why these remaining men have chosen to keep on fighting anyway. —Lacy Baugher Milas.
Distributor GKids sells Lu Over the Wall as “family friendly, ” which it is, an innocuous, offbeat alternative to the conventional computer animated joints typically found in modern multiplexes. But there’s “whimsical” and there’s “weird, ” and Lu Over the Wall ventures well past the former and into the latter before director Masaaki Yuasa gets through the opening credits. Barely a moment goes by where we come close to touching base with reality: Even its most human beats, those precious hints of relatable qualities that encourage our empathy, are elongated, distorted, rendered nigh unrecognizable by exaggeration. Lu Over the Wall isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, and for the average moviegoer, that’s very much a trait worth embracing. The plot is both simple and not: Teenager Kai (voiced by Michael Sinterniklaas in the English dub), recently relocated from Tokyo to the quiet fishing village of Hinashi, spends his days doing what most teenage boys do, sullenly hunkering down in his room and shutting out the world. As Kai struggles with his self-imposed isolation, he befriends Lu (Christine Marie Cabanos), a manic pixie dream mermaid wrought in miniature. What’s a solitary emo boy to do in a literal and figurative fish-out-of-water plot that’s buttressed by xenophobic overtones? Lu Over the Wall blends joy with political allegory with vibrant color palettes with storytelling magic, plus some actual magic, plus too many upbeat musical interludes to count. Describing the film merely as “creative” feels like an insult to its inspired madness.—Andy Crump
Get To Know About The 10 Most Popular Anime Movies On Netflix
When it comes to dark industrial sci-fi, Tsutomu Nihei is a visionary. Trained as an architect before pursuing a career as a manga author, Nihei’s art is simultaneously sparse and labyrinthine, his body of work defined by a unifying obsession with invented spaces. Byzantine factories with gothic accents spanning across impossible chasms, populated by bow-legged synthoids and ghoulish predators touting serrated bone-swords and pulsating gristle-guns. His first and most famous series, Blame!, is considered the key text in Nihei’s aesthetic legacy, going so far as to inspire everything from videogames, to music, and even art and fashion. Past attempts have been made to adapt the series into an anime, though none have been able to materialize successfully. That is, until now. With the support of Netflix, Hiroyuki Seshita of Polygon Pictures has delivered that long-awaited Blame! film. Set on a far-future Earth consumed by a massive, self-replicating superstructure known as The City, Blame! follows Killy, a taciturn loner, wandering the layers of the planet in search of a human possessing the “net terminal gene, ” an elusive trait thought to be the only means of halting the city’s perpetual hostile expansion. Boasting a
Short film anthologies are some of the most impressive showcases of boundary-pushing visual storytelling in animation, let alone Japanese animation. A cursory glance of anime anthologies produced within just the last 30 years is enough: From Masao Maruyama and Rintaro’s 1987 film Labyrinth Tales (known in the West as Neo Tokyo), to Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1995 film Memories, to even the 2003 American-Japanese co-production Animatrix, anthologies stand the test of time not only as landmarks of anime history, but as a vital venue through which to facilitate the introduction of new and exciting talent into the animation industry. With this mind, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, along with former Ghibli animators Yoshiyuki Momose (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and Akihiko Yamashita (Howl’s Moving Castle), have pooled their significant creativity to create a new installment in the storied lineage of prestige anime anthologies: Modest Heroes, the first volume in Studio Ponoc’s series of animated short films. “Kanini & Kanino, ” directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, is the first and most explicitly “Ghibli-esque” of the anthology’s three shorts. Following the story of a pair of anthropomorphic crab children living at the bottom of a riverbed, the short could be interpreted as something of a reprise of Yonebayashi’s directorial debut, the 2010 film The Secret World of Arrietty, although this time conceived and written entirely by himself. The anthology’s second short, directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, is the volume’s most poignant installment and, arguably, the true namesake of Modest Heroes. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” tells of a young mother and her son Shun, a happy and otherwise unassuming little boy born with a debilitating food allergy to eggs. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” sets a high bar for the film going forward, but the anthology’s final short, “Invisible, ” manages to meet and yet even surpass those expectations. Directed by Akihiko Yamashita, known not only for his prior work on Howl’s Moving Castle, but also as a character designer on Yasuhiro Imagawa’s Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still, “Invisible” follows the story of a man who struggles with a condition that seemingly renders him completely unnoticeable to every person he comes across. Modest Heroes is a satisfying sophomore effort from Studio Ponoc, a collection of shorts that, together, resonate with the sentiment of that most joyous and courageous of adages made famous by the likes of Rod Serling: “…there’s nothing mightier than the meek.”—Toussaint Egan
Netflix series The Witcher was a rather massive hit for the streaming platform in 2019, introducing mainstream audiences everywhere to the dangerous world of Geralt of Rivia, a magically enhanced professional monster hunter known as a Witcher. Like a lot of prequels, the animated film Nightmare of the Wolf can often feel more interested in table setting for the next season of the live-action series than in telling a standalone story of its own. Your mileage will likely vary on whether you think that’s a good idea or not—hardcore fans will be delighted by the frequent namedropping and amped-up violence in the lead-up to the series’ return, while casual viewers may wonder what the big deal about any of this is. But Nightmare of the Wolf works because it unabashedly doubles down on much of what makes the original series so appealing, namely the rich lore that surrounds the existence of Witchers in general. And in doing so, it makes the original series feel like something much larger than one man’s story, expanding its world in a way that makes almost every aspect of it seem more complex and interesting than it did before. The film is technically a Vesemir origin story, but it’s also a crash course in how Witchers came to be, from the harsh conditions in which they are created to the uncomfortable position they occupy in the politics and cultural consciousness of the Continent. But most of all, Nightmare of the Wolf continues to muddy the moral waters of the Witcher universe, crafting complex characters in every shade of grey imaginable. Nightmare of the Wolf’s broader message about how we often create the monsters we fear the most certainly isn’t new. But those familiar beats ultimately help us see the world of the live-action series—and Geralt’s place in it—in a different way than we did before, one which both justifies the Continent’s distrust of Witchers and deepens our understanding of why these remaining men have chosen to keep on fighting anyway. —Lacy Baugher Milas.
Distributor GKids sells Lu Over the Wall as “family friendly, ” which it is, an innocuous, offbeat alternative to the conventional computer animated joints typically found in modern multiplexes. But there’s “whimsical” and there’s “weird, ” and Lu Over the Wall ventures well past the former and into the latter before director Masaaki Yuasa gets through the opening credits. Barely a moment goes by where we come close to touching base with reality: Even its most human beats, those precious hints of relatable qualities that encourage our empathy, are elongated, distorted, rendered nigh unrecognizable by exaggeration. Lu Over the Wall isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, and for the average moviegoer, that’s very much a trait worth embracing. The plot is both simple and not: Teenager Kai (voiced by Michael Sinterniklaas in the English dub), recently relocated from Tokyo to the quiet fishing village of Hinashi, spends his days doing what most teenage boys do, sullenly hunkering down in his room and shutting out the world. As Kai struggles with his self-imposed isolation, he befriends Lu (Christine Marie Cabanos), a manic pixie dream mermaid wrought in miniature. What’s a solitary emo boy to do in a literal and figurative fish-out-of-water plot that’s buttressed by xenophobic overtones? Lu Over the Wall blends joy with political allegory with vibrant color palettes with storytelling magic, plus some actual magic, plus too many upbeat musical interludes to count. Describing the film merely as “creative” feels like an insult to its inspired madness.—Andy Crump
Get To Know About The 10 Most Popular Anime Movies On Netflix
When it comes to dark industrial sci-fi, Tsutomu Nihei is a visionary. Trained as an architect before pursuing a career as a manga author, Nihei’s art is simultaneously sparse and labyrinthine, his body of work defined by a unifying obsession with invented spaces. Byzantine factories with gothic accents spanning across impossible chasms, populated by bow-legged synthoids and ghoulish predators touting serrated bone-swords and pulsating gristle-guns. His first and most famous series, Blame!, is considered the key text in Nihei’s aesthetic legacy, going so far as to inspire everything from videogames, to music, and even art and fashion. Past attempts have been made to adapt the series into an anime, though none have been able to materialize successfully. That is, until now. With the support of Netflix, Hiroyuki Seshita of Polygon Pictures has delivered that long-awaited Blame! film. Set on a far-future Earth consumed by a massive, self-replicating superstructure known as The City, Blame! follows Killy, a taciturn loner, wandering the layers of the planet in search of a human possessing the “net terminal gene, ” an elusive trait thought to be the only means of halting the city’s perpetual hostile expansion. Boasting a
Short film anthologies are some of the most impressive showcases of boundary-pushing visual storytelling in animation, let alone Japanese animation. A cursory glance of anime anthologies produced within just the last 30 years is enough: From Masao Maruyama and Rintaro’s 1987 film Labyrinth Tales (known in the West as Neo Tokyo), to Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1995 film Memories, to even the 2003 American-Japanese co-production Animatrix, anthologies stand the test of time not only as landmarks of anime history, but as a vital venue through which to facilitate the introduction of new and exciting talent into the animation industry. With this mind, director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, along with former Ghibli animators Yoshiyuki Momose (The Tale of The Princess Kaguya) and Akihiko Yamashita (Howl’s Moving Castle), have pooled their significant creativity to create a new installment in the storied lineage of prestige anime anthologies: Modest Heroes, the first volume in Studio Ponoc’s series of animated short films. “Kanini & Kanino, ” directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, is the first and most explicitly “Ghibli-esque” of the anthology’s three shorts. Following the story of a pair of anthropomorphic crab children living at the bottom of a riverbed, the short could be interpreted as something of a reprise of Yonebayashi’s directorial debut, the 2010 film The Secret World of Arrietty, although this time conceived and written entirely by himself. The anthology’s second short, directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, is the volume’s most poignant installment and, arguably, the true namesake of Modest Heroes. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” tells of a young mother and her son Shun, a happy and otherwise unassuming little boy born with a debilitating food allergy to eggs. “Life Ain’t Gonna Lose” sets a high bar for the film going forward, but the anthology’s final short, “Invisible, ” manages to meet and yet even surpass those expectations. Directed by Akihiko Yamashita, known not only for his prior work on Howl’s Moving Castle, but also as a character designer on Yasuhiro Imagawa’s Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still, “Invisible” follows the story of a man who struggles with a condition that seemingly renders him completely unnoticeable to every person he comes across. Modest Heroes is a satisfying sophomore effort from Studio Ponoc, a collection of shorts that, together, resonate with the sentiment of that most joyous and courageous of adages made famous by the likes of Rod Serling: “…there’s nothing mightier than the meek.”—Toussaint Egan
Netflix series The Witcher was a rather massive hit for the streaming platform in 2019, introducing mainstream audiences everywhere to the dangerous world of Geralt of Rivia, a magically enhanced professional monster hunter known as a Witcher. Like a lot of prequels, the animated film Nightmare of the Wolf can often feel more interested in table setting for the next season of the live-action series than in telling a standalone story of its own. Your mileage will likely vary on whether you think that’s a good idea or not—hardcore fans will be delighted by the frequent namedropping and amped-up violence in the lead-up to the series’ return, while casual viewers may wonder what the big deal about any of this is. But Nightmare of the Wolf works because it unabashedly doubles down on much of what makes the original series so appealing, namely the rich lore that surrounds the existence of Witchers in general. And in doing so, it makes the original series feel like something much larger than one man’s story, expanding its world in a way that makes almost every aspect of it seem more complex and interesting than it did before. The film is technically a Vesemir origin story, but it’s also a crash course in how Witchers came to be, from the harsh conditions in which they are created to the uncomfortable position they occupy in the politics and cultural consciousness of the Continent. But most of all, Nightmare of the Wolf continues to muddy the moral waters of the Witcher universe, crafting complex characters in every shade of grey imaginable. Nightmare of the Wolf’s broader message about how we often create the monsters we fear the most certainly isn’t new. But those familiar beats ultimately help us see the world of the live-action series—and Geralt’s place in it—in a different way than we did before, one which both justifies the Continent’s distrust of Witchers and deepens our understanding of why these remaining men have chosen to keep on fighting anyway. —Lacy Baugher Milas.
Distributor GKids sells Lu Over the Wall as “family friendly, ” which it is, an innocuous, offbeat alternative to the conventional computer animated joints typically found in modern multiplexes. But there’s “whimsical” and there’s “weird, ” and Lu Over the Wall ventures well past the former and into the latter before director Masaaki Yuasa gets through the opening credits. Barely a moment goes by where we come close to touching base with reality: Even its most human beats, those precious hints of relatable qualities that encourage our empathy, are elongated, distorted, rendered nigh unrecognizable by exaggeration. Lu Over the Wall isn’t a movie that takes itself seriously, and for the average moviegoer, that’s very much a trait worth embracing. The plot is both simple and not: Teenager Kai (voiced by Michael Sinterniklaas in the English dub), recently relocated from Tokyo to the quiet fishing village of Hinashi, spends his days doing what most teenage boys do, sullenly hunkering down in his room and shutting out the world. As Kai struggles with his self-imposed isolation, he befriends Lu (Christine Marie Cabanos), a manic pixie dream mermaid wrought in miniature. What’s a solitary emo boy to do in a literal and figurative fish-out-of-water plot that’s buttressed by xenophobic overtones? Lu Over the Wall blends joy with political allegory with vibrant color palettes with storytelling magic, plus some actual magic, plus too many upbeat musical interludes to count. Describing the film merely as “creative” feels like an insult to its inspired madness.—Andy Crump
Get To Know About The 10 Most Popular Anime Movies On Netflix
When it comes to dark industrial sci-fi, Tsutomu Nihei is a visionary. Trained as an architect before pursuing a career as a manga author, Nihei’s art is simultaneously sparse and labyrinthine, his body of work defined by a unifying obsession with invented spaces. Byzantine factories with gothic accents spanning across impossible chasms, populated by bow-legged synthoids and ghoulish predators touting serrated bone-swords and pulsating gristle-guns. His first and most famous series, Blame!, is considered the key text in Nihei’s aesthetic legacy, going so far as to inspire everything from videogames, to music, and even art and fashion. Past attempts have been made to adapt the series into an anime, though none have been able to materialize successfully. That is, until now. With the support of Netflix, Hiroyuki Seshita of Polygon Pictures has delivered that long-awaited Blame! film. Set on a far-future Earth consumed by a massive, self-replicating superstructure known as The City, Blame! follows Killy, a taciturn loner, wandering the layers of the planet in search of a human possessing the “net terminal gene, ” an elusive trait thought to be the only means of halting the city’s perpetual hostile expansion. Boasting a
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