# Best Underrated Anime Movies

Underrated is a slippery word, so here's the criterion this list actually applies: films that lost the discovery lottery. No franchise behind them, no seasonal conversation, no algorithm pushing them into anyone's feed, and often a release scheduled against something louder or a premise too odd to summarise in one line. Critics know most of these perfectly well, so that isn't the gap. The gap is that almost nobody you personally know has seen them. Two categories were deliberately kept out: films that are merely old, since age is not the same thing as obscurity, and films that are underrated for entirely sound reasons. What remains is unusually varied, because the only trait these genuinely share is a marketing failure rather than a genre. There's a Christmas comedy in here, a wartime domestic drama, a hand-drawn racing film and a samurai picture. The order runs loosely from the easiest to love toward the most demanding, so if you take only one recommendation, take an early one.

1. **[Tokyo Godfathers](https://hozuna.com/anime/tokyo-godfathers)**: Three homeless people, a runaway teenager, a trans woman and a bitter alcoholic, find an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and set out across Tokyo to return it. It's a comedy, a glorious coincidence machine, and the warmest film on this list, which blindsides everyone who knows Satoshi Kon only for messing with reality. The city is drawn with unusual honesty about who actually lives on its margins. Start here: it's the most immediately likeable thing on the list by a wide margin.
2. **[Millennium Actress](https://hozuna.com/anime/millennium-actress)**: The Kon film squeezed out between his notorious first and his flashy last. A retired actress recounts her life to a film crew, and the movie flatly refuses to separate her memories from her roles, sliding between eras and genres inside a single cut. What initially looks like a formal trick turns out to be the emotional point, a life spent chasing one person shot as a chase across cinema itself. Warm, dizzying, and criminally undersold to this day.
3. **[Maquia](https://hozuna.com/anime/maquia)**: Mari Okada's directorial debut, and a film almost nobody saw. Its heroine belongs to a people who stop aging young; she raises a human child and then spends the rest of the runtime outliving him by degrees. The fantasy scaffolding is thin and the emotional writing is merciless, which is an unusual trade to make deliberately. It tends to wreck anyone who has raised a child, and a fair number of people who haven't. Bring tissues, and don't put it on at the end of a bad day.
4. **[In This Corner of the World](https://hozuna.com/anime/in-this-corner-of-the-world)**: A young woman marries into a family near Hiroshima and gets on with cooking, mending and making do while the war closes in at the edges of her ordinary days. It's the anti-spectacle war film: patient, domestic, genuinely funny in places, and devastating precisely because it never leaves kitchen height. A small production that had to fight to exist, and one of the finest things animation has ever done with history. Slow by design, and unforgettable if you let it work on you.
5. **[The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl](https://hozuna.com/anime/the-night-is-short-walk-on-girl)**: Pure joy, and a total tonal outlier here. One long elastic night in Kyoto follows a young woman drinking her way through a chain of increasingly absurd encounters while a lovesick student engineers coincidences to meet her. Yuasa animates it like a rubber band, colours screaming, bodies stretching, the pace never once relenting. The wordplay comes fast and the logic is deliberately drunk. Take this one if you'd rather be charmed than moved, and skip it if you want a plot that behaves.
6. **[Josee, the Tiger and the Fish](https://hozuna.com/anime/josee-the-tiger-and-the-fish)**: A quiet, grounded romance that got lost in a crowded year. He wants to dive; she draws, rarely leaves the house, and has a tongue like a blade. What makes it work is specificity, because her disability is written with real detail and without a drop of pity, and both leads are permitted to be selfish and ambitious rather than merely lovable. Sweet without turning saccharine, and rare for caring far more about what two people want from their lives than about whether they kiss.
7. **[Redline](https://hozuna.com/anime/redline)**: A hand-drawn racing film made with an obsessiveness bordering on self-harm, which then landed in front of almost nobody. Every impact bends and stretches, the camera flatly refuses to hold still, and the whole thing feels like it might vibrate off the screen. The story is deliberately thin because it exists to move, and the design is pure trash-culture invention. It has since become a cult object among animators. Wrong choice for depth, unbeatable if you want to feel something physically.
8. **[Sword of the Stranger](https://hozuna.com/anime/sword-of-the-stranger)**: The pure-execution pick, and the least demanding thing on the list. A nameless swordsman with a reason not to draw his blade ends up protecting a boy and his dog from people who want them badly. The plot is a familiar shape executed cleanly, and the reason it earns a slot is the fighting: the final duel ranks among the best-animated swordplay anyone has drawn, weight and footwork included. No homework, no message, and not one wasted scene.
9. **[Jin-Roh](https://hozuna.com/anime/jin-roh)**: The hardest sit here, which is why it's last. It lost its audience twice: no franchise or hook to sell it, then a credit that sends the auteur crowd toward its writer and away from the man who actually directed it. Skippers miss the inverse of the racing film above, craft spent entirely on restraint, and the soberest register animation has attempted. If you think the medium can't do adult tragedy, this is the rebuttal.

## FAQ

### What counts as underrated here?

Films that never got a fair shot at an audience: no franchise, no hype cycle, sometimes a release window that buried them outright. Most are well regarded by people who write about animation, and the shortfall is purely in how many people have actually sat down and watched them.

### Do I need to know anything about anime to enjoy these?

Less than for most acclaimed lists, honestly. Several of these are simply good films that happen to be animated, including a crime comedy, a war story and a romance, with no genre conventions to decode and no prior viewing assumed anywhere.

### Which is the safest starting point?

The Christmas one at the top. It's funny, warm and immediately legible, and it doubles as the best proof that its director wasn't only interested in unsettling people. After that, almost anything further down the list goes down easier.

### Are they all serious and sad?

Not at all, whatever the medium's reputation for solemn art films suggests. Two of these are outright comedies, one is a pure action showcase, and the melancholy picks tend toward gentle rather than punishing, with one clear exception near the end.

### Why do so many good films end up like this?

Animation gets sold on brand far more than on quality, and an unfamiliar original with no manga or franchise attached has almost nothing to grab onto in a crowded release calendar. That's a distribution problem rather than a quality one, and it's precisely the gap this list exists to close.