Hozuna Lists
Curated Guides
Page 5 of 7
Best Studio Ghibli Films
Ranking Ghibli feels odd because the choice is not between good films and bad ones. It comes down to which side of the studio matters most to you. Hayao Miyazaki's films return to flight, weather, food, capable people absorbed in their work, and childhood treated with respect instead of nervous protection. Isao Takahata worked in another register. He could make films without any magic and had no interest in sending the audience home comforted. Ignoring that side would turn a list about a studio into a list about one director, so both belong here. The common thread is the filmmakers' refusal to talk down to anyone. Morals are not spelled out at the finish, consequences last, and supposed villains often turn out to be people whose interests cannot be reconciled. Our order reflects how much each film reveals about Ghibli, not how charming it happens to be. The exclusions still hurt. Porco Rosso, Whisper of the Heart and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya all have cases strong enough to deserve a hearing.
Best Makoto Shinkai Movies
Makoto Shinkai keeps returning to distance in his films. His characters are separated by train lines and time zones, and sometimes an entire weather system stands between them. The deeper separation is harder to measure: they feel something intensely, struggle to put it into words, and miss their chance before the moment is gone. Shinkai often gets described as the heir to a certain throne, but that comparison obscures the concerns that make his work his own. His supposed forebear created worlds audiences long to inhabit. Shinkai creates distances that make you desperate to see them closed. The selections here begin with the generous blockbusters that made him a household name, then move toward the quieter early films where his methods are easier to see. Their order reflects how welcoming each movie is for a newcomer, not a judgment of quality. A warning is still in order. Some of these films are genuinely devastating, and beautiful light in a Shinkai frame should never be taken as a promise of a happy ending.
Anime Like Your Name
What people chase after Your Name is rarely the body-swap plot. It's the ache: that specific feeling of being tethered to someone you keep missing by minutes, in a world rendered so beautifully that the longing registers as weather. So this list is sorted by that ache rather than by premise. It opens with Shinkai's own shelf, because nobody else lights a sky quite the way he does and the family resemblance is real, then steps outside his filmography to the films and series that hit the same nerve without a single supernatural trick. One warning worth giving up front: several of these deliberately withhold the miracle. Your Name lets its lovers close the gap, and some of the best things in this neighbourhood refuse to, which is exactly why they stay lodged in people for years. We've left off the pretty-but-hollow romances that copy the visual grammar without earning the feeling, and we've put two long-form series near the end for anyone who'd rather live in this mood for a season than pass through it in two hours.
Anime Like Akira
Akira left three separate legacies, and what you mean by an anime like Akira depends entirely on which one grabbed you. There's the craft: a hand-drawn city so dense that the animation itself is the event. There's the cyberpunk: bikes, corrupt institutions, neon, bodies rebuilt and ruined. And there's the dread, which is the real subject, power handed to people far too young and too damaged to hold it in a country still living on top of an old catastrophe. This list serves all three rather than pretending they're one thing, which is why it isn't a straight run of rainy neon cities. It starts with the closest thematic relatives, moves through the picks chosen for pure craft, and finishes on tone. Two entries have no cybernetics in them whatsoever and are here because they share Akira's actual argument about what institutions do to the people inside them. Skipped entirely: the shows that merely dress the part, holograms and katanas and rain, while running on ordinary shonen fuel underneath.
Best Non-Ghibli Anime Movies
Ghibli is the default answer to what anime film someone should watch, and that's a problem, because it leaves people with the impression that everything else in the medium is television. The rest of animated cinema has been producing theatrical work of extraordinary range for decades, covering cyberpunk, psychological horror, social realism and disaster romance, and this list is the case for it. The rule was simple and absolute: no Ghibli, no exceptions, not even the Takahata deep cuts that would otherwise walk onto any best-of. What survives that rule still stretches from a body-horror riot to a quiet film about a deaf girl and the boy who bullied her. Treat the order as a route rather than a ranking. The widest doors come first, the films you'd hand to a friend who doesn't watch anime, then it moves progressively toward the ones best saved for after you've done the tour. Nothing here requires prior knowledge, and only a couple of picks assume any appetite for the genuinely strange.
Most Beautiful Anime Movies
Beautiful is a lazy word for animation, so this list treats it as a question rather than a compliment: beautiful how? Photoreal light behaves nothing like painted forest, which behaves nothing like charcoal lines left deliberately unfinished, and a film can be stunning in stills while being completely dead in motion. Every pick here is beautiful in a different technical dialect, and each blurb names which one, because that contrast is the whole organising idea. You'll move through sunlight, rain, ink, watercolour, digital maximalism and rough sketchbook linework, roughly in that order, travelling from the polished end of the spectrum toward the expressive one. What got left off: the titles that photograph superbly for a screenshot account but move like a slideshow, and the ones whose reputation rests entirely on a single famous frame. Beauty in animation lives in movement, and everything below holds up while it's actually running rather than only when you pause it.
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.
Best Anime of 2024
In 2024, several of anime's biggest bets paid off almost at once. Adaptations that fans had waited years to see arrived within months of one another, with serious money behind them and worldwide same-day releases. Unusually, most lived up to the anticipation. The result was a loud, communal year, argued over from week to week by an audience larger than ever. The quieter successes made it a great year, not only a busy one. There was a band drama almost nobody expected to contend, a historical adventure about a boy who survives by fleeing, and a romance that pays close attention to how sound works. Any of them could have led a less crowded year. Our order runs from the loudest show to the quietest because that matches what watching 2024 anime actually felt like. We excluded continuations of long-running franchises. Several of those were excellent, but they require prior viewing, while every choice here gives you a clean place to begin.
Best Anime of 2025
There was no emperor of anime in 2025. No single title swallowed the conversation, and no adaptation had everybody sitting down to watch on the same night. If the only measure of a year is the size of its biggest show, 2025 can look quiet. Look through the middle of the schedule, though, and the picture changes. We got a first-rate figure-skating drama and a pair of shonen series that looked and moved unlike anything else airing. Two romances treated their characters' feelings with real intelligence. A striking number of original productions also arrived without an established franchise to carry them. That abundance of originals is the year's real story. Without a juggernaut setting the agenda, shows bearing a clear authorial fingerprint had space to find viewers and breathe. This list is not ordered by scale because scale did not define the year. Instead, the sequence keeps switching registers, moving from sport to shonen, then into stranger territory and romance. That restless variety is a fair reflection of what watching anime through 2025 actually felt like.
Anime Like Kaguya-sama: Love Is War
Kaguya-sama sounds easy to sum up, but finding a replacement is much harder. It is a romantic comedy about two brilliant students who are too proud to confess. In practice, the show turns the tiniest social exchange into a military engagement. The narration raises the stakes, the direction commits completely to each absurd crisis, and the comic timing lands with outrageous confidence. Then the series reveals how much it cares about the frightened people hiding beneath all that posturing. Almost no other anime attempts the same combination, so this list follows individual ingredients instead of pretending there is a perfect match. Some picks use an information gap, letting the comedy come from one person knowing what another does not. Others share Kaguya's gift for presenting a trivial moment as if human history depends on it. A few leave the war behind and deliver the emotional openness that Kaguya withholds for seasons. The order moves roughly from comic machinery toward emotional payoff. Begin near the top for jokes, or look lower if the ache was what stayed with you.