You Need to Watch These Anime Shows

I'll be honest. I used to be embarrassed to admit I watched anime. Not because I thought it was bad, but because of the "oh, so you're one of those" look. I feel like with the K-wave, that's done now.

After all, when Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle became the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, surpassing even Hollywood blockbusters, that’s saying a lot. You're probably not the weird one anymore. Everyone else is just late.

The thing I always struggled to explain to friends is that anime is not just a genre. It's not all giant robots and schoolgirls. It's a medium. Within it lives some of the most ambitious storytelling I've come across.

If you've never watched anime, or you tried it once and bounced off something that wasn't right for you, this is the list I'd hand you. Just six shows — some old, some new — that I'd genuinely recommend to anyone who loves a good story told well.

Attack on Titan

Start here if you want to understand why people lose their minds over anime. What looks like a monster survival show in episode one is, by the final season, a meditation on war, nationalism, and moral collapse that would make prestige TV writers uncomfortable. I've recommended this to people who swore they'd never watch anime. Every single one came back asking what to watch next. That's the metric.

Vinland Saga

I watched the second season of this alone on a Tuesday night and genuinely had to take a walk after. It's a Viking epic — but slow, deliberate, almost philosophical. The whole show is asking what it means to live without violence as your identity. Thorfinn, the protagonist, spends years becoming someone I wasn't sure I could root for, and then the show quietly makes you understand him completely. It wrecked me in the best way.

Blue Eye Samurai

This came out on Netflix in late 2023 and I'm still annoyed it didn't get more attention. Edo-period Japan, a mixed-race swordsman hunting the man responsible for their birth, animation that genuinely looks like moving paintings. The fight in episode five — you'll know the one — is the best action sequence I've seen in years. On any screen, animated or not. It got renewed for a second season and I've been impatient about it ever since.

Demon Slayer

Yes, it's the most mainstream one on this list. No, that doesn't make it less worth your time. The story is simple — boy loses family to demons, trains to hunt them — but the animation is so absurdly good that it almost doesn't matter. The Infinity Castle film, which just broke box office records globally, is the kind of thing you watch and think: how is this hand-drawn? If you want a single thing to put on that will immediately make sense of why the world is talking about anime right now, it's this.

Vagabond

Based on the life of Miyamoto Musashi — Japan's most mythologised swordsman — and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's a manga more than an anime, but I'm including it because it deserves to be on every list like this. The artwork looks like ink paintings. The story is about obsession, mastery, and what it does to a person. Musashi is not a good man, and that's entirely the point.

Berserk

The one that started it for a lot of us. Dark medieval fantasy, a protagonist who has had genuinely everything taken from him, and a betrayal at the centre of the story that remains one of the most devastating things in fiction — I'll say no more. The 1997 anime is where you begin. Then you go to the manga, which the late Kentaro Miura spent thirty years drawing, panel by panel, with a level of detail that borders on obsessive.