The Major Genres of Anime Explained

Anime is a vast and underrated medium. Unlike most Western animation that keeps to children’s programs or raunchy adult sitcoms, anime stretches across all genres and demographics. This much variety can make it daunting to leap into, especially since most anime have English subtitles rather than getting dubbed with English audio. Of course, subtitles aren’t the largest obstacle in the world, so here are several types of anime explained with examples and a recommendation for each.

Shounen Anime Focus on Young Boys Ages 10-15

Shounen translates to “young boy,” which also captures the target audience of shounen anime — young boys, usually between the ages of 10 and 15. This may be the most familiar type of anime to some readers as some classic shounen anime like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and Yu-Gi-Oh! were often a part of Saturday morning cartoons on channels like Cartoon Network and 4Kids. Shounen anime is often action-focused, placing most of the focus on fighting as Dragon Ball Z does or following a competition that feels like a battle, such as Haikyu!, a sports anime about volleyball that frames its games as battles between two opposing teams. This action is often blended with comedy in the calmer moments or even in the fights themselves. Many shounen anime, especially those adapted from manga published in the venerated Weekly Shonen Jump publication, touch on similar themes of friendship, hope, and unity in the face of evil.

Recommendation:Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.In many ways, Demon Slayer exemplifies the core themes and tropes that make shounen anime. It’s a classic battle anime that focuses on a secret corp of demon slayers who use swords and mystical breathing techniques to hunt demons at night, but the protagonist, Tanjiro, is the real catcher here. Tanjiro is the quintessential shounen anime protagonist — driven and extremely powerful, but also deeply kind and caring, and seemingly the inheritor of a mysterious destiny. This coupled with stunning animation makes Demon Slayer a great introduction to shounen anime, and it’s available to watch on Netflix.

Shoujo Anime Focus on Young Girls Ages 10-15

Shoujo anime is very similar to shounen anime but aimed at young girls in the same age range of 10-15. Shoujo anime tend to focus on idealized friendships or romances as their primary motivators rather than thematic material running alongside battles. However, classics like Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2 show that shoujo isn’t afraid of embracing its own action sequences, even if they come in a very different package to shounen anime. It’s not uncommon for shoujo romances to have a very strong will-they-won’t-they factor with much of a series’s conflict coming from a protagonist (usually a girl) and a serious love interest who both like each other, but are too timid or face other difficulties before they can confess their love. Other shows can derive tension from a love triangle of sorts, such as the relationship between Tohru, Yuki, and Kyo in Fruits Basket.

Recommendation:Kimi Ni Todoke. It’s about Sawako Kuranuma, an outcast high schooler who’s feared by her classmates for her resemblance to Samara Osorio from The Ring. It falls into the will-they-won’t-they plot motivator with Sawako falling for the popular boy, Kazehaya, but facing a mountain of obstacles between them. The true strength of Kimi Ni Todoke is that it focuses on the female friendships Sawako builds with her classmates as much as it does the romance between her and Kazehaya. It creates a far more compelling and heartfelt story of a young girl coming into her identity than if it only focused on her romantic life.

Seinen Is Aimed at Men Over the Age of 18

Seinen is anime aimed at older men than shounen, usually those over the age of 18. With this more mature audience, the content will often be far more mature as well — for example, the anime, Highschool of the Dead, is filled with explicit sexual content and graphic violence. However, seinen shows don’t just use their more mature audience to display bloody violence or graphic sexuality. They also speak to a more mature audience. Most seinen shows don’t focus on high school or middle school students as many shounen and shoujo do, preferring to focus on struggles of adulthood like The Great Passage, an anime about a middle-aged man who discovers a passion for dictionary-making. When seinen anime does focus on younger characters, it often does so in a manner that doesn’t focus on the high school aspect and instead shows youth struggling with more mature problems.

Recommendation: March Comes In Like A Lion. This show is a prime example of young people struggling with adult issues. It follows a 17-year-old named Rei Kiriyama who lives alone off his winnings from shogi tournaments, a board game rather like chess. March Comes In Like A Lion doesn’t focus on the shogi matches the way a shonen might. It’s more about Rei’s introversion and chronic depression, and the people around him that help draw him out of his shell. It’s a deeply introspective and psychological show that utilizes its animation to show how chaotic our minds can be and showcases the mature themes seinen can embrace.

Josei Has a More Mature Audience Than Shoujo

Josei anime is aimed at adult women, much as seinen is aimed at adult men. At first glance, it can seem quite similar to shoujo as both heavily feature romance and friendships for female protagonists as their primary story. The main difference comes from how these relationships are portrayed. Often, shoujo romances are idealized fantasies, but josei anime look at much more realistic relationships, which potentially leads them down darker stories. An offshoot of josei is yaoi, or boys’ love shows that primarily focus on two men who are in love with each other. Yaoi is almost always entirely focused on romance and its complications, like the series, World’s First Great Love, which focuses on two young men who reignite a high school romance after discovering they work at the same publishing company.

Recommendation: Princess Jellyfish.Princess Jellyfish is about an unemployed 19-year-old woman named Tsukimi Kurashita who lives with 5 other unemployed women in a shared apartment. Their simple lives are upended when they’re introduced to a beautiful woman who turns out to be a wealthy cross-dressing male college student. The inclusion of this student, Kuranosuke Koibuchi, initiates a love triangle and plenty of other complications for the women in the apartment. Princess Jellyfish is a relatively simple, chill show that shows off how josei builds its relationships.

Ecchi Anime Cover More Explicit Topics

Ecchi is the anime genre you need to hide from your children. While not explicitly hentai, much of the focus of ecchi is sexual-based tensions and humor. These shows often push the boundaries of anime and hentai while rarely crossing over the line — though some, such as Interspecies Reviewers, seem to forget about this line entirely. Many ecchi shows feature a young man surrounded by beautiful romance and focus heavily on the comedy that one can derive from such a situation. If you’ve ever seen a meme about an anime character’s face planting into a girl’s chest, there’s a pretty good chance that it was a gag from an ecchi show. Lots of ecchi shows tend to be comedies, often romantic comedies. Other genres can also have ecchi elements, such as the previously mentioned Highschool of the Dead.

Recommendation: Monster Musume: Everyday Life With Monster Girls. As the title suggests, this show’s hook is that all the lovely ladies end up being monster girls like the lamia Miia and the centaur Centorea. It’s set in Japan after the government announces that mythical creatures are real and begins integrating them into human society. The protagonist is a Japanese student named Kimihito Kurusu who ends up fostering several monster girls, or liminals, quite by accident and, with time, they all fall for him. Monster Musume is a light-hearted show with plenty of fun gags and genuinely interesting characters, making it a perfect entry point for ecchi.

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Isekai

Isekai is a genre that’s grown more popular in recent years. It translates literally to “other world” and that’s what this genre focuses on — protagonists who get sent to another world, usually after suffering a sudden death in our world. Occasionally, protagonists are not reincarnated in another world but summoned to another world like Naofumi Iwatani in The Rising of the Shield Hero. Some common features of isekai anime include a fantastical world filled with magic and fantasy races like elves, and an overpowered protagonist. There are very few science-fiction isekai, with most favoring fantasy aesthetics. Many isekai protagonists get resurrected with overpowered abilities that make them far stronger than anybody else in the new world, which became so common that having a weak protagonist became the hook for some isekai like Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. Most recently, DC announced their Suicide Squad Isekai based on the beloved DC characters, indicating that the popularity of the anime genre right now.

Recommendation:That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. It follows the traditional setup; a corporate worker named Satoru Mikami is stabbed on his way home from work one day and gets reincarnated as a lowly slime in a fantasy world. But this anime leans into the overpowered protagonist trope rather than the weak one and Satoru, who goes by Rimiru in the new world, quickly becomes the ruler of the forest he woke up in and establishes a nation of monsters. Slime is a fun anime that takes a surprisingly in-depth look at how countries function as Rimiru combines his overwhelming magical prowess and modern know-how to create an advanced society for his monster friends while defeating powerful enemies.

Mecha Anime Include Sci-Fi Adventures Like ‘Gundam’ and ‘Trigun’

To round out the list, we’ll look at the mecha genre. Mecha anime are almost always heavy science-fiction based stories revolving around robots in some manner, most often using massive machines with human pilots. Famous examples of mecha include Gundam, a franchise with many spin-off series. Mecha anime has inspired many shows and movies that Western audiences might be more familiar with. These include Pacific Rim and Power Rangers, which would frequently feature mecha battles. Mecha anime often criticize war through their themes and generally take advantage of using humans to pilot gigantic robots as an introspective storytelling tool that helps signify how humankind might be insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, such as with Neon Genesis Evangelion. Some mecha anime are massive, space-crossing epics like many Gundam series or the sci-fi western anime, Trigun, while others are much more down-to-earth and focused, like the classic manga, Astro Boy.

Recommendation:Gurren Lagann. Gurren Lagann isn’t the most serious mecha anime you’ll ever find as it’s rather light-hearted. It takes place in the distant future when Beastmen had used mechas called Gunmen to drive humankind underground in large cities. The protagonist, Simon, is a digger tasked with expanding the city further down – until a Gunman comes crashing through the ceiling alongside a human rebel named Yoko. Simon finds a buried mecha he calls Lagann during the battle and, alongside his big bro Kamina, ends up taking down the enemy Gunman and ascending to the surface with Yoko. Gurren Lagann manages to touch on a lot of mecha elements. The beginning of the series is fairly grounded, but after a time skip in the middle, it quickly expands to the stars and finds a mighty enemy for a galactic battle that you won’t soon forget.