Top 10 Best Anime of All Time, Ranked
Ranking “best anime of all time” inevitably means weighing genuinely different things against each other: a tightly plotted, complete story versus a decades-long cultural institution, a niche critical darling versus a series that shaped an entire generation’s introduction to the medium.
This list tries to balance both, favoring series that combine lasting cultural impact with storytelling and craft that hold up on a rewatch, rather than picking purely by nostalgia or purely by critical consensus.
Here is the full ranking first. The argument for each placement follows.
- Cowboy Bebop
- Hunter x Hunter
- Death Note
- My Hero Academia
- Attack on Titan
- Demon Slayer
- One Piece
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
- Dragon Ball Z
- Naruto
10. Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop’s influence on anime well beyond its own genre is hard to overstate. Its blend of space western, noir, and jazz-scored melancholy, built around a crew of bounty hunters each running from their own past, remains a masterclass in tone and atmosphere over two decades after it first aired.
Its comparatively short run, just twenty-six episodes, means it never overstays its welcome, and its influence on pacing and visual style is still visible in countless later series that never quite matched its specific, unhurried confidence.
Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack deserves its own specific mention as a major reason this series has aged so well. Few anime have ever been so thoroughly defined by their music, to the point where discussing the show’s legacy without mentioning “Tank!” and the wider Seatbelts discography would leave out an essential piece of why it’s remembered so fondly decades later.
9. Hunter x Hunter
Hunter x Hunter is frequently cited by longtime fans as one of the most intelligently written shonen series ever produced, thanks to Yoshihiro Togashi’s meticulous, rule-based power systems and his willingness to let arcs like the Chimera Ant storyline run dark and morally complex rather than staying safely upbeat.
Its notorious, sometimes years-long publication hiatuses are a real, honest drawback worth naming, but the material that does exist is dense enough with genuine craft that it remains a fixture on nearly every serious best-anime discussion.
What sets it apart from most other entries on this list is how consistently it subverts expectations about its own genre. Arcs that appear to be building toward a straightforward tournament or power escalation frequently pivot into something far stranger and more thematically ambitious than the setup suggested, which keeps even longtime shonen fans unable to predict where the story is heading next.
8. Death Note
Death Note’s tightly constructed cat-and-mouse battle between Light Yagami and the detective L remains one of the most purely gripping psychological thrillers the medium has produced. Its central moral question, whether Light’s vigilante killings are justified, is handled with a level of nuance that keeps the show relevant to ethical debate decades after it first aired.
Its comparatively contained scope, a battle of wits rather than an escalating action series, makes it one of the more approachable entries on this list for viewers who don’t typically gravitate toward longer-form shonen storytelling.
Its cultural footprint also extends well beyond typical anime fandom circles, referenced constantly in general internet culture through its most iconic scenes and reaction images, which is a rare kind of crossover reach for a series built around courtroom-style psychological deduction rather than action spectacle.
7. My Hero Academia
My Hero Academia revitalized the classic shonen hero formula for a new generation, building a large, well-realized ensemble cast around Izuku Midoriya’s journey from a quirkless outcast to one of the most promising heroes of his generation. Its blend of superhero spectacle and emotional character work has made it one of the defining modern shonen series.
Its continued cultural relevance, spawning films, spin-offs, and one of the most active current anime fandoms, reflects just how thoroughly it captured a new generation’s attention the way Naruto and Dragon Ball did for previous ones.
Its ensemble cast deserves specific credit for how thoroughly it’s been developed. Class 1-A alone contains close to twenty named students, and the series has found time to give the vast majority of them real, distinct arcs rather than leaving most of the cast as background decoration around Deku and Bakugo, a difficult balance for a cast this large to strike well.
6. Attack on Titan
Few series have committed as thoroughly to recontextualizing their own premise multiple times as Attack on Titan, systematically dismantling nearly every assumption established in its opening season across its full run. Its willingness to complicate its own apparent good-versus-evil setup into something morally ambiguous set a new bar for ambition in mainstream anime storytelling.
Its production values, especially in its later seasons, rank among the most visually ambitious the medium has produced, and its ending remains one of the most discussed and debated conclusions in recent anime history.
Its opening season alone reshaped what mainstream audiences expected from a dark fantasy anime, and the shift in animation studios partway through its run, while controversial among some fans at the time, ultimately delivered some of the most technically ambitious sequences the medium has produced for its climactic final stretch.
5. Demon Slayer
Demon Slayer’s combination of stunning animation from Ufotable and a protagonist whose defining trait is empathy even toward his enemies helped introduce an entirely new wave of viewers to anime as a mainstream cultural phenomenon. Its breathing-style combat system gives its fights a structural clarity that makes them easy to follow even for newcomers to the genre.
Its cultural footprint, breaking box office records with its film releases and becoming a mainstream phenomenon well beyond typical anime fandom, marks it as one of the most significant anime of the last decade.
Tanjiro’s specific characterization, a protagonist defined by empathy rather than rage even toward the demons that destroyed his family, gave the genre a distinct emotional center at a moment when a lot of contemporary dark fantasy leaned harder into grimness for its own sake. That choice is a large part of why the series resonated so broadly beyond its core action-fantasy audience.
4. One Piece
One Piece’s sheer scope, running for over a quarter century and still ongoing, makes it one of the most significant achievements in serialized storytelling in any medium. Its found-family crew dynamic, deep worldbuilding, and consistently ambitious story arcs have kept it a fixture at the top of the genre for its entire multi-decade run.
Its ongoing status means the story hasn’t allowed itself a tidy, fully assessable ending yet, but the sheer volume of consistently strong material it’s produced across so many years is nearly unmatched anywhere in the medium.
Few creators have maintained this level of quality control over a single continuous story for this long. Eiichiro Oda has retained direct creative control over the manga for its entire run, and the meticulous long-term planning visible in how early throwaway details pay off dozens or even hundreds of chapters later is a rare achievement in serialized storytelling of any kind, in any medium.
3. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Widely regarded as one of the most complete, well-executed stories the medium has produced, Brotherhood tells the tale of two brothers seeking to restore what they lost through forbidden alchemy, building an epic that touches on war, genocide, and government corruption while never losing sight of its central family relationship.
Its willingness to actually follow its source manga to a genuine, satisfying conclusion, rather than diverging into an anime-original ending, is a big part of why it’s so consistently ranked at or near the top of best-anime lists compiled by critics and fans alike.
Its thematic ambition also sets it apart: the story tackles the horrors of war, the ethics of blind obedience to a corrupt state, and the specific cost of trying to bring back the dead, all while never losing sight of Edward and Alphonse’s central relationship as brothers. Very few action-adventure anime manage to be this politically and philosophically substantive without sacrificing the emotional core that makes the story work in the first place.
2. Dragon Ball Z
Dragon Ball Z’s influence on the entire shonen genre, and on anime’s global popularity generally, is difficult to overstate. It essentially defined the modern power-escalation battle formula that countless later series would build on, and its cultural reach extends well beyond dedicated anime fandom into broader global pop culture in a way very few other series have matched.
Its age shows in places, and its pacing hasn’t always aged gracefully, but its foundational importance to the entire medium’s international popularity earns it a spot near the very top of this list regardless.
Its rivalry between Goku and Vegeta, covered in more detail in a dedicated post on that rivalry, remains one of the most influential character dynamics in the entire genre, and the series’ iconic transformations, Super Saiyan chief among them, have become so culturally embedded that they’re recognizable even to people who’ve never watched a single episode.
Dragon Ball Z’s placement at second rather than first is worth a word of justification. Its influence on the medium is arguably larger than anything else here, and a list ranked purely on historical importance would put it top. It sits second because this ranking also weighs how well a series holds up on a rewatch today, and its pacing is the weakest of the entries at this end of the list.
Cowboy Bebop is the entry most likely to move upward on a list weighted toward craft rather than reach, and it sits at ten only because its cultural footprint is narrower than the franchises above it.
1. Naruto
Naruto earns the top spot for combining nearly everything this list has been weighing throughout: an epic, emotionally rich story spanning childhood friendship, devastating betrayal, and eventual reconciliation, a massive and beloved ensemble cast, and a cultural footprint that introduced an entire generation of Western viewers to anime as a serious storytelling medium rather than a niche curiosity.
Its themes of found family, empathy toward even the story’s most damaged antagonists, and earning strength through connection rather than raw power alone have made it one of the most influential and enduringly beloved series the medium has ever produced, a legacy that continues actively through Boruto and the ongoing Two Blue Vortex manga years after the original story concluded.
What ultimately separates Naruto from the other great, long-running franchises on this list is how consistently its central philosophy pays off across the entire story rather than being abandoned once the plot needed higher stakes. Naruto’s insistence on reaching rather than defeating his enemies, established in his earliest fights and carried all the way through to his final confrontation with Sasuke, gives the whole series a coherence that few multi-decade franchises manage to sustain. It’s a story about connection that never loses sight of that theme, even at its most explosive and world-ending, and that consistency is exactly why it remains this list’s top pick.
What this list is missing, and knowingly so
A list assembled this way has a visible shape, and it is worth naming rather than pretending otherwise.
It skews heavily toward long-running shonen action, which reflects both this site’s subject matter and the franchises with the largest cultural footprint. That leaves out entire categories of the medium that a broader list would have to include: Studio Ghibli’s films, which are arguably anime’s most significant contribution to world cinema, the psychological and slice-of-life traditions, and most of the medium’s output aimed at adult audiences.
Anyone using this as a starting point rather than a verdict should treat it as ten strong entry points into one part of the medium, not a map of the whole thing. The best anime for a given viewer depends enormously on which part they walk into first.
The other honest caveat is recency. Series that concluded recently have not had the years of rewatching and reassessment that settle a reputation, and a list assembled five years from now would almost certainly move several of these placements.
The bias built into a list like this
A tightly plotted twenty-six-episode series and a decades-long cultural institution are not competing at the same thing, and any single ranking has to fudge that. This list favors series that manage to combine lasting cultural significance with storytelling that holds up on a rewatch, which is why a few critically beloved but more niche series sit below some longer-running, culturally dominant franchises here.
Common questions
What is the best anime of all time?
Naruto tops this list, on the combination of an emotionally rich story, an enormous beloved cast, and a cultural footprint that introduced a generation of Western viewers to the medium.
Is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood better than Naruto?
On tight, complete storytelling, arguably yes, and it ranks third here for exactly that reason. This list also weighs cultural reach, which is where the longer-running franchises pull ahead.
What anime should a beginner start with?
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood or Death Note. Both are complete, tightly plotted, and short enough to finish without committing to hundreds of episodes.
Why is Studio Ghibli not on this list?
Because the list skews toward long-running shonen action, which reflects this site’s subject matter. A broader ranking of the medium would have to include Ghibli’s films, and this one openly does not attempt that.
