Anime has come a great distance since Osamu Tezuka first brought his manga creations to television screens within the early Nineteen Sixties. What began as a scrappy medium attempting to compete with American cartoons has transformed right into a cultural juggernaut that influences every part from Hollywood blockbusters to fashion trends. Each decade brought its own flavours, technological breakthroughs, and storytelling styles. The Nineteen Sixties gave us the inspiration, the Nineteen Seventies experimented wildly, the Eighties exploded with ambition, the Nineties refined the craft, the 2000s went digital, the 2010s went global, and the 2020s are still occurring. Picking only one show from each era feels almost cruel, but that is exactly what makes it interesting. These aren’t necessarily the preferred or highest-grossing titles. They’re those that captured something essential about their moment in time, pushed boundaries, and proceed to matter today.
So listed here are the most effective anime, from every decade.
Nineteen Sixties: Astro Boy (1963)
That is where every part begins. Astro Boy was the primary successful weekly anime series on Japanese television, and Osamu Tezuka mainly invented the medium’s visual language while making it. The production was absurdly low cost and the schedules were inconceivable, so Tezuka’s team needed to get creative. They used limited animation techniques, a lot of still frames, repeating backgrounds, and dramatic speed lines. What began as corner-cutting became the inspiration of anime’s distinct look. Those big expressive eyes everyone associates with anime? Tezuka borrowed them from Disney but made them uniquely Japanese. The show follows a robot boy built by a grieving scientist to interchange his dead son, and the stories got surprisingly heavy for 1963. Astro (or Atom in Japan) finally ends up fighting for each humans and robots while belonging to neither world.
The episodic adventures ranged from silly monster-of-the-week stuff to thoughtful examinations of prejudice and what makes someone human. American cartoons were still doing slapstick comedy, but here was a show willing to let its hero lose, to indicate real consequences, to ask uncomfortable questions on technology and progress. The animation looks primitive now, sure, but you possibly can see the blueprint for every part that got here after. Dramatic cross-cutting during motion scenes, the way in which music swells during emotional moments, using shadow and silhouette to convey mood–this became standard practice because Astro Boy did it first. Tezuka was working under brutal constraints and someway turned those limitations right into a recent art form.
Nineteen Seventies: Mobile Suit Gundam (1979)
Yoshiyuki Tomino checked out all of the invincible super robot shows on TV and decided to make something completely different. Mobile Suit Gundam treated giant robots like military equipment as an alternative of magical super weapons. These machines needed fuel, ammunition, and constant maintenance. They overheated in battle and broke down. Limbs got destroyed and stayed destroyed until someone welded recent ones on. The story follows teenager Amuro Ray, who unintentionally becomes a mobile suit pilot during a war between Earth’s government and space colonists searching for independence. He’s a Newtype, someone whose evolution in space gave him enhanced abilities, but that gift takes a serious psychological toll. You watch this kid grapple with combat stress and the moral weight of warfare over 43 episodes.
What makes Gundam matter is the moral ambiguity. The Earth Federation commits war crimes. The Zeon forces fighting for independence use fascist imagery and do terrible things. No one gets to be purely good. The essential solid are traumatised teenagers and burned-out adults barely holding it together, and the show treats warfare as horrific slightly than glamorous. The mechanical designs from Kunio Okawara modified how mecha looked perpetually like chunky, industrial, plausible. The show actually bombed when it first aired and got cancelled early. Then the model kits began selling and never stopped. Gundam became an enormous franchise, but that original series stays startlingly mature about the price of war and the way violence perpetuates more violence.
Eighties: Akira (1988)
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira has a gap motorcycle chase through Neo-Tokyo that has more individual frames than entire TV series. Every light trail from the bikes, every raindrop, every reflection on wet pavement was hand-drawn. The movie follows biker gang members Kaneda and Tetsuo, whose friendship fractures when Tetsuo gains psychic powers after a crash. Neo-Tokyo was built on the ruins of the old city that got destroyed in 1988, and it’s teetering on the sting again from student protests, government conspiracies, and secret experiments on psychic children. Tetsuo’s powers spiral uncontrolled in ways in which change into increasingly disturbing and visually arresting.
The production used over 160,000 animation cels and pioneered pre-scoring, where they recorded the soundtrack before animating so every part could sync perfectly. The rating mixes traditional Japanese instruments with electronics and Indonesian gamelan to create something genuinely alien. That shot of Neo-Tokyo at night with all of the neon and promoting and concrete canyons influenced Blade Runner 2049, Ghost within the Shell, The Matrix, and mainly every cyberpunk thing made afterward. Western audiences who rented this on VHS within the early ‘90s had their minds blown. Here was animation that wasn’t for youths, that had dense plotting and jaw-dropping imagery, that trusted viewers to maintain up. The film builds to a climax that is each spectacular and deeply strange, leaving you with images you will not forget and questions on power, corruption, and what comes after humanity.
Nineties: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
Hideaki Anno took the realistic mecha genre that Gundam pioneered and used it to explore clinical depression and psychological trauma. Fourteen-year-old Shinji Ikari gets forced by his estranged father to pilot a large bio-mechanical weapon called an Evangelion to fight mysterious beings called Angels. Appears like standard mecha stuff, except Shinji spends many of the series paralysed by self-hatred and the Eva synchronisation system causes real psychological damage to its pilots. The primary half has sensible motion sequences resembling geometric angels firing particle beams, synchronised dance battles, orbital drops. But Anno cared more about what happened between fights. Shinji lives together with his guardian Misato, who hides severe trauma behind a beer-drinking party girl act. His fellow pilot Asuka projects confidence to mask crushing insecurity. Rei Ayanami seems emotionless for reasons that change into clearer because the show progresses.
The show gets progressively darker and more psychologically intense because it goes. Angels start becoming weirder and more conceptually threatening. The characters hurt one another and retreat into isolation as an alternative of bonding like typical heroes. The ultimate stretch abandons conventional storytelling for something experimental and divisive that splits audiences to at the present time. Anno later made End of Evangelion, a movie that gives an alternate conclusion with apocalyptic imagery and no easy answers. The show’s impact is tough to overstate. It modified how anime approached character psychology and spawned countless imitators. The merchandising turned Rei right into a cute icon, which sarcastically proved Anno’s whole point about consumer culture. Evangelion asked whether broken people could connect with one another and explored that query through increasingly uncomfortable territory.
2000s: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009)
The unique Fullmetal Alchemist anime from 2003 caught as much as Hiromu Arakawa’s manga and needed to make up its own ending. Brotherhood got here out after the manga finished and adapted the entire story properly. Brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric attempt to bring their dead mother back to life using alchemy, which breaks the largest rule of their world. The attempt costs Ed his left leg and right arm, and Al loses his entire body. Ed manages to bind Al’s soul to a suit of armour by sacrificing his own arm. They seek for the Philosopher’s Stone to revive their bodies, but quickly learn the stone’s creation involves terrible secrets. The world runs on equivalent exchange and nothing comes free.
Every little thing in Brotherhood is thoroughly thought-out. Alchemy has consistent rules. The military dictatorship running the country has specific historical reasons for existing, including a genocide they committed against a minority group. The homunculi antagonists represent deadly sins but get actual characterisation and complexity because the story goes forward. The brothers’ relationship is the essential crux of the entire thing through their banter and unshakeable bond. Supporting characters also get real development resembling Roy Mustang who desires to reform the military despite his dark past, Scar evolves from one thing into something very different, and the Ishvalan genocide gets treated with real nuance for a shonen series. The animation stays consistently excellent across 64 episodes, with some great motion that shows martial arts with creative alchemy use with some very nice animation, and the story builds to an enormous climax that pays off dozens of character arcs and plot threads without feeling rushed.
2010s: Mob Psycho 100 (2016)
ONE made something even higher than One-Punch Man with Mob Psycho 100, and Studio Bones adapted it into animation that shouldn’t work but does. Shigeo Kageyama (everyone calls him Mob) is a middle schooler with godlike psychic powers who desperately desires to be normal. He’s suppressed his emotions for years because once they explode, bad things occur. His mentor Reigen Arataka runs a fake exorcism business and exploits Mob’s real powers while unintentionally giving him genuinely good life advice. Director Yuzuru Tachikawa threw out every rule about visual consistency. Characters shift between animation styles continuously employing crude sketches, oil painting looks, rotoscoped movement, hyper-detailed motion cuts, chibi comedy faces. Different animation directors with totally different styles worked on the identical episodes. It creates something fluid where the art morphs to match emotional states and comedic timing.
The experimental animation serves the story as an alternative of just showing off. Mob’s journey is about learning emotional regulation and self-acceptance. There’s a percentage counter tracks his emotional buildup, creating tension during peculiar situations like talking to his crush or coping with bullies. When he hits 100%, reality warps and the animation explodes into sequences that rewrite physics. However the show consistently argues that Mob’s real strength is his kindness and his refusal to harm people unnecessarily. Season two gets even higher with arcs that challenge every part Mob believes about himself and force him to confront what happens when someone pushes him past his limits. Reigen’s arc provides a few of the most satisfying character growth in any anime as watching a con man work out what actually matters hits harder than it has any right to.
2020s: The Apothecary Diaries (2023)
Maomao is a pharmacist who gets kidnapped and sold as a servant within the imperial palace, and he or she’s absolutely furious about it. She just wants to maintain her head down, do her work, and get out when her contract ends. But she will’t help herself when she notices two imperial heirs are getting sick from something everyone else is missing. She leaves an anonymous note about it, which catches the eye of Jinshi, a stupendous eunuch managing the inner palace. He figures out she’s got medical knowledge and essentially blackmails her into solving mysteries across the palace. What follows is a historical mystery series set in a fantasy version of ancient China, where every case involves poison, medicine, palace politics, or some combination of the three.
Maomao is an entire weirdo. She lights up with real joy when talking about poisons and their effects. She’ll test substances on herself without hesitation. She’s got the social graces of a brick and regularly forgets to be polite to nobility because she’s too busy fascinated by toxicology. The mysteries themselves are clever without being inconceivable to follow resembling deaths that look natural but aren’t, political schemes hidden in medical emergencies, coded messages in cosmetics. OLM and TOHO Animation Studios did something special with the production. The backgrounds are gorgeous, stuffed with detail that makes the palace feel not boring despite the entire show being set there. The character animation captures subtle expressions that sell the comedy and drama. Maomao’s internal monologue voice stays dry and sardonic even in dangerous situations, which creates a selected tone that separates this from typical period dramas. The show trusts viewers to choose up on historical context and medical details without over-explaining, and it balances humour, mystery, and real character work in a way that feels fresh, making it among the best shows from this decade in our book.
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