The 12 Best Anime Series Of All Time, Ranked

by Victoria VouloumanosBuzzFeed Contributor

Anime is one of the most ambitious storytelling mediums around, which makes narrowing it down to a ranked list borderline impossible. The criteria shift depending on what you value — influence, writing, animation, emotional weight, originality, or the sheer force of a show's cultural footprint. Still, these 12 series make the case for what anime can do when story, style, atmosphere, and emotional weight are all working at once, from psychological thrillers and crime epics to quiet meditations on grief and time. Some are canon for a reason. Others are cult favorites that deserve to be in the conversation. Starting from the bottom:

12.

Mushishi (2005)

Artland / Funimation / Via youtube.com

Mushishi is the quietest show on this list, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for smallness. The series follows Ginko, a soft-spoken researcher who travels through a pre-modern version of Japan studying “mushi,” primordial life forms that most people can’t see. They’re not ghosts, gods, monsters, or villains — they’re simply part of the world, and each episode follows what happens when human beings come into contact with something older than they are and largely indifferent to them.

Though the premise sounds simple, Mushishi uses it to examine grief, illness, isolation, inherited trauma, and the limits of human control. Nature in this show is neither hostile nor comforting. It doesn’t punish people, reward them, or explain itself. People are just left to live with what they can’t fully understand. Adapted from Yuki Urushibara’s manga by Artland, the series has no central villain, no escalating plot, and no final destination. It’s slow because it has to be. Nearly 20 years later, few anime have made stillness feel so consequential.

11.

Psycho-Pass (2012)

Crunchyroll / Via youtube.com

Set in a near-future Japan governed by the Sibyl System, Psycho-Pass imagines a society where an algorithmic surveillance network measures every citizen’s mental state in real time and assigns them a “Crime Coefficient.” If that number gets too high, they can be detained or killed before they’ve actually committed a crime. The series follows rookie Inspector Akane Tsunemori and her team of “Enforcers” — latent criminals forced to help the state catch other criminals — as they pursue the people the system can’t properly read. Written by Gen Urobuchi and animated by Production I.G., the show clearly draws from Ghost in the Shell and Minority Report, but its concerns feel less like distant sci-fi every year.

Psycho-Pass doesn’t just interrogate whether the system works. It asks what kind of people a system like that produces. What happens to moral agency when the state outsources judgment to an algorithm? What happens when dissent gets treated like an illness? And what does it mean to enforce a system that may also be imprisoning you? Shogo Makishima, the show’s main antagonist, works because he exposes those contradictions rather than just existing outside them. He’s a literary and philosophical sociopath, but the show doesn’t dismiss his arguments just because he’s monstrous. The franchise’s uneven later installments keep it lower on this list, but Season 1 alone is strong enough to make it essential.

10.

Black Lagoon (2006)

Madhouse / Crunchyroll / Via youtube.com

Black Lagoon is a cult favorite for a reason. Set in the fictional Thai port city of Roanapur, the series follows the Lagoon Company, a mercenary crew that runs jobs for basically every criminal organization operating in the region: yakuza, triads, Russian mafia, Italian mafia, cartels, and anyone else willing to pay. The story begins with Rokuro Okajima, a Japanese salaryman who’s kidnapped by the Lagoon Company during a job and eventually joins them under the name Rock. From there, the show becomes a stylized, bloody, and deeply cynical crime thriller about what it means to survive in a place where the law has already lost.

Creator Rei Hiroe cites John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, and James Ellroy as influences, and it shows — in the gunfights, the dialogue, the grimy noir atmosphere. But Black Lagoon works because it’s more than slick crime-action. Its characters are shaped by war, trafficking, colonialism, religious hypocrisy, and violence they can’t outrun. The female characters in particular — Revy, Balalaika, Roberta, Eda — aren’t “badass female characters” dropped into a male crime story. They are the story. Black Lagoon rarely makes the safest all-time anime lists, but that’s why it belongs here. The style is obvious, but the substance is easy to miss.

9.

Death Note (2006)

Madhouse / NTV / Via youtube.com

Death Note was the gateway anime for an entire generation of Western viewers, and it still holds up as one of the best psychological thrillers the medium has produced. The premise is simple and instantly compelling. Light Yagami, a brilliant high school student, finds a notebook dropped by a shinigami that lets him kill