25 Anime With Short Episodes of 15 Minutes or Less

To many, short-form anime, or when the episodes are less than 15 minutes, seem like a waste of time. After all, what sort of story can a series tell in five minutes or less?

Typically, short-form anime is the realm of fast-paced comedy, but you can find a little bit of every genre if you look hard enough. You certainly will see a lack of depth in the storytelling, but the charms of anime with short episodes lies elsewhere – usually in fact that these series cut right point of things.

Best Anime With Short Episodes

Makura no Danshi

Too busy for full-length anime episodes and a boyfriend? Then Makura no Danshi is the series for you.

Named after the infamous body pillowcases that are usually plastered with waifus, Makura no Danshi offers the boyfriend experience to its audience. In each episode, you get a different boy to ask you about your day and whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

It is a silly, if not slightly depressing concept, but with the commercialization of love, honestly it is just surprising that there aren’t more series like it.

Tsurezure Children

Romance seems like it would be hard to do well in short-form anime where the episodes are only 5 to 15 minutes. However, when you carve out all the drama and are left with all the fluff, that just means you can cram more couples in.

Tsurezure Children is a uniquely enjoyable romance anime about multiple different couples. It hits many couple tropes, but it explores them by only showing the cute romantic moments you show up to romance anime for and none of the tedious drama.

Girl Beats Boys

You know the old story – a tale as old as time – girl meets her long-lost twin brother of a yakuza family and goes to a school notorious for fighting in his place disguised as a boy.

However, really what you get is a condensed form of the usual reverse harem experience. She meets a series of broody thugs and helps them with their problems in a way that endears them to her.

Recorder and Randsell

Though without romance, Recorder and Randsell is really Lovely Complex in short episode form.

Recorder and Randsell follows an eleven year old boy who is as tall as a grown up and his seventeen year old sister that is as short as a kid. You can imagine the shenanigans therein, for better or for worse.

Chi’s Sweet Home

Chi’s Sweet Home is about a kitten that wanders away from its cat family and gets lost.

Instead of the brutal reality that usually happens to lost kittens, it gets picked up by a young boy and his mother.

Chi’s Sweet Home is more of a children’s anime, but like Bluey, there isn’t anything wrong with watching something wholesome and cute to unwind.

Aggressive Retsuko

The chibi mascot characters from Sanrio aren’t just for children, and Aggressive Retsuko means to scream it at you.

Also known as Aggrestuko, this series follows a cute red panda who faces misogyny and overwork in her corporate office of other animal mascot characters. So what is an working woman to do when the world gets her down?

Belt out her frustrations in a death metal screaming soliloquy.

Rainbow Days

Similar to Tsurezure Children, Rainbow Days also follows multiple couples. However, this time, it is specifically told from the point of view of a group of four male friends.

Rainbow Days enthralls you with a heady mix of cute romance and silly teen boy slice of life shenanigans as you explore moments in each boy’s relationship.

Sekko Boys

With idol anime being so increasingly popular, it has become rife for a little riffing.

Enter Sekko Boys, a series about the manager of an male idol group struggling to rein in her eccentric boys. Of course, adding to that difficulty, her “boys” are also just Greco-Roman busts instead of actual people.

That’s right. This is an idol anime about statue busts that are idols – something you can only get from anime.

Chocolate Underground

In the world of Chocolate Underground, the government has cruelly banned all sweets.

However, two teenage boys still remember the sweet tingle of chocolate in their mouths and are determined to find more. So they set out on a mission to find chocolate bootleggers.

Mangirl

Despite the “misconstrued in other langues” type of name, Mangirl isn’t actually about what you think it is. Unless you thought it was about manga and girls, in which case, you’re right!

Mangirl is about a bunch of girls trying to create manga. Or more accurately, a bunch of girls without any experience trying to create manga.

You celebrate their successes and endure their failures as they quickly and cutely explore the world of manga creation.

Aiura

What do you do at school when there is nothing to do? Not take notes and possibly learn something, that is for sure.

If you need ideas on how to goof off in school, then Aiura, a plotless anime about friends goofing off in school, has plenty.

Ao-chan Can’t Study

Who says you can’t explore a single-couple romance in short-form anime? Ao-chan Can’t Study does so in a fun way.

In Ao-Chan Can’t Study, the titular Ao wants to study hard to become a respectable person rather than a degenerate erotic novel author like her father. However, she begins to find it increasingly hard to focus when a boy confesses to her.

Growing up surrounded by lewdness, she thinks he has ulterior motives. Now, you watch her come to terms with her feelings and the fact that he is, indeed, just a normal guy.

Play It Cool, Guys

While Cute Boys Doing Cute Things is an increasingly embraced new genre, Play It Cool, Guys already sits at the pinnacle of it.

Play It Cool, Guys follows five different guys living their various lives. However, they are all some form of cutely clumsy and try to play it off smoothly and without embarrassment.

You know that awkward moment where someone waves at you – so you wave back – but they were actually waving to someone behind you? Play It Cool, Guys is about them tackling situations like that, but cutely.

Peeping Life

Even more suggestive than Mangirl is Pepping Life, which is, again, not about what you think it is.

Instead of peeping in the lewd sense, Peeping Life is more literally about “peeping” into the every day life of normal Japanese society. It is a curious anime about conversations and communication that particularly highlights the specific nuances of Japanese communication.

Get ready for a bunch of jokes that don’t translate and a ponderous show that is probably most appealing to native Japanese audiences and those specifically studying the Japanese language for use in Japan.

Oneechan ga Kita

After a new marriage, Tomoya Mizuhara gets a new sister, and he is not prepared. Not prepared to endure her intense love for him, anyway.

That’s it. That’s the show.

It is definitely not for everyone.

Teekyuu

No plot? No problem! That’s Teekyuu’s stance on anime.

Teekyuu is a show about nothing in particular except a high school tennis club that doesn’t play tennis ever.

Get ready for nonstop jokes and minimal sports.

My Wife is the Student Council President

Hayato Izumi is the perfect respectable student and is running for student council president. However, his competition, Ui Wakana, promises sex education and free condoms. After she wins by a landslide, things become even more complicated when Ui moves in with him.

Apparently their parents, the filthy lushes that they are, made a drunken promise to have their kids marry each other. Can he keep their life a secret and the student council in line at the same time?

Super Seisyun Brothers

Super Seisyun Brothers is about the unique friendship of two brother-sister pairs.

While Super Seisyun Brothers squanders some perfectly nice potential for romance, it is a lovely collection of solid jokes.

Senyuu.

After an ancient hero defeated the demon lord, the world was at peace. However, when the demons return and the demon lord awakens in the distant future, it is up to the hero’s 75 descendants to handle it now.

Unfortunately, not many of them are up to the snuff of their ancestor, certainly not Alba and his assistant Ross.

Before Konosuba was riffing hard on isekai adventures, Senyuu was tearing apart the tropes of the fantasy adventure story in strikingly similar comedic form.

Danchigai

This is the story of a man and his four sisters.

Like women occasionally do, they make it a daily goal to lecture him about all aspects of his life in this endless romp of sibling relations.

Encouragement of Climb

You’ve watched sports anime, but mountain climbing as a sport has been sadly absent – Until now!

Encouragement of Climb is about a group of girls that take up mountain climbing as a hobby. As climbing a mountain can be a solid metaphor for grow, Encouragement of Climb takes full advantage of that as it explores the endearing stories of its cute girls doing this cute difficult thing.

The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.

Kusuo Saiki has a wide range of psychic abilities from telepathy to x-ray vision. However, instead of being a blessing, to him, they are a curse.

All he wants is to live an ordinary life, so he tries to keep his powers a secret. Unfortunately, he is besieged by a wide array of oddballs that throw his normal life into frequent comical chaos.

Yamishibai

Every night at sunset a mysterious man comes to town to tell stories to the children that gather round. However, these are not happy tales, they are tales of curses and ghosts, murder and mayhem.

If you are sick of all these short-form anime recommendations being so comedic, cheerful, or downright wholesome – Yamishibai and its horror stories is there for you.

Yamishibai may only have five minute episodes, but across its many seasons, it has become legitimately one of the best horror anime to ever be made.

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying

It seems like an impossible match, but somehow a casual smoking, social drinking office lady fell in love with a hardcore otaku and got married. This is their life together.

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying is a story about normies trying to understand our ways and how love can conquer all.

My Neighbor Seki-kun

My Neighbor Seki-kun is the story of Toshinari Seki and Rumi Yokoi, the girl who sits next to him.

In order to pass the time in class, Seki crafts all sorts of odd inventions, and although he doesn’t notice her, Rumi is endlessly intrigued distracted by the weird things he creates.

Hetalia Axis Powers

While Hetalia had its heyday long ago, some charming things are just timeless.

Hetalia tells the various “cute and cheerful” shenanigans of World War era countries personified as anime characters.

While telling a comedy story in that time period of death and destruction is a choice, Hetalia charmed audiences with country stereotypes turned into anime character quirks and personality.

Got anymore good short episode anime recommendations? Let fans know in the comments section below.