I know that having “ADHD-level focus” is kind of a joke that people make, but it is probably less funny for people that actually have it. It can take twice as long to get things done, you start a dozen different things, half of the things you plan out don’t get done, and then you spiral and feel really terrible about it.
Things that require long periods of focus can be super difficult to complete because your mind just kind of wanders off or you wish you were doing something else even if you like the activity. This means binge-watching anime can be difficult, and even getting through an episode of anime can be difficult.
Having a love of anime and ADHD is a tough combination, and coping with it is different for everyone. Some find taking breaks between episodes necessary. Some have to watch anime dubbed to keep on task. Others find having other things to do during episodes helpful.
These anime recommendations aren’t anime about characters having ADHD, but rather are anime that might be more engaging to anime fans with ADHD. They are well-paced series with minimal slow moments, but without all being so ridiculously rapid-fire that one missed subtitle means you have no idea what is going on.
Best Anime For Fans With ADHD
Jujutsu Kaisen
Shounen anime is actually a pretty good option for those with ADHD because it is specifically meant to appeal to teenage boys who, even without neurodivergency, don’t have the best attention spans. As such, shounen anime tends to prioritize cool fights over those slow-burning plots that you might find in other demographic genres like seinen.
That said, shounen anime can have a little down time sometimes. There are arcs in some series that are necessary, but just plain old aren’t very interesting. Jujutsu Kaisen is a newer shounen anime that is working to modernize the formula, realizing fans don’t want five episodes of a training arc. Instead, it compacts things and quickly moves them along while still building out the plot, characters, and world.
Jujutsu Kaisen follows a boy who, to save his school friends, eats the finger of a demon that was sealed at his school and attracted another demon that wanted to eat it. He discovers that he is a vessel that can seal the demon until all his pieces are collected, consumed, and he can be killed to remove him from the world.
In order to pursue this, he is recruited by a group of exorcists that deal with demons and are trying to collect those body parts.
While this shounen anime runs on the darker side, isn’t necessarily the most gory thing either. What it does best is create likable characters and maintain a faster than average pacing.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Gurren Lagann captured audiences with its characters that were overflowing with infectious passion, and kept them there by creating an adventure that was always growing grander in scale.
It follows a kid that lived meekly underground with other humans forced below the surface by the beastmen that rule above ground. One day, the main character and his adventurous friend find a weapon that allows them to defend themselves and thus break out of the monotonous toil that is their lives.
While this series may be parodying older mecha anime, it does so in a way that allows it to be an engaging mecha anime in its own right. You watch the pair fight tougher and more grand enemies on an adventure that keeps growing in scope as well. It knows how to make everything seem very exciting, and uses those techniques frequently.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
While Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure can be a little less than spectacular in its first season, the amount of memes and weirdly passionate fans are testament enough that it gets better.
What makes Jojo so endlessly watchable is that it is, in fact, bizarre. It is the type of show that seems to suggest you should take it seriously, but it is vastly more enjoyable if you don’t. Furthermore, each season follows a new member in the Joestar lineage on a new adventure and (usually) fighting a new villain. This means no season of Jojo is exactly like the season before it and every adventure has something compoundingly bizarre in store for viewers.
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
Aside from one anime short about ADHD, there are really no formally diagnosed anime characters with ADHD. However, if there is one anime that best showcases ADHD in an interesting way, it would probably be Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.
This series is, in short, about three high school girls making anime. It isn’t the first anime about making anime, but it is one that keeps you engaged by having the main character being passionately creative, and also lacking focus. This means it frequently shifts off the task of what they are working on as she hyper-focuses on her creations.
The series follows three girls, each passionate about different things. One passionate about creating realistic animations, one passionate about creating unique worlds, and one passionate about… making money off the other two. They take on animation projects that not only are captivating and detailed in their creation, but don’t sugar-coat how hard it is to actually make anime, especially when it is just three people.
This certainly isn’t a series for everyone, plot-wise. However, I do believe that Asakusa is one of the low-key best fan-diagnosed ADHD characters in anime and the plot is both educational and never lets itself be as boring as it could have. It also happens to be a real love letter to anime as a medium.
Spy X Family
There are a few spy anime out there, and they are pretty much what you’d expect them to be – slow-burning tales of political intrigue. Those are interesting in their own right, but not exactly the most gripping thing for everyone.
Spy X Family injects a bit of energy and levity to the spy thriller formula. This series follows a master spy told to get close to a target that only appears in public to attend his kid’s school functions. In order to accomplish this, he builds himself a fake family of wife and daughter from strangers. However, while he is a master spy unbeknownst to them, his adoptive daughter can read minds and his fake wife is an assassin secretly using him as a cover of her own.
Now that all sounds very serious, but Spy X Family portrays it with light-hearted comedy and big, over-the-top silly action. It is the grand action and the frequent jokes that keeps Spy X Family interesting and unpredictable.
Gintama
Gintama is a comedy anime, but not a comedy anime for everyone. Gintama is what I would describe as a very “Japanese” kind of comedy where it occasionally references things that western audience just doesn’t know and the style of comedy is just kind of absurd.
That said, it is still definitely a comedy anime to consider because if there is one thing Gintama never is, it’s boring. The series throws jokes at you with every breath and has a weird character for every situation.
Gintama is also a particularly good comedy if you have watched a fair bit of anime, since it does enjoy its parody. It keeps parodies to pretty popular series for the most part, so even if you never watched them, if you know of the series, you will still grasp the joke.
The fact that it references things you might not understand, like Japanese media or various anime, makes Gintama sound pretty unapproachable as a comedy, but it really isn’t. It enjoys mostly universal jokes if you like weird and random comedy, but you do need to be aware that some jokes just won’t land sometimes.
Id – Invaded
Sci-fi anime is interesting, but not always particularly engaging to watch. Too much sci-fi anime gets caught up in justifying the technology or waxing ponderous about philosophy. However, there are some series that do keep a tight pace and an engaging plot.
One of those engaging sci-fi anime is Psycho-Pass, which is also a valid anime recommendation to check out, but the issue is that Psycho-Pass experiences diminishing quality after the fantastic first season. So instead of just recommending the first season of Psycho-Pass, I thought to recommend Id: Invaded, something very, very similar, but with only one quality season to enjoy.
Id: Invaded follows police officers who use a system to dive into the psyche of serial killers at crime scenes. They use it to examine clues and piece together a profile of the killer. However, to use this system, the operator has to be a murderer themselves. Enter the main character that was a detective, but was imprisoned after turning vigilante to avenge his wife and child that were killed by a serial killer.
The series has interesting sci-fi elements and can be almost unexpectedly brutal in some of its murders which keeps you wanting to see more.
The Disastrous Life of Saiki K
The problem with comedy anime sometimes is that it takes a decent amount of time to set up the jokes, and you kind of lose interest before it gets to the punch lines. This can be an issue sometimes in Gintama if you aren’t invested in the actual plot of the episode.
However, if you enjoy really absurd comedy like Gintama, but want things delivered a little more compactly, that is The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.
The series follows an overpowered psychic who just wants to live normally. He tries to avoid using his powers, and often attracts number of strange individuals. This is a pretty slice of life comedy where the jokes come from the silliness that happens around the main character.
What makes The Disastrous Life of Saiki K a more engaging comedy is that it only has 5-minute episodes. This means it sets up the joke, delivers it, and ends before you have too much time to get bored.
Chainsaw Man
I like to think of Chainsaw Man as the shounen anime for people who are kind of bored with normal shounen anime. It features characters that are all some form of terrible people, fighting devils who viciously maim and murder in creative ways, and never really lets the series linger.
While Chainsaw Man is pretty graphically violent and therefore not for everyone, the most charming thing about it is how fast the plot and fights move. It doesn’t have whole arcs for training, the actual battles rarely take longer than a single episode, and it is always onto the next violently shocking thing.
Chainsaw Man is an anime for those with a short attention span that like things violent and don’t mind having characters that aren’t exactly “heroic” in their motivations.
My Hero Academia
There is a good reason that My Hero Academia is so wildly popular. Sure, maybe it is because the West tends to enjoy anything with superheroes in it a little more, but the real reason My Hero Academia gets so much hype is because it inspires so much hype.
This series is particularly good at building towards “big” moments, the moments where you feel the tingle of adrenaline while watching them because of how exciting it is and how that excitement is augmented by just superb animation.
Furthermore, My Hero Academia has a very large cast of characters that it actually utilizes pretty well. Sure, some characters fall to the wayside, but way less characters get pushed to the sidelines than you would think. All the heroes are unique in their powers and a bit memorable in their personality.
That said, like many shounen battlers, My Hero Academia does have “breather” arcs, especially later on. It can’t all be hype, and because the hype is so good, you notice those breather moments a little more. Admittedly, those moments are not quite as engaging.
Grand Blue
Anime likes to portray the Japanese high school experience as pretty academically intense, but what they don’t tell you is that the Japanese university experience is actually a lot lower intensity than you would think. Grand Blue, a college-set comedy anime, fully shows that off as the main character gets caught in a whirlwind of alcohol and degeneracy that never lets him go on his first day at university.
Grand Blue throws jokes at you early and often. While the anime is ostensibly about a college dive club, I think it kind of forgets about that sometimes. There is diving, and it highlights the beauty of diving, but Grand Blue is still a comedy anime first and the collegiate shenanigans take the characters to all sorts of different places.
Kill la Kill
Studio Trigger original anime – Little Witch Academia, BNA, Space Patrol Luluco – are all pretty great anime at keeping things engaging. The plots and events happen at a reasonably fast, but not quite FLCL-level pace, they never stay away from action too long, and the characters are all memorably quirky.
And at the pinnacle of everything good about Studio Trigger anime is Kill la Kill. It is quintessential everything I just mentioned.
Kill la Kill follows a girl trying to find out who murdered her father, the hunt taking her to an elite high school where she must fight the super-powered club leaders and student council, all of which are enhanced by uniforms that get stronger the more skin you are showing.
That last bit makes it sound lewd, but rest assured it is used for comedy and not to be particularly titillating.
Zombieland Saga
Idol anime is only for a very specific group of fans – people that like cute anime girls and/or idols being cute – but it is best to think of Zombieland Saga as a comedy anime and not an idol anime.
This series follows a group of girls from throughout Japan’s history who were resurrected as zombies to be an idol group that will promote the province of Saga.
While it dabbles in a wide array of musical styles, you become most invested in this series for the jokes that it makes surrounding its cast of quirky would-be idols. It is a weird comedy, but what could one expect from an idol show about rotting corpses?
Assassination Classroom
Too few anime take advantage of plots that involve a whole class of characters in a school. In a school setting, typically the story centers around the main character and maybe their small group of friends. Since Assassination Classroom really takes advantage of most if not all of the characters in the class by making them actual characters, it allows it to have a variety of plot lines.
The series follows an over-arching plot about their teacher being a creature that threatens to destroy the world in one year if his class cannot kill him. However, the twist is that he is actually the best teacher this class of misfits ever had. That’s pretty wholesome, but they still do their best to kill him as they receive assassin training by military professionals outside of their normal studies.
Assassination Classroom is unique in the plot it explores – setting it up like a shounen battler, embracing the darkness of the situation, but still having school life levity. It makes it so rarely does it ever linger on a single arc too long and never lets things be boring. Furthermore, it has a few twists up its sleeves to keep things interesting.
Asobi Asobase
Girls in anime are often portrayed a cute or, at least, kind of dignified. However, in reality, girls in middle school are just as degenerate as boys in middle school. Nothing highlights that degeneracy between than the comedy that is Asobi Asobase.
This comedy often shows off various ill-fated schemes to be popular or stupid games used to pass the time. However, its passion for raising the intensity to maximum and utilizing over-exaggerated facial expressions to nail a joke home is what keeps it interesting.
It may look like a slice of life show that meanders about, but there is nothing in this show that isn’t twisted to an excellent joke by the end.
SSSS.Gridman
Mecha is a bit of a dead genre these days, but that does mean that new entries in it try a bit harder to revive interest. SSSS.Gridman, an anime based off an old tokusatsu, enjoys old mecha tropes with energetic and slick looking modern animation that makes it a joy to watch.
The series follows a boy with amnesia who discovers that he can go inside of an old computer and use it become Gridman, a giant robot, that he uses to fight the giant monsters that keep appearing in his city.
While that sounds pretty close to the plot of every mecha anime, Gridman sets itself up as an accessible entry into the genre by keeping the action moving, creating likable characters, and not getting too caught up in trying to explain itself – something that often kills the pace in many sci-fi anime.
As I don’t have ADHD myself, I asked a few different anime fans that I know who do what anime they were able to watch diligently and what generally keeps them engaged with a series to formulate these anime recommendations. That said, ADHD is one of those things where what works for some does not work for all. It would probably be a great help for those looking for anime they can potentially enjoy with their ADHD if you left your own anime recommendations in the comments section below.
