Chakuro is a young archivist on the island of Mud Whale. This island floats above an endless sea of sand and is home to around 500 people. On this island, most residents have been blessed with special powers but they also curse them to an early death.
While the inhabitants have seen other islands, they have never met or even seen any other inhabitants on them as they drift by.
One day, while passing another island and sent there to scavenge for resources as they pass close enough, Chakuro meets a girl who will change everything.
Deceptive in its bright pastel colors, there is a story with dark undertones that lurks within Children of the Whales, painting a world that draws you in to learn more. If you are looking for anime recommendations like Children of the Whales, head on down below.
Anime Like Children of the Whales
For Fans of Small Civilizations In A Wasteland
From the New World
After a small portion of humanity suddenly developed psychokinetic powers, the world underwent a rapid transformation.
After 1,000 years of turbulent history where regular humans struggled against those with powers, we focus in on Kamisu 66, a small town where 12-year-old Saki Watanabe finally awakened her powers. This awakening means she is finally able to join her friends at the Sage Academy. However, things in Saki’s life do not remain as simple as those precious days.
With missing children in the village, rebellious rumblings, and a world steeped in myth and mystery, Saki and her friends are about to face the shocking truths of their peaceful society.
Of all the other anime on this list, From the New World is easily the most similar series to Children of the Whales.
Both series start off following younger, cheerful characters that live happily in their very secluded villages. While most people have powers in Children of the Whales, all children have psychic powers in From the New World, and if they don’t manifest them – Well, that is one of the many dark secrets to the happy society that you uncover over the course of the series.
While Children of the Whales is about the characters realizing there is a whole vast world out there that they were cut off from, From the New World is more focused on showing you the dark surface underneath the peaceful society that the characters were living in.
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet
In the distant future, humanity has abandoned a ruined Earth and now lives in the furthest reaches of space fighting their eternal enemy, the Hideauze.
During one of their massive space battles, a young soldier named Ledo and his mecha Chamber are flung through a warp hole into space. He crash lands on a strange planet that is covered completely in water.
To his surprise, he finds that other humans also live there aboard massive fleets of boats. Found by the Gargantia fleet, Ledo must navigate this strange new world.
Like Children of the Whales is set on a floating island in a endless sea of sand, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet follows a fleet of ships afloat on a planet without land.
Both series follow secluded societies where the arrival of a newcomer from the outside world shakes things up. However, the outsider is the main character in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, so the plot follows more his general sense of wonder and realizing that the space society he comes from is a terrible way to live. That said, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet still has him uncovering some darker truths about what he thought he knew to be true like Children of the Whales as well.
Compared to Children of the Whales and its more fantasy world, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is more of a sci-fi story.
Kaina of the Great Snow Sea
With the world covered by a great snow sea, drinking water becoming scare, and livable land located at the feet of a few deteriorating orbital trees that extend into the sky, humanity has dwindled down to a few thousand.
According to legend, there is a sage that knows the secret to producing unlimited amounts of water, and Princess of Atland, Liliha, sets out from her war-threatened kingdom to find this sage in hopes of fostering peace.
She ends up floating to the top of an orbital tree where she finds Kaina, a young man part of a small village of elderly.
Although she couldn’t find the sage, Liliha takes Kaina with her back to her home where she hopes to find another route to peace or victory with the aggressive and technologically advanced mobile nation of Valghan that plagues the snow sea.
Children of the Whales follows the residents on a floating island in a sand sea, Kaina of the Great Snow Sea follows human populations that live on small islands or boats in an ever-encroaching snow sea. They depend on their land, but Kaina of the Great Snow Sea has a focus on that land becoming less and less livable as time goes on, and that is what drives the conflict.
While both are sort of dystopian worlds, Kaina of the Great Snow Sea is more a sci-fi world where humanity may have endured an apocalypse whereas Children of the Whales is more a fantasy world with some light magic elements.
Unfortunately, both series, while creating these magnificently creative worlds that beg to be explored, don’t run long enough to actually show you the world beyond what the characters know, despite talking about going there at the end of their seasons.
Fractale
In the future, the world is managed by the Fractale System, an adaptive virtual reality that creates a personalized environment for each person. One day, Claine, a boy living with his computer-generated parents, meets a girl named Phryne.
She is being chased by someone, and when he rescues her, he ends up pulled into a conspiracy unraveling their whole world.
Both Children of the Whales and Fractale take place in worlds where humanity, or at least the main characters, are closed off from the rest of the world. What they know is a relatively small area that they have always been in. While they present this in a brightly-colored, beautiful setting, the truth of their world is dark. That is what both series spend their plots uncovering through a rather innocent main character that has a clandestine meeting with a mysterious girl.
However, it is immediately apparent that Fractale is a sci-fi story, unlike Children of the Whales.
For Fans of Bright Characters, Dark Worlds
Made in Abyss
The Abyss is an enormous cave system and the only unexplored place in the world. No one knows how deep it goes, but generations of bold adventurers have descended into it.
In the town at the edge of The Abyss, an orphan named Rico dreams of raiding, as her mother did before her. One day while exploring the murky depths, she meets a boy, who turns out to be a robot, kicking off the start of her epic adventure.
Children of the Whales, and many of the other anime recommendations here, are about the characters exploring their interesting worlds and then usually uncovering the dark truths beneath the surface. Made in Abyss is similar, but it goes about it differently.
Made in Abyss draws you in with its cute potato-looking characters, then does very brutal, morally awful things to them as they descend and explore the titular Abyss. Every level you go down, the morals of the humans that have descended erode further.
While Made in Abyss is an excellent anime because it really makes you want to explore the Abyss with the characters, it can be pretty graphic and disturbing.
A Lull in the Sea
Long ago, all of humanity lived underwater. However, a portion of them soon left to live on the surface, losing the ability to breath underwater.
With this gap between them, the two societies grew apart.
A Lull in the Sea tells the story of a group of kids forced to attend school above the water where they come to terms with themselves and the discrimination against them.
Like Children of the Whales, A Lull in the Sea features two different types of humans – normal people and people with special powers. In A Lull in the Sea, their special power is the ability to live underwater.
While both series are about younger characters and have a very bright color palette, they both tell stories that are filled with emotion and are a little dark without being too gory.
The biggest difference is A Lull in the Sea is more of a coming-of-age drama. It is most notorious for having a very large love triangle where everyone loves someone, and usually that person loves someone else. Like Children of the Whales, it presents an interesting fantasy society, but it is split between focusing on that society and showing the characters in a modern world above the water.
To Your Eternity
One day, an entity, for reasons unknown, threw an orb to Earth. With no emotion or identity, the orb is meant to gather sensations and is able to take the shape of things it encounters as it learns.
For many years, it was a rock, and then it became moss, and when a wolf took its last breath near it, it became the wolf.
After wandering for some time, it met a boy. After a long struggle, the boy, too, took his last breath.
With human form, now the orb sets off on his never-ending journey where he will meet many new people and have many new experiences.
Both Children of the Whales and To Your Eternity dare to tell more creative sort of stories following characters in a fascinating, vast world. However, while To Your Eternity starts off following a character in seclusion, it expands things as the story goes on and the main character travels.
While Children of the Whales and To Your Eternity are different in many ways, what they have in common is sparking a sense of curiosity. You want to unravel the truths of the world and you want to learn more about those worlds with the characters.
Furthermore, while Children of the Whales isn’t afraid to kill characters for emotional impact, To Your Eternity excels at doing just that. It makes you love characters so that it hurts a lot more when they die after struggling so long to live.
Land of the Lustrous
In this world, Gems inhabit the ruins of a world. Taking on certain characteristics, gems are assigned roles depending on their hardness.
The hardest among them fight the Lunarians, aliens that seek to shatter them to decorate their own bodies.
Phosphophyllite, or Phos, is young and fragile, but wants desperately to help the war effort of fellow gems.
Like Children of the Whales has people with special magic who die early for a particular reason, Land of the Lustrous has gem people of varying hardness who don’t die unless they are too shattered by aliens that break them and take pieces away to decorate their bodies.
They both live in small communities in an otherwise empty world and each has a particular job in their community. They both also have that innate threat of dying, but Land of the Lustrous has characters that don’t age, so the threat comes from sudden attacks more so than a time limit like in Children of the Whales.
Both series create brightly colored characters and worlds, then tells stories where the innate darkness of those worlds is revealed. In doing so, you learn a few dark truths about how and why things are happening as well.
For Fans of Limited Magic Abilities
WorldEnd – What Do You Do At The End Of The World?
It has been five hundred years since humanity went extinct at the hands of the mysterious beasts that roam the land.
Now, the surviving races have retreated to floating islands in the sky out of reach of most of the beasts. However, there are ones nimble enough to put these people in danger.
A small group of young girls, a race called the Leprechauns, are now raised as the only ones that can wield ancient weapons to fend off invasion by the beasts, but it often requires them to sacrifice themselves and they don’t often live to see adulthood.
Enter Willem, the last surviving human woken from his slumber and sent to watch over these girls, still feeling the sting from the final battle where he lost everything five hundred years ago.
Both Children of the Whales and WorldEnd are fantasy series, but WorldEnd has the more “swords and sorcery” that people tend to think of when you call something a fantasy series. Regardless, the both follow societies that live based on islands. In WorldEnd, society lives on islands in the sky to avoid monsters instead of the lone secluded society in Children of the Whales.
While Children of the Whales is about uncovering the secrets of their society, WorldEnd is more a straight-forward action anime with elements of romance and tragedy. What they most have in common is they both feature only a handful of characters with the magic to defend their societies. However, WorldEnd is more about those people used as sacrificial pawns, but both series highlight those people with powers dying young.
Alderamin on the Sky
The world is currently embroiled by war between the Katjvarna Empire and the Kiorka Republic.
Within a corner of the empire, a young man prepares to take his High Grade Military Officer Exam. He is lazy and lecherous, but no one would expect his name would go down in history as a legendary military general.
This is his story.
I like to think that if Children of the Whales had gotten another season, and they would have gone out into the world, they would see a world much like Alderamin on the Sky where most people can use small amounts of magic, but their governments utilize it for war.
Alderamin on the Sky combines World War I era technology with spirits that grant people very small amounts of elemental magic that they augment with weapons.
Aside from the general structure of the world and both series being almost criminally underrated considering how good they are, Alderamin on the Sky and its tactical war story doesn’t have much else in common with Children of the Whales. However, both stories don’t shy away from the darkness of the world and killing characters
Deca-Dence
Driven to the point of extinction by creatures known as the Gadoll, humanity now lives out of a large mobile fortress known as Deca-Dence.
Inside, the residents are separated into Gears, warriors that fight the Gadoll, and Tankers who maintain the fortress.
Natsume, a Tanker, has dreams of becoming a Gear, but is forced into armor repair where she meets a surly senpai named Kaburagi that has more skills than he lets on.
Both Children of the Whales and Deca-Dence have worlds built around people who think they are the very last of humanity living in an enclosed, mobile space. There are those among them that can utilize special powers to fight, and the ones that can’t are charged with taking care of the actual space they live in.
Of course, Children of the Whales is more fantasy whereas Deca-Dence is a sci-fi story.
While they already share a lot in common, what Deca-Dence and Children of Whales perhaps most have in common is that the actual truth of the world is much different than what the characters know it to be. Deca-Dence lays that truth out in a big way early on while Children of the Whales lets it be a slower reveal.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Children of the Whales? Let fans know in the comments section below.
