When you think of mecha anime, you think of intense mech battles with shrapnel and rubble flying with abandon. You watch hot-blooded protagonists navigate intricate, universe-spanning political intrigues and warfare with the sheer mettle.
It is all very serious.
However, the mecha genre, while remembered for its most serious stories, is also a fairly weird genre. When you have characters climbing into giant mechs that even fictional science sometimes finds hard to explain, you can sort of do what you want with the story – and sometimes, they choose to be hilarious.
If you like the less dour side of the mecha genre where creators aren’t afraid to be a bit silly even within what may still be a serious story, then check out these mecha anime recommendations.
Best Comedy Mecha Anime
Martian Successor Nadesico
While Martian Successor Nadesico is now overlooked for its age, it is actually one of the perfect examples of how mecha anime can still be a comedy anime, but also a serious mecha story at the same time.
Martian Successor Nadesico follows a main character that likes mecha anime, but would rather been a cook than some mech pilot. However, after his home is destroyed, he finds himself employed as the cook on a private battleship looking to investigate the mysterious destruction.
From there, you discover that everyone aboard the ship is, quite literally, a quirky badass. Each person is eccentric and comical, but also an absolute expert in what they do.
Full Metal Panic
Full Metal Panic is an anime that wanted to do a lot of things – and so it did them! All of them.
The series follows a teenaged soldier raised on the battlefield who faces his toughest mission yet – guarding a targeted girl with a unique power by posing as a student in her high school.
However, while putting a super soldier with the social skills of a cardboard box into a school setting would be funny enough, Full Metal Panic also really wanted to do a serious mecha story. So they did that too.
In between comical school life moments and no small amount of romance being set up, Full Metal Panic has the main character leave school life to pilot his mech on the battlefield for the secret organization that employs him while sinister intrigue continues to burble up in the world around him.
Dai-Guard
Coming after the Super Robot age of mecha anime, Dai-Guard embraced all those silly tropes and decided to parody them. Yet, it is so easy to create a super robot and make it incredibly silly. Dai-Guard chose the path less taken and embraced the corporate realities that too many mecha anime willfully ignore.
In Dai-Guard, humanity had been fighting aliens with mechs, right up until those aliens suddenly disappeared. Now, over a decade later, most of the giant robots were decommissioned and destroyed. In fact, the titular Dai-Guard is considered a great paper weight for a private corporation that uses it for PR.
However, when the aliens suddenly reappeared, humanity was left without defenses. Now, salarymen are forced to pilot Dai-Guard and save the world – if they can fit it into the company’s budget.
Mechs would be expensive to operate – it a lesson that more mecha anime should address. However, the charm of Dai-Guard is more so how it blends the comical frustrations of bureaucracy and office politics with a standard mecha plot.
Patlabor
Similar to how Dai-Guard displayed the likely corporate realities of a world with giant mechas, Patlabor also explores a more likely reality for a mecha future world – monotony.
Patlabor isn’t a story of fighting off aliens of even waging a dramatic space war with Mars. Instead, Patlabor is about a unit of police officers who use their mech units, named Labors, to fight crime and keep the peace.
While much of the comedy in Patlabor comes from its eccentric cast, there is no small amount of enjoyment gleaned from watching police officers do mundane police tasks like hand out traffic citations in their giant hulking mech. It is made all the better by how much Patlabor mires itself in reality, making the mechs slow and clumsy rather than the lithe machines of war you see in larger mecha franchises.
While Patlabor is more mecha workplace comedy than mecha action, as it follows a police unit, you do see some more serious moments that justify a police unit needing to have Labors in the first place.
Space Battleship Tiramisu
While its name is a very obvious parody of the enduring Space Battleship Yamato franchise, Space Battleship Tiramisu is not the “comedy, but also serious action” sort of parody like many of the other comedy mecha anime recommendations on this list.
Space Battleship Tiramisu is pure silliness in every second of its short-form 7-minute episodes.
In Space Battleship Tiramisu, you follow a pilot aboard the titular advanced battleship Tiramisu. As he really can’t stand other people, he pretty much lives inside the cockpit of his mech – often naked and unadvisedly taking his meals in there.
The plot of Space Battleship Tiramisu isn’t particularly important as the entire series is just showing you too much of a naked dude and showing you why you shouldn’t eat food in zero gravity or in the middle of a battle.
Jokes. Jokes are the plot here.
Toppa Tengen Gurren Lagann
As mecha popularity waned, Toppa Tengen Gurren Lagann reminded people what was so special about the genre in the first place by making one of the most hype-inducing, bizarrely hilarious, but also touchingly emotional mecha stories of all time.
While filled with no small amount of parody of older mecha tropes, Toppa Tengen Gurren Lagann isn’t remembered as a mecha parody comedy. It is remembered simply as an amazing mecha anime in every ounce of its story as it follows a boy toiling in his boring underground village as gets pulled into events that take him to the stars.
It is hard to quantify what makes Gurren Lagann special. However, in the moments where it is telling you its most meme-able lines like “believe in the me who believes in you” or “Mine is the drill that will pierce the heavens,” you know exactly what makes this series special beyond just its frequent jokes.
Daimidaler: Prince vs. Penguin Empire
While sexual comedy is not something everyone finds appealing, sexual comedy is still comedy and Daimidaler is a comedy mecha series that embraces its curvaceous allure.
In Daimidaler, a standard-issue horny teen boy is recruited to pilot the titular robot due to his high amount of Hi-Ero particles, a power source that Daimidaler relies on to function. While he is recruited to fight humanoid alien penguins that all sport massive chubs and are allegedly evil to an unclear degree, he must keep his robot well-powered – which is done by groping girls.
Rumble Garanndoll
As otaku, we must hold tight to the dear hope that someday our wealth of anime knowledge will save the world. Rumble Garanndoll takes us to that precious future!
After an alien invasion, Japan is a shadow of its former self. Anime, manga, and indeed all precious otaku interests are outlawed by the invaders. However, in Akihabara, not-so-legal stores exist on the periphery to deal in otaku merch and serve as a meeting place for freedom fighters who would end this tyranny!
To strike back, these freedom fighters pilot Garanndolls, mechs that rely on the passionate otaku energy of battery girls in order to function. Get ready for a lot of otaku comedy far beyond just mecha anime references.
Gundam Build Fighters
It was really only a matter of time before Gundam, wildly large anime franchise that it is, decided to do something outwardly comedic with its IP. Their attempt eventually came with the Gundam Build Fighters spin-off.
In this series, there is no great intergalactic war filled with drama and political intrigue to explore as is typical of other Gundam series. Instead, Gundam Build Fighter goes hard meta by being about Gunpla enthusiasts, or the people that build gundam model kits.
The series follows these hobbyists as they build Gundam models and fight them in a virtual arena. While not gut-tickling comedy in and of itself, Gundam Build Fighters is easily the most light-hearted Gundam anime, and has no small shortage of jokes and references for long-time Gundam fans.
Bang Brave Bang Bravern
In its very first moments, no one anticipated that Bang Bravern would be a mecha comedy anime. It treated its plot seriously, created a solid rivalry, had a devastating event happen that ravaged Earth with unprecedented loss of human life. Then, the series started to lay on the gay.
Bang Bravern follows a joint training exercise between Japanese and American pilots of compact mobile combat mechs. However, when aliens suddenly attack Earth, their mechs and other weaponry are useless against them. In their darkest moments, Bravern, a heroic super robot, arrives and recruits a reluctant Japanese pilot to save Earth from inside him.
Bang Braven isn’t actually a yaoi anime, but it does heavily lean into the homoerotic subtext latent in many mecha anime with its rivalry between a Japanese man who didn’t really want to be a heroic super robot pilot and his American weeb friend and rival who really wanted to be a heroic super robot pilot. Of course, the most homoerotic moments early on came from the sentient super robot itself.
In essence, Bang Bravern is stuffed with parody and silly comedy, but takes itself completely seriously – which in and of itself is part of the comedy.
Do you have more comedy mecha anime recommendations? Let us know in the comments section below.
