Ah, youth.
You don’t really appreciate it until it is gone, but there are ways to reminisce – especially in anime. Coming-of-age stories are all about that delicate time of insecurity and growth. About kids who are just getting to that age where the future is wide open and full of endless possibilities, but the creeping reality of adulthood is setting in.
They get to experience mistakes when they don’t have as serious of consequences. They get to decide what they would like most for their life. Whether it is sorting out what their passion is or feeling the keen sting of love for the first time, we got a heap of coming-of-age anime recommendations to take you away in the whirlwind of youth.
Best Coming-of-Age Anime
Clannad
Anime has a bit of a bad habit sometimes of only showing you the really good bits that come with growing up, and kind of pulls its punches with the difficult bits.
The first season of Clannad has some typical harem drama. All the girls have problems, and the main character helps them. In tackling these long-standing issues, you get to enjoy each girl experience personal growth and start to flourish.
However, the second season is almost exclusively about the main character having to grow through not only a difficult part of life to navigate (that “fresh out of school, what do I do with my life now” time) as well as a terrible tragedy.
Clannad may be a harem due to its visual novel roots, but it certainly never pulls it punches when trying to hurt you with tender coming-of-age character drama.
Pet Girl of Sakura Hall
Sakura Hall was established for students on the campus of their school who don’t quite fit in at the normal residence halls. It is a simple set up that allowed the creators of this series to put a bunch of lovable misfits together and explore their different, and occasionally surprising, stories.
Every young person has their problems, and The Pet Girl of Sakura Hall doesn’t shy away from that. The main character struggles to find his passion among his extraordinarily talented peers. Some of his peers struggle with being ostracized for being too good at what they do. Others struggle with not being good enough and holding people they respect back.
The Pet Girl of Sakura Hall is a fun show as a comedy, but it runs much deeper than you would expect.
O Maidens in Your Savage Season
O Maidens in Your Savage Season depicts puberty-fueled whirlwind swirling around the complex relationships of the all-girl Literature Club when they one day realize that they want to have sex.
Instead of being a lewd ecchi anime about female perverts, which isn’t as rare as you’d think, O Maidens in Your Savage Season is more about the curiosity surrounding sex and love as you get to a certain age.
Each girl explores her own sort of blooming relationship. Some only complex because of how awkward teens can be, others made complex by situations with no clear right path forward. It wealth of different relationships make sure that there is an abundance of coming-of-age worries and insecurities for the series to touch on.
Regardless, it is also nice to see a series that admits that teen girls are, perhaps not equally as horned up as teen boys, but get horny none-the-less.
Toradora
Do you ever feel like the world has you all figured out?
You look like a thug, so you must be one. You are super cute, so you must also act cute. If you don’t fit expectations based on your appearance, the world feels the need to make things difficult for you.
Toradora is a love story about just that. Two people become friends because they don’t fit the world’s expectations made based on how they look. So they agree to help each other try to form relationships with their crushes. As any experienced romantic comedy fan could guess, their efforts in trying to do so only make them realize how much they mean to each other.
Kimi ni Todoke
Kimi ni Todoke is a series that markets itself as a romantic comedy, but as it takes two full seasons just to get past hand-holding, it isn’t exactly speedy with romantic progression.
A romance without the main couple making moves seems like a tedious affair, but Kimi ni Todoke endears itself to its audience, not so much with its love story, but with its strong coming-of-age journey for the heroine.
Kimi ni Todoke follows a kind girl whose kind actions are misunderstood as malicious due to her looking a lot like Sadako from The Ring and being not-so-great at talking to others. After a clandestine meeting with a refreshing athletic popular boy, he helps her try to break out of her shell where she, on her own merits, starts to make meaningful friendships for the first time in her life.
The romance is slow, but touching. Kimi ni Todoke also feeds you plenty of cute moments that show clear affection throughout the series, but in all truth, Kimi ni Todoke shines most in its endearing depiction of a young girl making true connections with others in a non-romantic way.
Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions
While the term “chunibyou” is often used as an insult or for comedy in anime, it is actually probably a bit of a familiar phenomenon for many anime fans.
While the definition of chunibyou is specific to Japan, the phenomenon definitely is not. Chunibyou is used to describe the grandiose delusions you can experience in youth. As you hit puberty, you begin to imagine yourself as “better” than other people or, at least, “different” or “special”. It is part of forming your own individual identity as you grow up. In the most severe cases, it means imagining things like being the host of a sealed god in your eye or being able to wield forbidden magics.
These grand delusions are the driving force behind Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions.
In this romantic comedy whose cute comedy and romance makes the moments it hurts you emotionally sting even worse, a boy hopes to make his high school debut and leave his cringe-worthy chunibyou persona back in middle school where it belongs. However, he has a clandestine meeting with a cute girl who is still very much in the throes of chunibyou-ism – pulling him back into the depths of weebery and cringe.
Honey and Clover
While most coming-of-age drama stories take place in high school, growing up is a process. Sometimes you don’t really feel like a grown up until you are 28, working your tedious office job, and wondering where the time went.
Instead of following high school students, Honey and Clover follows a group of college students as they live their various lives. Much of Honey and Clover is about the complicated romantic relationships that swirl between the friend group, but it also touches on the all-too-relatable concerns that young adults about to be thrust fully into the cold, unforgiving adult world have for their future.
Nana
A goodly chunk of coming-of-age anime is wholesome and idealistic. Under that shiny veneer, there are usually some nuggets of wisdom, but if you crave a drama that doesn’t shy away from the toxicity that can manifest in many relationships or the castle of unhappiness you can build for yourself with stones upon stones of bad decision-making – Nana’s got you.
Nana follows two girls named Nana who meet on the train to Tokyo. One is a punk rocker leaving a toxic relationship to focus on her music career in the city, the other is a naive country girl looking for love. They soon discover that they were both trying to rent the same apartment, and settle on just being roommates.
While there are moments of wholesomeness in the support that these two adult women offer to each other as they try to navigate the rough waters of life, you also watch them individually dig their own pits to wallow in. One has trouble moving on from her whirlwind romance, even as unhealthy as it was, while the other falls in love too early, too often, and with all the wrong types.
Anohana
Nothing sets up for a good coming-of-age story better than the death of a friend as a child. That is a traumatic event that can twist the shape of people, and only in moving on from it can you move forward. That is what Anohana is about.
In Anohana, a friend who died very young in a tragic accident comes back as a ghost when her young friends have grown up into adrift teens. It is this phenomenon that reunites the group of friends who had drifted apart, then ignites a powder keg of unresolved problems and pent-up emotions.
The tragedy shaped each of these kids in different ways, and it all starts to come out throughout the course of this series in dramatic, emotional explosions. Oh, and tears. Many tears.
Hanasaku Iroha
Hanasaku Iroha is a still-quite-good anime that struggles to find the story and themes it wants to focus on. This, in its way, is perhaps one of the most fitting styles of storytelling to depict the indecision that should drive a coming-of-age story.
In Hanasaku Iroha, a teen girl is forced to move from Tokyo to rural Japan to live with her grandmother after her mother runs off with a man. Her grandmother, cold and distant due to her being the spawn of her willful, irresponsible mother, puts her to work in the hotsprings inn she owns where the girl becomes entangled in the small messy lives of her other co-workers.
That’s really the story. You watch her learn how to best do her job, you watch her bear witness to the personal and professional struggles her peers are going through, and you watch her try to form a closer connection with her grandmother while trying to decide what she wants for herself.
There is no grand message in Hanasaku Iroha other than sometimes there are difficult situations that you must learn to endure before you can learn to overcome.
Tsuki ga Kirei
Tsuki ga Kirei deals almost exclusively with first love.
Do you remember yours? How utterly important it felt, like you would do anything to be together and would definitely be together forever?
Well, as we know, first loves don’t often work out. There are a number of complications that get in the way of “first” love becoming “forever” love, youth and immaturity primary among them.
Tsuki ga Kirei is beloved for skipping the tedious “will they, won’t they, when will they” back and forth that many romantic comedies focus intently on, and instead starts with the main character confessing to and dating his first girlfriend.
You watch as they grow closer and learn about themselves as people. Furthermore, the series doesn’t shy away from the very real realities that can easily tear apart first love even if it is going well.
A Lull in the Sea
While A Lull in the Sea is destined to be forever remembered for having one of the most unwieldy and large one-sided love triangles in anime, that unwieldy love triangle serves as the driving factor for the coming-of-age drama – but it isn’t alone in the driver’s seat.
A Lull in the Sea follows a group of children part of the original human race that lived underwater. Generations ago, some of them moved on land and lost the ability to return to the water. Now, underwater populations are dwindling, and after the schoolhouse in their small underwater town closes, the friend group must integrate into school on land.
While introducing new peers means introducing new romantic rivals among the youthful childhood crushes, the children also face subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination from land-dwelling humans that starts to shape their attitudes towards their own culture and others.
Eureka Seven
While Eureka Seven starts off a bit slow, it is actually perhaps the quintessential coming-of-age anime in its portrayal of its protagonist and the character growth that happens for him throughout the series.
Eureka Seven starts about an immature boy who dreams of leaving his boring small town and struggles with how he can live up to the heroic legacy of his dead father. He gets his shot at leaving town when he joins Gekkostate, a crew of freedom fighters traveling under the guise of being sky surfers.
Throughout the series, much of the charm of Eureka Seven is watching the, admittedly, initially difficult to like main character, discover who he is as a person rather than trying to mimic those he respects as well as watching him tackle the difficult truths that come with building a heroic legacy like his father did.
Of course, Eureka Seven is not all difficult to grasp coming-of-age themes. There is plenty of mecha action, world political intrigue, and a solid romance to always keep you invested.
Kemono no Souja Erin
It seems almost like a complete waste to focus almost all coming-of-age anime on just following complicated romantic relationships. However, in truth, if there isn’t the carrot of romance on the end of that stick, there isn’t a lot else going on in our real world to drive a compelling coming-of-age plot.
However, fantasy can allow coming-of-age stories to thrive without the need to even add romance, and there is no finer example of that than Kemono no Souja Erin.
Kemono no Souja Erin, or The Beast Player Erin as you less often see, is a coming-of-age story that follows the titular Erin on her journey from childhood to adulthood in a fantasy world rife with political instability as she grapples with the world’s unethical use of various beasts purely as disposable tools of war.
From the New World
Similar to Kemono no Souja Erin, From the New World follows characters as they grow from being naive and innocent children to to world-weary adults beaten down by the truth of their society in a fantasy world.
From the New World takes place 1,000 years after humanity started to develop psychic powers. Now, in the far future, non-psychic humans are completely gone and society, for reasons they explore, lives in fragmented, isolated small villages.
The most charming part of From the New World is that it shows the world to you as the children see it when they are children – innocent if mysterious. However, as they grow up and learn the dark truths lurking just out of sight, the audience and the characters both are confronted with grim, brutal reality.
March Comes in Like a Lion
While the subject of shogi is of interest to a very small demographic, much of the charm of March Comes in Like a Lion, and anime occasionally about playing Shogi, comes from the initially completely uncharming main character.
The main character is a chronically depressed shogi all-star with a complicated family situation who now lives alone. In his lonely, socially barren existence, he is brought into a family of three sisters like one would bring in a stray cat. As he begins to spend time and develop his bond with them, it fosters a growth in the less peaceful areas of his life.
Silver Spoon
While Silver Spoon is a surprisingly educational anime about farming, its core story is one of growth and discovering a future path that you are actually passionate about pursuing.
Silver Spoon follows a gifted city boy who, thinking he is cleverly escaping the competitive academic rat race of high schools in Tokyo, decided to enroll in a agricultural high school in Hakkaido so he can get high marks for college admissions. There, he discovers something that a lot of people fail to realize – it is hard work creating food for everyone’s table.
Silver Spoons touches on a lot of agricultural topics from the emotional turmoil that comes from slaughtering livestock you raised from birth to the hardship that factory farming has caused family farms. Along the way, you watch the initially naive main character realize his distinct lack of knowledge on the subject, but embrace the strengths he does have from growing up in the city to help his newfound friends.
Kids on the Slope
Kids on the Slope is both coming-of-age teen drama and a period piece set in the rarely-seen 1970s time period of Japan. While the nation had healed the surface wounds of being on the losing end of a major conflict; new, deeper societal ones popped up to take their place for a lot of people.
In Kids on the Slope, a high-strung boy who loves classical music crossed paths with a rebellious half-Japanese delinquent who has an enduring love of jazz. Together with the girl whose family owns the local record shop, they form a friendship over jazz whose improvised rhythms give them the courage to deal with their own personal problems.
As not the first music anime on this list, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to suggest that music anime often covers a lot of coming-of-age struggles as it is a creative outlet to vent a lot of pent-up frustrations that you otherwise can’t do anything about.
Vinland Saga
What is a coming-of-age story doing in my vicious war saga about vikings, you may wonder. It’s doing something marvelous and new, I would say.
Vinland Saga, if you are familiar with shounen action anime or action anime stories in general, tells a familiar tale. A boy sees his father brutally slaughtered, and starts following the man that did it. He is so hell-bent on revenge, he joins his mercenary band and obeys his orders if only for a shot to duel and potential kill him if he does well on the field.
That’s a fairly straightforward tale of revenge, and enough to satisfy any action-minded anime fan. However, that isn’t the singular plot line that Vinland Saga follows. You are watching this child grow up on the battlefield, and eventually, you watch him travel off of it. When revenge is no longer the sole driving factor in your life, you need to figure out how to live without it.
Mob Psycho 100
Like Vinalnd Saga, Mob Psycho 100 is probably not a series you expected to see on this list. It’s one of those shounen action anime series, even if it is more paranormal comedy most of the time. However, shounen is built on the broad back of coming-of-age themes – Mob Psycho is just a bit more upfront with it.
Mob Psycho 100 follows the titular Mob, a teen boy with powers psychic abilities. However, after a traumatic incident, he tries his best to not use his psychic abilities and instead is most focused on trying to woo his crush.
Over the course of the series, he falls in with a charlatan that uses Mob’s actual supernatural abilities to deal with spirits as well as other psychics. Mob Psycho 100 wields that plot in order to foster Mob’s personal growth. Throughout the series, you watch him progressively unleash more and more power as he begins to accept who he is an what he can do.
Do you have any more good coming-of-age anime recommendations? Let fans know in the comments section below.
Nice! appreciated your suggestions