Family By Choice – 18 Heart-Warming Found Family Anime

Anime has a complicated relationship with families. Certainly you can presume that most characters have whole and happy families located safely off-screen, but anytime someone needs even a minor tragic backstory to explain present dysfunction – then BAM – dead parent.

While dead parents are as lazy a storytelling device as they are effective, it can be used to quickly set up a found family situation. These stories often follow adrift and lonely people cut off by dead families and social isolation finding each other. As these people don’t have any close family related by blood, they make their own through strengthened social bonds.

If you are looking for found family anime where people become each other’s familial support system, proving that strong ties are not just limited to blood ties, then give these anime recommendations a try.

Best Found Family Anime

Usagi Drop

Always on the top of the list whenever some mentions anime about family or wants something that is heart-warming, Usagi Drop follows a bachelor who ends up adopting his grandfather’s secret bastard daughter after he dies.

While the guy certainly has to adjust to going from living alone to taking care of a little girl, the child in question was just subjected to a shocking death and pretty brutal rejection by her relatives that just learned about her.

Spy X Family

Spy X Family is the ultimate found family anime and also one of the most subversive set ups for it. The series follows a master spy who needs to get close to his target, a man that only appears out of hiding to attend his child’s school events.

To get close to him, he needs a wife and child to appear as a well-functioning, successful family. He recruits an orphan girl who is unknowingly able to read minds and an office lady who is secretly using HIM as a cover to help hide her nighttime job as an assassin.

So begins their surprisingly happy and wholesome daytime life undercut by high-action nighttime activities in espionage.

Of course, don’t let the premise fool you. Spy X Family is lower and sillier with its action as it puts a lot more emphasis on how nice the three once-lonely individuals live their lives together.

Hinamatsuri

Hinamatsuri follows a girl with telekinetic powers that crashes into a home in a pod and is taken in by the mid-level gangster that lived in that building. The set up alone can tell you that Hinamatsuri isn’t necessarily super wholesome, but it is really quite funny.

There are nice moments between this odd couple that are stuck together, but Hinamatsuri will always be a comedy-first anime.

Somali and the Forest Guardian

If you are looking for a unique fantasy anime that is also in the found family vein, then there is no better than Somali and the Forest Guardian.

It takes place in a world where humanity is supposedly extinct, leaving fantasy creatures to have the run of the place. For one golem who serves as the solitary guardian of the forest and who is almost at his maximum lifespan, he finds a human child in his forest and becomes determined to find and return her to her pack of humans – if he can find them.

In Somali and the Forest Guardian, you follow the pair on a journey through their world as they look for humans and get caught up in other events. However, this is no cheerful Disney movie adventure between a child and her non-human thing.

The world is dangerous, and even more dangerous for humans, which is not something this soon-to-expire golem wants to leave her alone in.

Poko’s Udon World

If there is one thing to learn as a working young adult – don’t go back to your hometown feeling adrift or like a failure. By any anime logic, you will be given a kid to raise.

Poko’s Udon World follows a web designer who returns to the udon shop in his hometown that his parents used to run. Inside, he finds a grimy boy, and thinking it was a lost child, takes care of him.

The child turns out to be a young tanuki, but the relationship they build together begins to help the main character unravel what he wants from life.

If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord

Another found fantasy adventure in a fantasy setting, in If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord a powerful adventurer find a little girl in the forest and takes her back to town.

It turns out that she is a demon whose caretaker died in the wilderness, and with demons villainized, she is in danger if anyone finds out. He ends up adopting her and caring for her himself to keep her safe.

You essentially watch him grow into a father role while still being an adventurer as well as having to hide the demonic origins of his new daughter. It’s a large balancing act evened out by a lot of cute fluff.

My Roommate is a Cat

This is perhaps not the most traditional example of found family, but I feel its still applicable since so many consider their pets as family.

My Roommate is a Cat tells the tale of a depressed guy who finds a stray cat at the grave of his parents, eating the offering. After adopting it, the anime takes a unique storytelling approach. Half the episode is from his perspective taking care of a pet for the first time, and the second half of each episode is from the cat’s perspective as they try to take care of their miserable human. Essentially, each thinks they are taking care of the other, and they are.

While My Roommate is a Cat is an excellent pet anime, a cat helps this isolated man also branch out his own human social connections. It creates a found family connection between him and more than just his cat as the series goes on.

Michiko and Hatchin

As a series about a female criminal who abducts an all-too-willing-to-be-abducted orphan from her abusive foster family to use as bait to lure out her biological father and the criminal’s ex-boyfriend, you would think that there is a one hundred percent chance that this criminal will be revealed to be the child’s actual mother.

Well, she’s not.

However, Michiko and Hatchin does show you the strong found family bond that the pair build between them as they battle other criminal gangs and look for one well-hidden deadbeat.

Kurenai

In Kurenai, a series of contrived storytelling is used to establish why a high school boy is serving as the bodyguard and pretty much primary caregiver to the elementary-aged daughter of a wealthy family.

While what brought them together requires some suspension of disbelief, the series does explore the strong bond that builds between them as they dodge assassination attempts and deal with the stress that comes form having a price on your life at such a young age.

Alice and Zouroku

Similar to Hinamatsuri, Alice and Zouroku follows a powerful girl that was kept captive as a test subject until she escaped. She is taken in by an old man and hidden from authorities as they build a grandfather-granddaughter connection with each other despite no blood ties.

Unlike Hinamatsuri that cuts every nice moment with a joke, Alice and Zouroku takes its emotional action plot quite seriously.

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Ah, the ultimate found family of a bunch of dragons moving into your home and invading every facet of your life.

Joke aside, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is a great comedy, but the unexpected wholesomeness sneaks up on you.

You start laughing at jokes about the titular dragon maid trying to trick her beleaguered office lady into eating her severed, cooked dragon tail for dinner, and end up tearing up as they form a family unit doing cute family things with a baby dragon.

Buddy Daddies

Think of who you would trust most to raise an abandoned child? Was the answer two criminals who barely get along and can barely take care of themselves? No? Well, that is what Buddy Daddies is about.

After being told to go find her father by a mother who was abandoning her, a little girl is taken in by the pair of young assassins that were in the process of successfully assassinating her scummy criminal father. They try to give her back to her terrible mother, fail several times, and end up bumbling through raising a young child that they came to deeply love as dysfunctional co-parents.

While Buddy Daddies has its moments of drama, it is actually a rather tender and touching found family story.

Kotaro Lives Alone

Like the title helpfully says, Kotaro Lives Alone is about a four-year-old boy that lives alone. However, this isn’t a series that expects you to just accept a world where a boy who is still basically a toddler can live alone. Instead, it explains why he lives alone and uses the reality of it to hurt you emotionally.

Outside of the emotional moments, Kotaro Lives Alone has the boy often helped by his lonely and adrift neighbors in the apartment building he lives in, bonding them together as one big, non-blood-related family.

School Live

If you don’t mind a touch of zombie horror juxtaposed with moe slice of life, then School Live fits the found family bill.

School Live takes place in the early days of a zombie apocalypse. After things go swiftly downhill, a teacher managed to band several girls together and turn their school into a defensible place to keep safe. With your entire family likely dead in the zombie apocalypse, the people you are sheltered with have to fill that family support role.

However, while the series has plenty of cute slice of life, it can also bring the drama and horror when it gets serious. It is worth noting since “horror” may not be a genre fans are looking for when trying to find a wholesome found family anime to watch.

Arakawa Under the Bridge

While Arakawa Under the Bridge is known for its weird characters, what most people don’t know is that it is also a really good romance with strong undertones of find your place in the world even if that place is being homeless under a bridge.

Arakawa Under the Bridge is very much a sort of “finding your tribe” sort of affair where a guy realizes he is closer to the weird homeless that live under the bridge than to anyone else in his empty modern life.

The series follows a successful man whose father nailed into him that he should never own debts to anyone. So when a homeless girl saves him from almost dying, he tries to make it up to her, but the only thing she asks for is to know what it is like to fall in love. Deciding to date, he moves under the bridge!

Moribito

Moribito is the type of series that is a magnificent example of great world-building without eschewing action or deeper emotion.

The series follows a young prince who was going to be sacrificed by his royal father to appease a god and prevent a drought. However, his mother sends him away with a female mercenary who spirits him away to the countryside.

While the mercenary protects him, she is no soft motherly figure. She guides him with a stern hand and helps him see the way of the world outside the palace in a unique coming-of-age story.

Barakamon

In Barakamon, an artist with anger issues is sequestered to a rural Japanese island village by his family where he is plagued by curious children.

While he does not necessarily take on a parental role to any of these kids, the friendships and mentorships he forms with the children do help him work through his own issues more so than any of his actual family does.

Do you have more anime recommendations that feature a family that is found in the world rather than forced by blood? Let fans know in the comments section below.