Well, if you worked hard enough, technically you can watch most anime series in a day. However, just because you can wedge 48 episodes into a day doesn’t mean you should. Besides, that leaves profoundly little time for crucial snack and bathroom breaks.
No, when most people crave short anime, they crave a nice 12-episode series that, while it will take up about seven hours, is completely watchable in one single day. What’s more, you want it to be both good and satisfying in the end. This means it concludes pleasingly in those twelve episodes with no second seasons to be left hanging on for.
If that is the kind of anime you are looking for, here are out top short anime recommendations.
Criteria for this list includes:
- Between 10 to 13 episodes (6 to 8 hour total watch time)
- Has a conclusive, satisfying ending (The one exception being Asobi Asobase since comedy anime often has no ending)
- No second seasons planned or needed
Best Short Anime
A Place Further Than The Universe
There are literally tons of anime series about characters going on adventures.
However, they all require a certain suspension of disbelief where you allow yourself to believe that in that fictional world they could, for example, travel from planet to planet or reach a distant unknown continent. However, A Place Further Than The Universe dares to say that a group of school girls living in our unremarkable modern world want to go to Antarctica.
While that isn’t the grandest adventure, it is a huge goal for teenagers in a world steeped in our reality. Yet, the series lays out logical and realistic steps that allow them to reach that goal.
Furthermore, it doesn’t skimp on building out the characters, their motivations, and making them feel like very real people.
Orange
Orange is a lovely little reflection on regret. We all have regrets, but no one has the ability to go back in time and tell their past selves to do or not to do certain things. That is the plot of Orange.
It tells the story of a group of school kids who receive letters from their future selves telling them they will become friends with a transfer student they will meet that day, but at some point in the future he will kill himself.
After the series gets past the “I can’t believe this” part, it splits its time between exploring the character relationships, deciding on which actions to take, and showing how the future plays out after his suicide. It is packed with emotion, and while the drama is lovely, the romance is a bit bittersweet.
Charlotte
After discovering he has the power to see through someone’s eyes for short periods of time, the main character of Charlotte abuses that, gets caught be a girl recruiting people with powers to her school, and forced to join her team that catches more super-powered individuals.
This premise starts off light-hearted and fun for the first half of the series, and then spirals into surprisingly serious and emotional territory in the second half as you continue to learn the truth of that world.
Charlotte, while a fine anime series, does have pacing issues. However, while you will note that the second half of the series zips along, it does at least end with a conclusive ending.
Elfen Lied
Horror anime is generally a good choice for satisfying short anime to binge because a good horror anime can’t drag on too long and it can’t end in a way leaving people hanging on for a second season since most horror watchers wouldn’t come back.
Elfen Lied is a series that is on the more vicious and gore-oriented side of horror about a member of a species of demi-human that escaped government containment, briefly lost her memories, and recovered them as she brutally upends the lives of the college kids that rescued her in her amnesiac state.
Angel Beats
Angel Beats is a unique series that can have you laughing hard one episode and crying harder the next.
It essentially follows a character that has died and is in a sort of purgatory with several others that is set up as a high school. They are told to enjoy their school time, but instead he is recruited into a rebellious force that is trying to rebel against god.
While the school shenanigans are humorous, everyone in the series is dead. As such, when it explores their back stories, you will understand that each and every character had a rough life, ultimately leading to the reason they are there.
Barakamon
Barakamon doesn’t seem like a series that has an overabundance of plot, and for much of the series, it doesn’t. it follows a prestigious calligraphy artist who loses his temper and is sequestered to a rural island by his family. There he gets pulled into the shenanigans of curious neighborhood children.
While the rest of the series is just children goofing off around him, you find that, through his musings on these adventures, it is actually having a rehabilitating effect on him.
Throughout Barakamon, you enjoy the silly adventures, but also watch the main character grow as an artist and as a person. It isn’t the most cerebral plot, but it is a soothing one.
Erased
Who doesn’t love a good old murder mystery?
Erased goes a step further and cuts out a niche as a time traveling murder mystery. Erased follows a struggling manga artist that can occasionally travel back a few minutes in time to stop bad things from happening around him. However, when someone close to him dies, he travels back to his childhood before a series of child murders are about to occur.
While the time travel is never explained, Erased does a great job of crafting a murder mystery where the culprit isn’t immediately obvious. It has its twists and it loves a few red herrings, but the nice thing about a murder mystery is eventually they always get solved.
Anohana
If you are in the mood to cry, Anohana is a series that can provide.
This little heartbreaking adventure details a friend group who suffered the sudden accidental death of a friend when they were children. One day when they are teens, a ghost of their friend begins to haunt one member of their friend group. They then dedicate themselves to trying to discover why she is suddenly haunting them.
As you can imagine, this draws a lot of long-suppressed drama right up to the surface for these kids that have failed to grieve.
Another
This horror anime does well to front-load mystery in the first few episodes and juxtaposed it with some pretty graphic deaths. It follows a new student who finds his class has a tradition of ignoring one student. He thinks this is bullying, and despite their warnings, talks to this girl. That starts off a curse that starts causing his classmates to die in horrific accidents.
Another explores not just the curse, but the girl they had decided to ignore as well. I believe it plays it hand a little too early, but this is a lovely series for those that just like watching a little violence and mystery.
Devilman Crybaby
While “Devilman” is one of those brand names of anime that has a number of older entries, Crybaby is a newer series that is compact and completely accessible to those not familiar with Devilman.
It follows a rather timid schoolboy who goes with his friend to a ungodly gathering in search of demons and ends up getting possessed by one. The story progresses from him fighting demons to humanity discovering their existence and setting up a grand battle between demons that side with humanity and demons that side with Satan.
Devilman Crybaby is a story that is as heartbreaking as it is gruesome. These aren’t some shounen anime demons, these are more western religion inspired demons that come with all the glorious sin that you don’t typically see with anime demons.
Horimiya
Romance anime has a bad habit of existing almost purely to sell you manga or light novels. This means the seasons end open ended for second seasons that will never come.
Horimiya, however, as the source material was ended around the same time as the anime, adapted the entire tale, even doing audiences a favor by skipping a lot of side character fluff stuff that filled the later half of the manga.
This series is about two people who accidentally meet outside of school and discover that they are both different people than how they present themselves to their class. This shared secret bonds them and it doesn’t take long before that friendship turns into love.
Horimiya is excellent as a romance anime because it doesn’t really do the traditional rom-com drama and the main couple gets together rather quickly. This is why it has both the time to finish in 13 episodes while also fleshing out side character relationships.
Terror in Resonance
It’s a ballsy move to make an anime that is unapologetically about terrorists as the main characters. However, this series gets away with it because they purposefully don’t kill anyone, and it makes the terrorist main characters out to seem like unapproachable but nice people.
While a plot about terrorism seems like it should be grand and complex, Terror in Resonance is rather straightforward.
You discover why the main characters are doing this, and what message they are trying to send. To say more delves dangerously close to spoiling a less complex than expected, but still very enjoyable tale.
91 Days
Anime doesn’t have too many mafia stories. However, of the few it does have, 91 Days is easily the very best of the bunch.
In just one season, it tells the story of a boy who has his family killed by the mafia they were working for. He grows up, infiltrates that family, and begins to carry out his revenge from within. Of course, he didn’t account for forming a friendship with the boss’ son while carrying out his plan.
It is gritty, brutal, and it is everything you expect from a mafia story.
Katanagatari
If you are in the mood for fast-paced fights and unique characters, shounen series have that, but you pay the price of having to sit through sometimes hundreds of episodes.
Katanagatari sets itself up as a story best summed up as a swordsman collecting a series of special blades, and then lets you enjoy watching him fight the wielders of those swords.
The plot sounds basic, but it has its interesting twists. It is a great bite-sized action anime that actually has an ending you can reach in a day.
Kids on the Slope
Everyone knows Shinichiro Watanabe for Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, but Kids on the Slope is his more realistic and widely underrated series.
It tells the story of a high strung student moving to a new area and, while looking classical sheet music for the piano, getting involved with a thuggish outcast who has a serious love for jazz. This outcast finds a friend in the main character and from him, the main character learns that not everything has to be methodical and perfect. It can be beautiful chaos, like jazz.
While this is a series about music, and highlights jazz in a way that even non-jazz fans can appreciate, it is also very much a coming-of-age series set in the very rarely displayed 1960’s Japan.
Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song
Hard sci-fi stories tend to be stories that feel the need to go on perhaps longer than they need to. Vivy dares to be different in that it keeps a tight pace, but still makes time for a variety of stories before reaching the conclusion.
This series follows an AI that works as a songstress in a theme park. However, she is approached by a time traveler that needs her to stop points of singularity throughout the next 100 years that will ultimately lead to AI rebelling and killing humanity.
As she can live indefinitely, it allows her to show you points in her 100 year history and explore the short stories within. It is actually a unique form of storytelling that can really only be told through a sci-fi story. It also doesn’t hurt that this series can be just devastatingly beautiful sometimes.
Asobi Asobase
Like the horror genre of anime, pure comedy anime are an excellent choice for short, satisfying anime series to watch in a day. However, whereas horror depends on taut pacing and conclusions, pure comedy series benefit from usually a general lack of plot.
In Asobi Asobase, the only plot is rather literally that girls just want to have fun. Three girls form a club with no clear purpose and spend it messing around.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily sound like a convincing barrel of laughs, but where Asobi Asobase reigns supreme is the reaction shots and how un-moe-like crude the girls can be to each other.
So its not cute girls doing cute things, it is cute girls acting like degenerates.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
As Japan has had its fair share of earthquake-related tragedy, it is no surprise that there are a few anime series showing you how devastating it can be for those on the ground. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 follows two siblings and a female stranger that ends up watching out for them after a serious earthquake hits Tokyo.
The series really shows how dangerous it can be to be in a ruined city where infrastructure is down, people are scared, and everything is uncertain.
While it can be dislikable for its main characters acting very much like actual children would in this situation, the longer you watch, the more that starts to really hurt you.
Japan Sinks 2020
While yet another series about Japan being destroyed by an earthquake, Japan Sinks goes a step further by being about that earthquake causing the entire nation to sink into the ocean. It follows a family who, after escaping their ruined neighborhood, then tries to escape their sinking nation.
Much like Tokyo Magnitude, Japan Sinks is built upon a solid foundation of family drama and devastation. Their journey is a real struggle for survival that not everyone is going to survive.
Astra Lost in Space
There aren’t a lot of sci-fi series about just being in space, and that is what makes Astra innately special. They aren’t fighting some intergalactic war. Instead this series follows kids that were supposed to be on a school-sponsored camping trip on a planet getting tossed in a wormhole and managing to survive by finding an admittedly convenient abandoned space ship. They then must planet-hop to gather resources in order to get home.
The series plot itself is also built upon a mystery on why this happened to them and the fact that there may be a traitor among them sabotaging their efforts to get back.
It is interesting watching them experience new planets, and each character tends to get their moment to shine as a myriad of problems start popping up.
Tsuki ga Kirei
It is hard to end a romance anime in a satisfying fashion because life is long and you always want to see what happens next in a relationship. Tsuki ga Kirei documents the intense feelings of young love between two junior high students about to graduate to high school. Its intense feelings, but you can’t be together forever, especially when you are children.
Yet, the series also highlights that just because you are apart doesn’t mean you can never be together again either.
It is in that vein that this series really succeeds at crafting a touching romance story that has its moments of melancholy, but pulls it all together with a satisfying montage in the end.
It is one of the few times you can really be left feeling really satisfied with a romance anime conclusion.
Deca-Dence
While Deca-Dence never really got a lot of attention, it had the fairly interesting hook by being completely different from how the first episode made it seem.
It seemed like an Attack on Titan affair where humanity lived in a mobile city and certain individuals got to leave that city in order to fight monsters. However, it turns out those defenders were essentially players of a game that logged into avatars to play and cared little about the actual humans in the world.
After that early twist, the series explores the effect of this on the actual humans and eventually starts to unravel the system as the system tries to maintain itself.
Angels of Death
While Angels of Death is an anime series dripping with a certain amount of edge, to its credit it tells a full and complete story that was actually pretty good.
The entire series follows a girl locked in a building where each level is the domain of a different killer. Many of the episodes are exploring the varied back stories of the person trying to kill them in that episode, but it is also feeding into the overall mystery of why the girl is in that building in the first place when she appears to be perfectly innocent.
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet
There are only a small handful of mecha series that you can actually watch and completely enjoy in a day. While Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet isn’t strongly mecha, it has those elements within it. Yet, this series isn’t about the big robot, it is about its pilot stranded on a new and wonderful world that is so foreign to him.
In Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, humanity has fled the uninhabitable Earth and gone into deep space where they live to fight an alien enemy. During one battle, the main character is flung into a worm hole and wakes on a planet of all water. He is soon rescued by a fleet of ships that prove to him that humans live elsewhere in the universe and live lives of relative peace. As he was raised from birth to fight, he finds this situation difficult to adapt to and discovers mysteries abound on this planet.
Paranoia Agent
Paranoia Agent is one of those series you can enjoy even if you don’t enjoy looking for symbolism, but it will blow you away if you can connect the right dots that are handed out throughout the series.
This series follows an event in which some people in Tokyo are suddenly assaulted by a boy with a bent golden bat. As the police investigate these assaults, it becomes increasingly clear that they boy wasn’t actually there, yet the attacks continue to spread throughout the city, throwing it further closer to absolute chaos.
The Heike Story
Based on a Japanese novel that you don’t need to read in order to enjoy this series, The Heike Story tells the fall of a powerful clan in one of the eras in Japanese history that anime doesn’t really tell stories about – the Heian period.
This particular story tells the tale of the events proceeding and causing the Genpei War between the powerful Taira clan and the Minamoto clan, the latter of which would go on to form the Kamakura Shogunate.
Even if you aren’t particularly into Japanese history, The Heike Story is great anime as an art-form and tells an absolutely devastating tale about the fall of a powerful family as they continually both struggle against their fate and cause it with their actions.
Izetta the Last Witch
Izetta the Last Witch is a unique amalgamation of World War II era technology and warfare combined with the titular last witch, the final bastion of magic in a increasingly industrialized world.
That set up alone is uniquely interesting. You don’t know you want to see a witch ride an anti-tank rifle like a broomstick until you get to see it, you know what I mean?
The story follows a princess of a struggling nation and her near-forgotten childhood friend and witch Izetta that she accidentally rescues. Together they stand against tremendous odds and prove even a little magic can trounce military might if used correctly in what is a pleasing and compact military action series.
Just Because
While you hope for romance anime with a beginning, middle, and end to wrap everything up, Just Because is more drama than it is romance. Furthermore, as a romance, it makes a point of really hammering that young love doesn’t necessarily end neatly, but that doesn’t mean it has to end badly.
The story Just Because tells is one about a character moving back to his childhood home in the final months of high school. This both ignites old feelings of the friends from his past and spurs others to act on feelings they developed while he was gone.
Taking place as characters are getting ready to enter the adult world really adds an extra element to a situation that is already emotionally unclear. It is what makes the story interesting, but ultimately what keeps the romance from being heart-warming.
Sonny Boy
Sonny Boy may not count as a satisfying series for every anime fan since it is one of those symbolic, interpretive, and intentionally vague anime series.
However, while its ending is highly up to interpretation, it does in fact have a conclusion to it, you are just meant to draw your own conclusions from the information you were given up to that point.
It essentially follows a group of students at school during summer vacation who were suddenly transported with the school to a black void. The story evolves as they enter different worlds in a particularly hard to explain event, unwinding why this happened and who is causing it.
Kiznaiver
This series follows the tale of a main character that cannot feel pain and the several other people who are suddenly linked to him by a mysterious system that allows everyone to feel not just physical pain, but emotional pain as well.
It isn’t necessarily one of those anime series steeped in reality, but it is deeply rooted in emotion that uses its diverse cast to unravel a looming mystery that sits over the main character in an interesting and visually lovely series.
There are certainly a few more short but satisfying anime you can watching in one day that I missed. Let fans know what they are in the comments section below.
