There are many different strategies that a series can employ if it wants to be artistically unique. There was a time when moe was the hook and not standard for anime. There was also a time where a main character needed wild hair or else you didn’t know they were a main character.
However, when the creator of an anime really wants to hammer their emotional or traumatic message home, there is one surefire way to do it – a childish art style.
The type of art style you would find in Doraemon or the weekly episode of Sazae-san provides a certain sense of nostalgia and comfort. It would be a shame if something terrible were to happen to such cute characters, right? And that’s how they hurt you a little more effectively.
A childish art style in anime is disarming, so it often enhances how hard some of the more mature themes hit. If you are looking for more anime that looks like it is fore kids in its art, but is very much for adults in the story it is telling, head on down below.
Dark Anime With Childish Art Styles
Made in Abyss
Anime went through a brief phase for a few years where it featured characters that were best described as “cute potatoes,” but the anime actually covered quite dark stories. Made in Abyss was the pinnacle of that brief trend by creating cute potato people, then making you watch as they piss themselves and bleed from every orifice.
But seriously, the goal of Made in Abyss was very clearly an art style dissonance to make the graphic body horror just that much more shocking.
Girls’ Last Tour
Aw, look at these cute little potatoes dressed in their little military uniforms. Are they off to have a little tickle battle with feather bullets?
While watching cute potatoes explore the horrors of war would have had its own charms, Girls’ Last Tour is actually a distinctly post-war story.
The war is over because there are about five people left on Earth and fighting doesn’t seem so important now. The world is dead, and two girls are just foraging for supplies and roaming around until the inevitable, fast-approaching end.
There is a lot of melancholy and sometimes a few sinister moments in this world’s end road trip, but ultimately Girls’ Last Tour also communicates a surprisingly strong message of enjoying the small moments in the moment – even if (or especially because) they are fleeting.
Kemurikusa
Kemurikusa takes place in a world that actually has a lot of dark implications, but often dodges those looming implications for plot convenience as it continues on with the story. This ends up actually preventing Kemurikusa from being too dark, but also led to it receiving a chorus of yawns as a reception as well.
In a similar way to Girls’ Last Tour, Kemurikusa follows a series of cute potato people as they journey across a dead, somewhat magical landscape in search of water.
They journey, the world is slowly unraveled as they do so, and the stakes, while seeming high, are never too particularly dire for the crew when things always seem to work out for them.
Akuma-kun
There are a few series on here that get their childish art style more from the age of the content than necessarily as a design choice. The older manga series they were based on were marketed to kids, after all. However, when they get a reboot, you realize that we told more mature tales to kids back in the day – like Akuma-kun.
Akuma-kun is a reboot of a manga in the 60s and an anime in the 80s. It had a youthful art style and a story angled at the power of friendship, but it was also about is about a guy essentially solving murders that were often caused by demons. The modern Akuma-kun is about doing the same thing with a new main character, the adopted son of the original Akuma-kun. You can still see a youthful plot everywhere, but that doesn’t change that it is still also about solving brutal supernatural murders.
Dark Gathering
Anime has no shortage of series about kids investigating paranormal incidents, and some of them are also more creepy than you would expect from a show following children characters. Dark Gathering keeps in line with such traditions by being a paranormal investigation anime following a child and two college kids whose art style makes them all look like children.
However, where Dark Gathering differs from some of its “childish-looking but unexpectedly dark” peers is that it goes extra hard when it comes to horror. It makes the paranormal investigations feel actually life-threatening as well as captures a lot of the more deviant personalities that one would expect to find in beings left to wander the Earth.
If you like paranormal investigation anime, but do wish there was one that was actually legitimately a horror anime – Don’t be fooled by Dark Gathering’s childish art style because it provides just that.
Kotaro Lives Alone
There is no shortage of pleasant found family anime where you enjoy people choosing the close connections they forge rather than only bound to those they are blood-related to. However, because found family anime is meant to be pleasant that is why it often glosses over the real reason some people enjoy the concept of a found family – because their real family is awful.
Kotaro Lives Alone and its childish art style seems like it is going to be another pleasant found family anime, and it is. However, as it goes on, the dark realities of life start popping up. A guy whose divorce estranged him from his own son. A lady whose boyfriend beats her. A child who lives alone for reasons that they actual go to great effort to explain realistically.
When creating a cheerful experience, you tend to leave those stories off-screen, but Kotaro Lives Alone uses them to augment its touching story.
Kaiba
The use of a childish art style in anime that actually tells a mature story is a completely intentional choice in some series. The dissonance between the art and the story is often augmenting something, sometimes that “something” is some sort of horror, and sometimes that “something” is the message it is exploring.
Kaiba uses its basic art style to save all its energy for its occasionally confusing psychological plot about a world where people can and frequently do download their memories and switch bodies.
In this particular case, a childish art style might be used to suggest that the body of a person is less important than the contents of their mind. As such, that can ultimately be extrapolated to mean that the overall narrative of Kaiba is more important than its art style.
Why yes, that is a pretty lofty inference, but Kaiba is one of those thought-provoking psychological mindfuck anime that invites such ponderous things.
Ranking of Kings
Interestingly enough, the youthful art style in Ranking of Kings was meant to evoke a charm similar to fairy tales, but it also features a decently fairy tale-themed story as well. The key aspect that sets it apart is that Ranking of Kings doesn’t sugar-coat any events of the normally hard-frosted fairy tales you would read to kids.
When people get into fights, people get hurt and die. When there is a power vacuum, neighboring nation don’t do things “just to help.” When you are an immortal being, your mind probably isn’t in a good place. Ranking of Kings doesn’t shy away from darkness and reality, but doesn’t eschew friendship and love either.
Keeping all that in balance is difficult, but Ranking of Kings really does it quite elegantly. It is never too eye-rollingly cute with its softer themes, but it also doesn’t crush you with darkness either.
Aggretsuko
With a long-standing reputation for creating cute mascots for the sake of inducing diabetes in kawaii-seeking fans, Sanrio-sponsered Aggretsuko, at a glance, offers all that. However, beneath the surface of its cute and marketable animal characters lies – of all things – the stark reality that office ladies frustratingly face.
Aggretsuko follows a cute red panda woman that works in an office. Each day, she faces a series of frustrating events like social expectations for her as a woman, sexism from her boss and co-workers, and the many ways a workplace can subtly step on the rights of its workers.
To vent these frustrations, she sings death metal arias about all the terrible things that happens that day.
Odd Taxi
Like Aggretsuko, Odd Taxi uses cute animal characters to disarm you as to the darker reality of the plot. Furthermore, both series are using those animal character as apt representations of stereotypes without any characters being too one dimensional.
While Odd Taxi may lack the death metal, it instead explores a murder mystery happening around an only vaguely involved walrus cab driver.
Not only does Odd Taxi explore the mystery through a compelling narrative, but it does the unthinkable and explains why its characters are animals in a way that contributes to the story rather than disrupts it.
Osomatsu-san
Now, Osomatus-kun was aimed at young audiences when it was a manga in the 60’s and an anime in the 80’s. However, it is one of the first anime aimed at young audiences to realize that original fans do in fact grow up. As such, Osomatsu-san is an raunchy adult anime full of parody and sex jokes.
The art style is based on the original version of the story, meant to evoke nostalgia and augment the more mature comedy.
Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt
Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt is often mistaken for a raunchy Western cartoon rather than a Japanese anime, but that was exactly what it was meant to do.
With a very interesting origin story involving being made on a drunken work trip after the creation of Gurren Lagann, Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt was meant to be evocative of adult animation popular in the West, like South Park or Drawn Together.
This is why the creators chose the art style specifically and made the characters as comically horny and crude as they could. Just like series such as Castlevania are showing admiration for the Japanese anime art style despite being made in the West, Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt is appreciation for the Western cartoon art style… made by drunk Japanese animators.
Do you have more anime recommendations that look quite childish in their art style, but have very mature stories? Let fans know in the comments section below.
