Idol anime is all the craze these days, but as is common with anime, it’s the girls that get all the attention. The industry loves making idol anime because idol fans love consuming it. Unfortunately, a large chunk of those consumers are looking to watch cute anime girls on their journey to become idols, and all the cute anime boys of male idol anime don’t get as much love as they perhaps should.
If you are a male idol enjoyer, and want to see what the world of male idol anime has to offer, we have anime recommendations for that.
Idol Anime About Boy Groups
Uta no Prince Sama
When it comes to male idol anime, Uta no Prince-sama has long been the king of the experience, with many other series following its lead.
Uta no Prince-sama follows Haruka Nanami, a girl who dreams of composing music for her favorite idol. She enrolls in Saotome Academy, a prestigious school for the performing arts, where she meets a group of aspiring male idols.
Together, they tackle their own professional and personal problems as you explore a veritable buffet of boys.
Idolish7
Idolish7 follows a group of young male idols bound together in a group by their production company. However, while Idolish7 looks like your typical bright and shiny idol anime experience, it is actually a series that embraces some of the more realistic difficulties that idol face on their journey from trainee idol to top star.
Nothing really goes quite right for these boys, and it sets up a lot of the drama that this series uses for plot. However, drama can build depth of character, and Idolish7 does it masterfully.
Heroines Run The Show
If you don’t necessarily need your male idol anime bursting at the seams with boys, Heroines Run The Show offers a more compact – and grounded – idol anime experience.
Heroines Run The Show follows a girl who moves from her rural town to try and become a track star in Tokyo. To pay her own way, she gets a job that turns out to be a manager-in-training role for two male idols. These two boys just happen to be her classmates who are as difficult to manage as they are to befriend.
Heroines Run The Show often shines more as a “plucky main character with endearingly thick eyebrows doing her best” series, but because it only follows two boys, it does go quite deep into their individuals stories.
Ensemble Stars
Ensemble Stars follows the sole new female student of the newly-founded production course at a school that is famous for training male idols. Instead of having idols struggling to stardom, Ensemble Stars is very much a school anime.
Ensemble Stars is actually an anime adaptation of a game, and you very much get that sense in terms of quality. It has beautiful character designs and an okay overall school plot, but does deal heavily in stereotypes.
B Project
As is almost disappointingly common in this particular genre, B Project is yet another male idol anime that follows a singular girl who is put in charge of managing an idol unit at her company. This time, her task is to manage B Project which is made up of three different groups.
While that offers up a large cast of beautiful boys, and explores their own unique (and singular) problems as part of the plot, B Project, or at least the Kodou*Ambitious series, suffers from trying to do too much. Perhaps trying to wedge ten idol character stories and an attempt at a female main characters story into 12 episodes was unwise.
Starmyu
While reverse harem elements are really the big selling point of male idol anime, the female heroines are usually barely characters. For people not looking to slip into that loose self-insert skin, those bland female characters are just tedious distractions from the real stars – the boys!
Starmyu does away with attempting to wedge a female main character into a male idol anime by focusing on a group of men at a prestigious academy famed for producing talented musicians.
Refreshing in that the series is literally all men, Starmyu offers you both the standard character-focused idol stories as well as a compelling competitive school-centered plot.
Tsukiuta
When will idol anime learn that more is not really better. More dilutes and leads to less. However, while Tsukiuta follows two, six-member idol groups trying to learn to work together for an upcoming collaboration event, it at least makes room for the stories of twelve boys by cutting out any overarching plot.
Tsukiuta is very much a character show where much of the series is just getting a peek into the daily life of any one specific character as they deal with their individual problems. The collaboration event was just a loose reason to bring them together and create more opportunities for contention between some of the stronger personalities.
Phantom of the Idol
There are only a small handful of male idol anime that even remotely try to break rank and do something new. Phantom of the Idol is a series that does something new with idols, and more impressively, succeeds.
Phantom of the Idol is another “plucky girl helps male idols” anime, but this time, that heroine is not a bland nobody for fans to slip into the skin of, but rather a ghost of a female idol who starts haunting a struggling male idol duo.
The ghost starts performing in the body of one of the male members who just became an idol to make money. However, typical of female protagonists in male idol anime, she is also desperately trying to make him excited to be an idol like she was when she was alive.
I Chu: Halfway Through the Idol
As another idol anime adapted from the game, I Chu offers up another idol story about a male idol group attending a school renowned for producing hit idol groups.
This time, it skips a female main character and just explores the many boys and their journeys to try and make it to stardom.
So what sets I Chu apart from the rest on this list? Honestly, nothing. Do you like cute boys? Do you like pretty good music? Character drama? It’s got all the things people enjoy in idol anime, and does them in a “fine, not great” way that is oh-so-hard to make seem different and exciting.
Eternal Boys
Eternal Boys is very much just more idol goodness, but done with an extra dash of original thought that makes it enjoyable for people who aren’t purely in it for the boy bait.
The series follows a male idol group, but instead of fresh-faced young men, it follows middle-aged men who decide to form a middle-aged idol group for their own variety of reasons.
Eternal Boys could have been a drama, but instead it is more of a slice of life idol shenanigans with a not-small amount of sneaky comedy. Essentially, the series is about watching older men with more life experience than the average male idol wrestle with a whole variety of new experiences.
UniteUp
UniteUp offers the usual idol story following various idol units under the purview of a talent agency that is staffed by retired idols. It also makes the familiar mistake of trying to cram in too many character stories into 12 episodes.
However, UniteUp has two things that really elevate it – the song and the dance.
All idol anime needs to have those two things, but UniteUp has some absolute bangers in there and some seriously stunning choreography. This is aided by the fact that the series is based on a YouTube channel that specifically highlights talented singers and songwriters trying to make it.
While the good choreography is likely just quality CloverWorks work, the songs are often – if not completely – from the talented individuals on the UniteUp Youtube Channel.
Marginal #4
While Marginal #4 is an idol anime about a compact four-member idol group preparing for their debut, it leans less into tropes from this genre and often just lets its characters act like regular teens.
While it has the occasional song and dance as they train, much of Marginal #4 is more of a slice of life story where you get to enjoy the members not exploring their dire, dramatic problems, and instead, acting like teen boys who occasionally do cute or silly things as they live their life normally.
Technoroid: Overmind
With a distinctly futuristic sci-fi setting and plot, Technoroid: Overmind doesn’t seem like an idol anime. However, after several episodes that end with a choreographed song and dance number, you begin to get suspicious that it just might be.
Technoroid takes place in a futuristic society where androids were made to assist humanity, but they have become so human that they just live like normal humans as well. The series follows four chronically poor androids who decide to enter the American Idol/Eurovision-type competition where people perform in return for payment.
What is most interesting about this sneaky little series is that the idol aspect is a major aspect of the show, but not its main plot. In fact, it’s main plot involves mystery and murder, which can make the series seem a bit unfocused, if not just occasionally unhinged.
Do you have more male idol anime recommendations? Let fans know in the comments section below.
