Top 10 Best Anime for Complete Beginners

Naruto is a cultural institution. The story of a young ninja outcast who dreams of becoming the greatest leader of his village has resonated with hundreds of millions of people across the globe — because at its core, it’s a story about perseverance, belonging, and the weight of other people’s expectations.

The caveat for beginners: Naruto is long. Very long. And like most long-running shonen series, it contains filler arcs that can test your patience. The recommended approach for new viewers is to use a filler guide and skip the non-canon episodes, which brings the watch time down dramatically. When you focus on the main story, you get some of the most emotionally powerful fights and character payoffs in the genre — particularly in Naruto Shippuden.

Demon Slayer is the series that makes it impossible to argue anime isn’t art. The film adaptation — Mugen Train — became the highest-grossing anime film in history, and watching the series explains exactly why. Studio ufotable’s animation is simply breathtaking: every fight is a kinetic masterpiece, and even the quiet moments between battles are rendered with extraordinary care.

The story follows Tanjiro Kamado, a kind-hearted boy whose family is slaughtered by a demon and whose sister is transformed into one. He sets out to find a cure while training as a demon slayer. It’s a story rooted in family, grief, and compassion — told with visual panache that few other series in any medium can match.

If Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer represent the previous generation’s breakthrough hits, Jujutsu Kaisen is the flag-bearer of the current era. It launched with some of the highest first-season viewer numbers in anime streaming history, and the Shibuya Incident arc in Season 2 was a moment that dominated global social media.

The premise: high schooler Yuji Itadori swallows a cursed finger belonging to history’s most powerful evil sorcerer to save his friends, and suddenly finds himself sharing his body with something ancient and terrifying. He enrolls in a secret school for jujutsu sorcerers and begins training — while a clock is quietly ticking on his life.

Code Geass is what happens when you take Death Note’s chess-match tension and attach it to massive robot battles and a sweeping geopolitical narrative. Lelouch Lamperouge is a brilliant exiled prince who acquires the power to command anyone to obey him exactly once — and decides to use it to overthrow the empire that ruined his life.

The series is gloriously complex. Lelouch is a protagonist whose methods you’ll frequently question, whose plans are diabolically clever, and whose personal cost keeps rising with every victory. The finale is considered one of the most memorable endings in anime — and also one of the most emotionally devastating.

Start with a boy searching for his missing father. End somewhere entirely different — and that’s the highest praise. Hunter x Hunter begins as a fairly cheerful adventure series and gradually reveals itself to be one of the most thematically rich and structurally inventive works in anime. The power system (Nen) is the most logically consistent in the medium, and the Chimera Ant arc is frequently cited as one of the greatest extended narrative arcs in fiction.

This one rewards patience. The first arc is deliberately lighthearted by design — the contrast with what follows is intentional and enormously effective. By the time you reach the later arcs, you’ll understand why the community talks about this series with the reverence they do.

What do you do when you’re so powerful that nothing can challenge you? That’s the surprisingly poignant question at the heart of One Punch Man. Saitama trained so hard to become a superhero that he can now defeat any opponent with a single punch — and finds himself profoundly bored by it. The show is both a brilliant satire of the superhero genre and a genuinely excellent action series in its own right.

Season 1 — animated by Madhouse — is among the best single anime seasons ever produced. The animation quality, pacing, and comedic timing are impeccable. If you’re at all familiar with superhero tropes from Western comics or films, One Punch Man will resonate with you immediately while introducing you to uniquely anime storytelling sensibilities.

The list stops at ten, but anime doesn’t. Here are additional series our editors and community strongly recommend for new viewers, depending on their specific interests:

Each of these is beloved for good reason, and once you’ve worked through the Top 10, they represent natural next steps depending on which aspects of anime you’ve found most compelling.