Back in my day (I’m 26), kids were bullied for watching anime. Just over a decade later, my little brother confessed that a child in his class had been branded a ‘normie’ for not being up to date with the latest episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. How times have changed.

This unprecedented popularity of anime has not gone unnoticed by streaming giant Netflix, which recently announced that over 50 per cent of its global viewership watches anime. More widely, anime is everywhere in popular culture right now: earlier this year Megan Thee Stallion announced she will be producing her own anime series in collaboration with The Boondocks creator Carl Jones; last year’s Olympic Games saw multiple gold medalists strike anime-inspired poses; and the likes of Michael B. Jordan, Zac Efron and pretty much half of hip-hop have expressed their love for the Japanese animation medium in recent interviews.

Still, despite this global success, there are very legitimate reasons to call anime weird (and this is coming from someone whose Master’s thesis was quite literally anime glazing). Not least of all is its often highly sexualised and outdated depictions of female characters, which can tarnish an otherwise incredible series – for example, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda once quipping that women are easy to draw: just draw two circles (representing their waist and breasts) and an X (to represent narrow waist and wide hips).

Elsewhere, just figuring out where to start with an anime series can be a narrative arc in itself. Almost all anime series are TV adaptations of manga (Japanese comic books), which can lead to excessive wait times between episodes while the source material moves forward or, worse, the dreaded ‘filler’ episodes, in which narratively insignificant, anime-only content is created to pad out the series until the manga provides new storylines to adapt (I’d recommend using a filler guide to avoid these on longer series like Naruto or One Piece and preserve your precious, late-stage capitalist time).

Likewise, when watching most anime series, you will have to face one unavoidable question: subbed or dubbed? Most die-hard fans will tell you that watching a series with its original Japanese voice actors and English subtitles is far superior – and, indeed, some international releases introduce sacrilegious localisations like replacing words such as ‘rice ball’ with ‘cheeseburgers’ in an attempt to make the series more relatable to a Western audience. Still, there are some great English voiceovers in classics like Naruto and Berserk, and it is worth doing some research around the dubbed quality of a series before you dive in so that you get the best viewing experience.

But, once you get past all of that, you’ll find one of the most epic, imaginative and rewarding storytelling experiences around. So, below, we’ve listed ten of the best (and there’s not a Ghibli film in sight).

COWBOY BEBOP

Bebop jazz meets cowboy-themed space pirates in the year 2071? Shinichirō Watanabe’s 1998 classic makes zero sense on paper, but boy, does it work in practice. Running for a digestible 26 episodes, each around 20 minutes long, Cowboy Bebop is widely regarded as one of the best animated series of all time. Its storytelling is episodic yet tasteful, covering the exploits of intergalactic bounty hunter Spike Spiegel as he pursues money and cigarettes throughout the cosmos; its soundtrack is exceptional; and its English dub is one of the best around. Also check out Watanabe’s later series Samurai Champloo, which depicts hip-hop-themed samurai in Edo-period Japan, along with a soundtrack created by the late lo-fi hip-hop pioneer Nujabes. Genius.

ATTACK ON TITAN

If we’re talking anime’s global expansion into the global market, we have to talk about Attack on Titan. This is one of very few series to be almost equally as popular outside of Japan as within, partly due to its vaguely European setting and subject matter, which parallels the rise of far-right politics across much of the Western world. Political allegories aside, however, no one can deny that Attack on Titan is one of the most epic dark fantasy plots to ever be released, spanning multiple Game of Thrones-level plot twists, lavish narrative payoffs, and a moral complexity that most superhero cartoons could only dream of. 

AKIRA

Does it totally make sense as a stand-alone film separate from the manga? Not really. Is it one of the greatest films of all time? Yes. Written back in 1982, and adapted into a feature-length film six years later, Akira is essential viewing for any film buff, anime fan or not. At its core, Akira is a classic caution against the absolute corruption of power, but, through its intricate and eerie hand-drawn depictions of a dystopian 2020 Tokyo megopolis, and an iconic soundtrack which draws on both traditional Indonesian and Japanese musical traditions, this familiar narrative is told to perfection. Plus, the film not only predicts that the 2020 Olympic Games would be held in Tokyo, but also that they would be interrupted by a world-shaking event. Akira is different. 

YOUR NAME

2016 release Your Name proved that you didn’t have to be Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli to make a globally successful anime film. Inspired by natural disasters in Japan, director Makoto Shinkai’s magnum opus depicts two young teens whose bodies were swapped after a comet flies close to Earth during Japan’s autumn festival. Where most anime productions might balloon out into a sprawling science fiction narrative, however, Your Name executes this simple premise perfectly. It’s one of the best-animated anime you can find, and it has a very satisfying conclusion. If you want a concise and authentic anime experience, look no further than Your Name.

HUNTER X HUNTER (2011)

Spanning Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piece and more, almost all of anime’s most popular franchises fall under the ‘shounen' genre – roughly translating as ‘male teen’ – but Hunter x Hunter is perhaps the crown jewel of this category. Created by Yu Yu Hakusho mangaka (manga author) Yoshihiro Togashi, who is also coincidentally married to Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi, Hunter x Hunter follows the story of the young Gon Freecss, who sets out to become a professional monster hunter. Unlike the other shounen anime, it doesn’t sprawl out into a million episodes, it has one of the most robust power systems around (‘nen’) and features very little filler. Just make sure you watch the 2011 not the 1999 anime adaptation, and be prepared for an abrupt ending, as Togashi left the series unfinished due to health issues. 

STEINS;GATE

Terrible punctuation notwithstanding, Steins;Gate has one of the best depictions of time travel in any popular series. It’s also really fucking weird. In the show, pretend scientist Rintaro Okabe accidentally invents a microwave time machine and, to quote the Scottish Doctor Who, all sorts of ‘wibbly wobbly timey wimey’ stuff ensues. The storyline gets pretty confusing, but it’s offset by an unsettlingly laid-back pace and rich Akhihabara, Tokyo setting, which makes for an incredibly compelling watch. Just make sure to catch this one with English subtitles and start with the original Steins;Gate series (not, counter-intuitively, Steins;Gate 0) for the full experience. 

BERSERK (1997)

Now, if you have the stomach for dark subject matter, Berserk’s 1998 anime adaptation is a cult classic. There’s an undeniable nostalgia to Berserk’s pre-21st-century, VHS-era animation, but there’s nothing sweet about its plot, which follows the tragic hero Guts as he is swallowed up by a world filled with demons, death and betrayal. Berserk is a great example of a mature anime, handling gore and sexual violence (trigger warning) with relative care, and it’s soundtrack has truly stood the test of time (only last year Irish hip hop band Bricknasty opened their UK tour performances with an excerpt of Susumu Hirasawa’s “Gats” theme). Just be careful of where you go after watching the original 1998 animated series – later manga adaptations were widely criticised for their use of CGI and could never quite live up to the original.

BAKI HANMA

In just one of Baki’s ridiculously high-octane fight scenes, a character’s hands are cut off by his opponent. “A-ha! What you don’t know is that my hands have always held me back!” the character responds before continuing the fight with newfound strength. Later, a fictional version of Mike Tyson (referred to as Iron Michael) is attacked by the Che Guevara-inspired character Jun Gueveru. These scenes are quintessential Baki. It’s anime at its most gratuitous, excessive and nonsensical, and it's so much fun to watch. 

MOB PSYCHO 100

Most anime aren’t very funny – humour often devolves into slapstick comedy or probably very clever puns that get lost in translation. But, Mob Psycho 100 has impeccable comedic timing, straddling a thin line between tension and comedy throughout its three-season runtime. This is probably to be expected, considering that the series was created by web manga artist and One Punch Man author ONE. Unlike his more internationally successful series, however, Mob Psycho 100 has a sense of growth as protagonist Mob gradually settles into his untapped psychic powers, as well as breadth, with as much care being given to its intimate subplots as its explosive and colourful fight scenes. Mob Psycho 100 really ticks all the boxes. 

ONE PIECE

Now, I might have said that Hunter x Hunter was the best shounen anime, but One Piece has transcended anime and manga altogether. It stands behind only Harry Potter as the best-selling book series of all time, has broken the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author, and has spawned a Netflix live-action adaptation, countless video game spinoffs and even its own theme park in Japan. One Piece is perhaps the most expansive work of fiction ever created, with unexplored corners of its rich, pirate-themed fantasy world still unfolding almost 30 years after it was first released. It truly is in a realm of its own. 

The only problem? The anime series is quite literally impossible to recommend to anyone with a life, totalling 1,135 episodes and counting (that’s a watch time of 22,700 minutes, 380 hours or almost 16 uninterrupted days). My honest advice: wait for Netflix's and Studio Wit’s new anime adaptation The One Piece, which seems set to tell this incredible story in a more manageable way.