Must watch older anime from the 80s, 90s and 2000s?
I'm honestly tired of modern anime, especially the isekai slop and everything having nearly the same clean digital art style. Yes there are amazing gems that have come out (Frieren, CSM movie, Bocchi, Vinland saga etc) but I really want to some older stuff
I recently watched Nausica valley of the wind and absolutely loved it! Can anyone reccomend me more great animes from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s?
Can be movies or regular anime of any genre
I've seen most of the popular stuff already like the Satoshi kon films, cowboy bepop, monster, golden boy, FMA etc. Please reccomend stuff thats not well known
I recently watched Nausica valley of the wind and absolutely loved it! Can anyone reccomend me more great animes from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s?
Can be movies or regular anime of any genre
I've seen most of the popular stuff already like the Satoshi kon films, cowboy bepop, monster, golden boy, FMA etc. Please reccomend stuff thats not well known
Commentaires
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Desert Punk - Great show about a post-apocalyptic world. Has its comedic moments as well
School Rumble - Romance/comedy/school life, if you're into that
Great Teacher Onizuka - Comedy/School life about a former gangster who decides to be a teacher
A few more suggestions: Seto no Hanayome, Ouran High School Host Club, NHK ni Youkoso!, Detroit Metal City.
If you like Frieren and Vinland Saga you would love Turn A Gundam
(No you don't NEED past exp with Gundam to enjoy this one, but a Gundam or two under your belt helps the themes of Turn A hit even harder)
Does Turn a Gundam have good pacing and a great ending?
Turn A probably out of all the Gundams has the best, most complete production with very few issues.
Also it has a really neat setting and the last 5 minutes of the series are seared into my brain I love it sooooo much!
-Noir, is about 2 lesbian assassins.really good show.
-Serial experiments lain, this one what a mind f#ck.
-psychopass is really good also.
if these are something you find interesting and end up watching them there are tons more like the whith the gritty futuristic dystopian vibe.
As an added try, Iron blooded orphans it's a gundam series that is to great to put into words
Thank you!
I guess I'll keep to the bigger ones:
\- *Mobile Suit Gundam Wing*
*- Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still*
*- Mobile Police Patlabor*
*- Slayers*
*- Dear Brother*
*- The Vision of Escaflowne*
*- Revolutionary Girl Utena*
*- Urusei Yatsura*
*- Macross*
*- Space Cobra*
*- Cat's Eye*
*- Akira*
*- Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust*
\- *FLCL*
\- *Angel's Egg*
*- Mononoke*
If you want to dust off some also fun but a little less mandatory things
\- *Magical Angel Creamy Mami*
*- Leda: The Fantastic Adventures of Yohko*
*- Master Keaton*
*- Corrector Yui*
*- NieA\_7*
*- Area 88*
*- Tekkaman Blade*
*- Blue Gender*
*- Eat-Man 97*
*- Chie the Brat*
*- Harmageddon*
*- Moyashimon*
*- Dead Leaves*
*- Princess Arete*
*- Shounan Bakusouzoku*
*- Roujin Z*
*- Windy Tales*
*- Kaleido Star*
*- Eureka Seven*
You can also just pick through my [AniList](https://anilist.co/user/Salty145) for all the ones I forgot to mention.
Literally one of the greatest OVA series ever and so under appreciated outside of Japan
It’s just an absolute dime of a 90s anime production and a great homage to that classical style of super robot show.
I simply cannot praise it enough.
Black Lagoon.
Blood+
Darker than Black
Eden of the East
Elfen Lied.
Eureka Seven
Gun X Sword
Gunslinger Girl
Haibane Renmei
Love Hina
Mobile Suit Gundam (the OG 80’s that started it all)
Nana
Paranoia Agent
Princess Tutu
Read or Die (both the 3 OVAs and the tv series)
I gave it a rewatch not long ago and it still holds up so damn well, plus Roberta's blood trail is amazing
Gun x Sword: Like Trigun but with mechas
Spriggan: a sci-fi action film from the 90's with Akira vibes
Death Note is early 2000s and always worth watching
Evangelion
This one is my most rewatched anime series of all time xD
Legend of the Galactic Heroes (check a watch order)
Yu Yu Hakusho (dub)
Rurouni Kenshin and the Trust and Betrayal OVA
SDF Macross, Macross Do You Remember Love? Macross 7, Macross Plus
Outlaw Star
Area 88 OVA
Mobile Suit Gundam 1979 and Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, Char's Counterattack
Gundam the 08th MS Team
G Gundam
After War Gundam X
Turn A Gundam
Seisenshi Dunbine
Hajime no Ippo
Gankutsuou
Versailles no Bara (1979)
Major
Terra e
Gungrave (skip episode 1)
Chuuka Ichiban!
Yawara!
Kyou kara Ore wa!!
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Seirei no Moribito
Twelve Kingdoms
Crest of the Stars followed by Banner of the Stars
The Third: Aoi Hitomi no Shoujo
Master Keaton
Hanada Shounen-shi
Glass no Kamen 2005
One Outs
Macross Frontier
Black Jack OVA
- Bubblegum Crisis
- Cyber City Oedo 808
- Future Boy Conan - should watch it if you are a Miyazaki fan, one of his first major works - 70s if that is okay
- Maison Ikkoku
- The Big O
- Haibane Renmei
- Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise
- Major
- Armored Trooper Votoms - and it's various spin offs (Mellowlink etc)
- Area 88 OVA
- The Big O
>Yes there are amazing gems that have come out (Frieren, CSM movie, Bocchi, Vinland saga etc) but I really want to some older stuff
While fair, I will say, even as an anime fan, whose favorite decade, is probably the 80s, I do think modern anime is putting out a lot of great works, and it's not just the big mainstream titles. This season with Journal With Witch is promising, and you have got a bunch of great upcoming titles this year.
Gundam (og and wing), FLCL, Rurouni Kenshin, Outlaw Star, Lupin iii (part 2), Tenchi Muyo, Ghost in the Shell SAC, Gurren Lagann.
Sword of the stranger is a mid 2000s so a little newer but it’s one of the best anime movies of all time.
Dororo: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TlMkM6Kq9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TlMkM6Kq9g)
**70's**
Lupin the 3rd Part 1: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhaknNdgRls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhaknNdgRls)
Mobile Suit Gundam: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZszGvGAR5NU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZszGvGAR5NU)
The Rose of Versailles: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJIeJIqw-J0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJIeJIqw-J0)
**80's**
Tokimeki Tonight: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMeJl0CW4E4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMeJl0CW4E4)
Ideon: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIcYvE231q8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIcYvE231q8)
Macross: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4aQQBLokNo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4aQQBLokNo)
**90's**
Yu Yu Hakusho: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urZWmEgm72Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urZWmEgm72Q)
Cardcaptor Sakura: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDezQD57h-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDezQD57h-g)
Trigun: Intro [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxFSy8G5wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxFSy8G5wk)
Ah! My Goddess a.k.a. Oh My Goddess
Petite Princess Yucie
Figure 17
Brigadoon
Princess Tutu
Fancy Lala
Kaleido Star
Real Bout High School
Magical Girl Pretty Sammy / Magical Project S
Saint Tail
Corrector Yui
Junkers, Come Here (movie)
The original Sailor Moon series. Not Crystal. It's *long,* with multiple seasons of 40+ episodes each, and I personally found the first season kind of rough going. But partway through Sailor Moon R, the second season, Kunihiko Ikuhara takes over and the writing and direction get a lot more interesting. It holds up astoundingly well; unlike most female weebs of my generation I didn't watch it until about 2014, and I adored it.
After Sailor Moon, Ikuhara went on to make Revolutionary Girl Utena, a surreal and gorgeous masterpiece about kids engaging in ritualized duels at a fancy, elite boarding school and the gradually unfolding mysteries surrounding those duels and the extremely fucked-up duellists. Also lesbians. It's about a lot of lesbians. The first arc has a lot of silly comedy episodes; it gets *way* darker and more fucked-up later on, with content that earns all the trigger warnings.
Escaflowne and Twelve Kingdoms are both early examples of the kind of isekai we used to have before the LN slop took over - teenage girls from our world transported to a fantasy realm. Fushigi Yuugi is another, huge at the time, but it's not as good.
Martian Successor Nadesico was also ENORMOUS at the time and has become a lot more obscure since. It's a mecha series that gets very meta at times and may be more fun if you have some familiarity with the genre, but I can confirm that it's still excellent if not.
Slayers was also a must-see in that era, a sort of parody or comedy take on the traveling adventuring party (they're a legit traveling party of adventurers, but they're largely out for themselves and often cause more trouble than they remedy.) You want Slayers, Slayers Next, and Slayers Try; the late-00s comeback series, Revolution and Evolution-R, aren't nearly as good, and I never cared for the OVAs/movies with Naga.
I'm *assuming* you know Evangelion but if you haven't seen it you have to.
The original Trigun series is excellent - I liked it more than the manga.
If you want to investigate the ancestry of our current isekai-slop trend, watch El-Hazard! It's *not* slop - the original series was released as an OVA so it's got beautiful design and animation - but the story is about a teenage boy from our world being transported to another world along with two classmates and a teacher, where he proceeds to collect multiple beautiful women and get involved in a battle for the fate of the world and you get the idea. This one is virtually forgotten these days, because there's always more wish-fulfillment out there...
Slam Dunk and Yawara are both classic sports anime; Slam Dunk is boy's basketball, Yawara is girl's judo.
The early seasons of Precure aired in the early 2000s, and Futari wa Precure, the first season, is still great, with the trademark hard-hitting action scenes the franchise is known for now.
Kodocha is a slightly demented comedy about a hyperactive child TV star and her life at school. It was tremendously popular back in the day but fansub groups kept burning out on it, and then its commercial release was strangely low-profile. A blind item on ANN years ago strongly suggested that a dispute about the color of the mascot plushie may have throttled the US distributor's ability to promote the domestic release.
Boys Over Flowers and Marmalade Boy are both long-running shoujo romance/dramas, from back in an era when they made those more often, that have completely fallen off everyone's radar now.
Battle Angel Alita
Outlanders
Just about everything else I can think of from around that time people have already said.
Bubblegum Crisis
There are some whiny characters but some are for legitimate reasons. Most are from growing purposes. Some not so much.
There is a lot of world building.
It is technically incomplete (side story) because it kinda hops around short story wise but the main story is complete. Couple of different stories/characters. They ran out of funding when making the anime but I guess the actual short stories werent totally done being written either.
- True Tears
- School Rumble
- Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
- Gokusen
- Soul Eater
- Wolf's Rain
- Gurren Lagann
- Blood+
- Red Garden
- SoltyRei
- Kare Kano / His and Her Circumstances
- Monster
- Elfen Lied
- Scrapped Princess
- Karin
- Paranoia Agent
- Nana
- Beck
- Eureka Seven
- Samurai Champloo
- Nodame Cantabile
- Eden of the East
- Darker than Black
- Special A
- Chrono Crusade
- Full Metal Panic/ Fomoffu
* The Big O
* Hikaru no Go
* Azumanga Daioh
* Yakitate Japan
* Kaiji
* Basilisk