Now that you've watched a little anime, it's time to up your game a bit. These are shows which rely slighly more on a knowledge of Japan -- or anime itself -- to be fully enjoyable, but are still pretty good for relative newcomers.
All shows are listed in alphabetical order.
1. Ah! My Goddess
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Genre: Comedy / Romance.
Concept: Luckless engineering student Keiichi accidentally ends up receiving the “help” of a goddess, Belldandy, and soon finds himself not only head-over-heels for her but dealing with competition from several other goddesses as well.
Length: 50 (two seasons), plus multiple OAVs and features.
Appeal: For anyone who wants a good-natured love story with a generous dose of both comedy and some supernatural / SF / fantasy elements, this is your show. The gods (and their heaven) in this story are an eclectic mix of Japanese, Nordic and technological tropes, in roughly ascending order of importance. (Random example: Belldandy's sister Urd falls dead asleep on hearing enka, a kind of sentimental pop ballad common in Japan.)
2. Fruits Basket
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Genre: Comedy / Romance.
Concept: Orphaned teen girl Tohru is taken in by a family harboring a strange curse: when embraced by a member of the opposite sex they turn into one of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. Being attracted to any of them is complicated enough -- but being one of the few people capable of making sense of their messy lives just makes things even crazier!
Length: 26 episodes.
Appeal: Like Ah! My Goddess, one of the attractions of this show is how many of the main characters (well, with a few hilariously pungent exceptions) are good people trying to do the right thing. Most of the Japanese elements of the show are kept as secondary elements (Tohru's late mother, for instance, was a yanki or gang-girl), and the Chinese zodiac itself isn't completely alien to Western audiences either.
3. Hell Girl
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Genre: Horror / Thriller / Mystery.
Concept: Urban legend has it that if you log on to Hell Girl's website at the stroke of midnight, you can condemn someone to hell ... at the cost of your own immortal soul. Turns out it's no legend, though -- Hell Girl is very real, and it's up to a reporter with a curious connection to Hell Girl herself to find out what the hell (pun intended) is going on.
Length: 78 episodes (three seasons).
Appeal: A supernatural mystery with some downright savage scenes of karmic comeuppance, as the vast majority of people condemned by Hell Girl really do have it coming. The show draws on Japanese mythology and superstition to bring Hell Girl and her cronies to life, but also makes use of present-day issues in Japanese society (e.g., bullying).
4. Hikaru no Go
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Genre: Drama.
Concept: Hikaru Shindo's a kid with no particular aim or ambition in life until the day he finds himself sharing a peculiar bond with the spirit of one Fujiwara-no-Sai, a long-dead master of the ancient boardgame of go. Hikaru's interest in the game blossoms when he encounters another young rival player, Toya Meijin, and soon the game becomes the arena for both of their maturation.
Length: 75 episodes (three seasons).
Appeal: Like many other stories about someone embracing a sport, this one's not so much about go itself. Rather, it's about Hikaru starting as a brash, unambitious kid and turning into a disciplined, focused (though not always any less brash) young man. The game itself is explained in the context of the show with minimal fuss, and becomes unexpectedly riveting to watch because of what else is at stake.
5. Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit
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Genre: Adventure / Martial Arts / Historical / Drama.
Concept: Soldier of fortune Balsa returns to her homeland after many years of wandering, only to be thrust into the middle of a devious plot to assassinate a young prince and use the power he carries unwittingly within him. Balsa takes the young man under her wing, fights to keep him safe, and gives him not only a chance to survive his enemies but find a new kind of belonging he never had before.
Length: 26 episodes.
Appeal: Part fantasy epic, part martial-arts / action showcase, part alternate history, part historical drama -- any one of the ingredients of Moribito alone would have made a good show by itself, but together under the stewardship of the director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, they combine to create something really special. The land of "Yogo" in the series is a loose amalgam of many different Asian lands -- China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Mongolia -- and while some familiarity with them helps make the elements all the easier to assimilate, that's not absolutely vital to understanding the story.
6. Mushi-shi
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Genre: Drama / Mystery / Supernatural
Concept: The wraithlike, mysterious "mushi" are a form of life that exists separately from the rest of nature, but every now and then man and mushi interact in problematic ways. Ginko, the wandering mushi master, has made it his life's calling to understand these creatures and help those afflicted by them, but what mankind sometimes calls "affliction" is just another being's way of life and death.
Length: 26 episodes.
Appeal: Adapted from an award-winning comic (also available in English), this ethereally beautiful story has the atmosphere of a folk tale and the mind of a medical-mystery story like House. It's clearly set in Japan's own rural past, and many individual pieces of the show's background can be traced to that country's own myths and legends, but the foreground details are engrossing enough on their own that they barely need any explaining.
7. Ouran High School Host Club
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Genre: Comedy / Romance
Concept: Haruhi Fujioka's a schoolgirl who's about as romantic as a dried leaf. One day she blunders into her school's "Host Club," the creation of a gaggle of extremely wealthy (and even more extremely romantic) male students. Their mission: to bring romance into the lives of the female students -- and they've just drafted Haruhi as their newest host!
Length: 26 episodes.
Appeal: This broad, frothy comedy gets much of its mileage out of the interactions between Haruhi and the (rather bizarre) members of the Host Club, as well as a budding romance between her and the leader of the crew. The concept of a host (or hostess) club itself is relatively exclusive to Japan, but not terribly hard to fathom in terms of how it's used as a plot element ... or, for that matter, a source of nearly endless laughs. Note that this is one example of a show that also operates as a showcase for many anime-centric visual and storytelling tropes, some of which take a little getting used to for the uninitiated.
8. Rurouni Kenshin
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Genre: Martial Arts / Historical / Drama
Concept: The beginning of Japan's "Meiji" period -- when the country became a modern nation -- brought forth many human relics of the previous era. Among them, Himura Kenshin, a former assassin turned gentle wanderer who has now dedicated his life to helping and not hurting. Surrounded by a bevy of new friends, he does his best to keep them safe from forces out of his own past that want to seize this new, modern Japan for themselves.
Length: 95 (3 seasons)
Appeal: You don't need to be a student of Japanese history to enjoy Kenshin, even though the series does tie into and freely include many people and events from its time period of choice (the 1870s). What's always front-and-center are the characters -- especially Kenshin himself, who seems like a lovable goof until you threaten his friends.
9. Samurai Champloo
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Genre: Martial Arts / Historical / Drama / Comedy
Concept: Jin's a cold-as-ice ronin (masterless samurai). Mugen's a fiery street brawler who's never said no to a fight. And Fuu is a teahouse waitress who somehow ropes the two of them into helping her find "a samurai who smells of sunflowers," on a wild ride across feudal Japan that'll leave all three of them breathless -- and leave you laughing.
Length: 26 episodes.
Appeal: Whose idea was it to take all the tropes of samurai action films and mash them up in a sauce of hip-hop / gangsta rap / street-culture idioms? Doesn't matter, because the end result is the most original interpretation of "East Meets West" in a long time. ("Champloo" does mean "mix-up" or "gumbo" in Okinawan.) And while it doesn't hurt to know about the samurai era, most everything is explained along the way anyway -- or is just thrown in the for the sake of color and not meant to be the slightest bit historically accurate.
10. Spirited Away
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Genre: Martial Arts / Historical / Drama
Concept: Little Chihiro's a bundle of gloom now that she's had to move to a new neighborhood. On the way to the new house, her parents are distracted the remnants of a former amusement park -- and transformed into pigs. The place is actually a playground for the gods, and now Chihiro has to prove her worth to the eccentric owners so her parents can be restored to normal.
Length: 130 minutes.
Appeal: Hayao Miyazaki's animated films appeal to kids of all ages, not just in Japan but most everywhere they're screened. This 2002 film, widely regarded as one of his very best (and to think he was considering retiring before he made it!), does draw heavily on Japanese mythology and culture to fill in and round out its little universe. But all of it is just as alien to its young heroine as it is to the audience, whether they're Japanese or not, and so it works well as a standalone adventure with no cultural dictionary needed to make sense of it.
11. Summer Wars
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Genre: Thriller / Drama
Concept: In a world a lot like ours, where almost every aspect of daily life is reflected in and managed by a giant virtual-reality space named "OZ", teen math whiz Kenji finds himself in gallons of hot water when he's tricked into cracking the site's encryption protocols. Now he had to draw on all the myriad members of his female classmate's extended family to help out when a mysterious AI named "The Love Machine" threatens to use "OZ" to crash the real world.
Appeal: One of anime's charms is how even in the middle of the most outlandish goings-on, the story can remain rooted in the most mundane parts of life. Here, on one hand, an out-of-control AI threatens to make life miserable for most of the people on the planet; on the other, a young man's being conned into pretending to be his girlfriend's fiancée (in traditional Japanese fashion) so that her ailing grandmother can be put at ease. Those background details about Japanese courtship, marriage, and family help round out the story and make it that much more human instead of esoteric.
