Anime With Adult Protagonists: 7 Shows About Grown-Up Lives

If you only pick one SHIROBAKO

• 24 episodes
• complete story
• optional 2020 film

A young production assistant keeps a TV anime on schedule while everything around it catches fire. The best workplace drama in the medium.

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In most anime the lead is fifteen and the crisis is a tournament. In SHIROBAKO the lead is Aoi Miyamori, a production assistant at Musashino Animation, and the crisis is that this week’s key animation is late, the director is behind on his storyboards, and someone has to drive across Tokyo at night to collect the drawings. Nobody throws a punch. People send emails, apologise to freelancers, and argue in meeting rooms about whether a scene is good enough to air, and it is more tense than most action shows.

Aoi and four friends from a high-school animation club once promised to make a show together, and the 24 episodes follow all five into careers that only partly match the dream: a key animator learning to draw faster, a voice actress chasing auditions, a CG artist at another company, a student who wants to write. The series covers two full productions and sees both to broadcast. A 2020 film catches up with everyone later, and it is extra. The cast is huge, so give it three episodes to learn the names. If you work in any kind of team, you will recognise at least one colleague.

At work: Planetes and The Great Passage

For work in orbit Planetes

• 26 episodes
• complete story

In 2075 the lowest-status job in space is picking up rubbish. Hachimaki wants out; the new hire wants to fix everything.

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Hachirota Hoshino, known as Hachimaki, collects orbital debris for a corporation that treats his section as an embarrassment. He wants to own his own spaceship one day. Ai Tanabe, the eager recruit, wants to talk about love and fairness, which makes her the most irritating person on board for the first few episodes and the moral centre of the show by the end. Their captain, Fee Carmichael, is a chain smoker living in a world of sealed air and smoking bans, and she takes every one of them personally. The early episodes are workplace comedy built on hard science: at orbital speed, a single loose screw can destroy a passenger craft.

Then the second half widens into politics, terrorism and a crewed mission to Jupiter, and the characters’ ambitions start costing them. The anime reworks its manga substantially and ends its own version of the story within 26 episodes. Content note: terrorism, and deaths in space accidents. If the science is what hooks you, the science-fiction guide has more.

For a quieter job The Great Passage

• 11 episodes
• complete story

A socially hopeless salesman is moved to the dictionary department and spends years on one book.

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Mitsuya Majime is terrible at sales and unusually good at noticing what words mean, so a retiring editor recruits him to help compile a new dictionary called The Great Passage. The job takes well over a decade. The show follows index cards, arguments over a single definition, a hunt for paper thin enough to hold a whole language, and Majime’s courtship of Kaguya, the trainee chef who lives in his boarding house, which he attempts with a love letter so formal she can barely read it. The eleven episodes finish the book and the story together, and the ending lands exactly as quietly as everything before it.

Starting over: Space Brothers and Ya Boy Kongming!

For a long second chance Space Brothers

• 99 episodes
• anime stops mid-story
• manga continues

At 32, Mutta headbutts his boss and loses his job. His little brother is about to walk on the Moon.

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Mutta Nanba and his younger brother Hibito promised each other as boys that they would both go to space. Hibito kept the promise and is training for a lunar mission. Mutta became a car designer, was fired for headbutting a boss who insulted Hibito, and is now out of work at 32 with an astronaut application he cannot stop thinking about. The first long arc is the JAXA selection process, including a test in which candidates are sealed inside a closed facility together and quietly judged on how they treat each other. It is gripping for something built from paperwork and group exercises.

The commitment is the catch. The 99 episodes, broadcast from 2012 to 2014, stop partway through the manga with the story still going, so you get a long stretch of real progress and then a halt. If that is a dealbreaker, pick Planetes instead. If you want a patient, funny show about an adult rebuilding his confidence one embarrassing step at a time, few do it better.

For something ridiculous Ya Boy Kongming!

• 12 episodes
• first arc ends
• manga continues

China's most famous strategist dies on campaign in 234 AD and wakes up in Shibuya on Halloween. He becomes a singer's manager.

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Zhuge Kongming dies at the Wuzhang Plains wishing for a peaceful world, then wakes up young in a crowd of Halloween partygoers. Eiko Tsukimi, a singer whose club sets draw polite indifference, takes him in, and he decides to make her famous using the tactics of the Three Kingdoms. The joke should wear out after one episode. Instead it becomes a warm show about a young adult deciding whether her music is worth another year of trying, and a rapper named Kabe arrives midway and nearly steals it. The opening’s dance went viral, deservedly. Twelve episodes finish the first big arc, and the manga goes on from there.

After hours: Wotakoi and Kakushigoto

For an office romance Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

• 11 episodes
• episodic
• stops mid-manga

Two colleagues who are both serious otaku start dating in the first episode, then work out how.

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Narumi Momose changes jobs after a boyfriend dumped her for being an otaku, and on her first day she finds that the colleague at the next desk is Hirotaka Nifuji, her childhood friend and a hardcore gamer. By the end of that episode they are dating, mostly because it seems convenient. The rest is two tired office workers learning to be a couple while keeping their weekends for conventions and games, alongside senior colleagues Hanako and Kabakura, who bicker about anime like people who have been together for years.

The 11 episodes cover only part of the manga, so the show stops at a comfortable point rather than an ending. It is lightweight, and some of the fandom jokes will pass you by, but the central couple are refreshingly settled. If watching adults simply be together is the draw, the romance guide has more relationships that actually move.

For a single parent Kakushigoto

• 12 episodes
• ends properly

A manga artist who draws mildly smutty gags hides his job from his ten-year-old daughter.

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Kakushi Goto leaves the house every morning in a suit, then changes out of it at his studio so that his daughter Hime will believe he works in an office. Most episodes are comedy about the lengths he goes to, with a staff of assistants dragged into the lie. Between the gags, short flash-forwards show Hime at eighteen opening a storehouse full of her father’s secrets, drawn in a different palette, and those scenes change the temperature of every joke around them. Twelve episodes, and the anime ends with the story’s own conclusion. Content note: grief sits underneath the comedy.

Seven picks by commitment

Four of the seven reach a real ending, and the completed anime guide has longer stories that do the same. To go sideways from any of them, start the Finder with the one you liked and filter by length.