From Spirited Away to Cowboy Bebop: The Internet’s Must-Watch Anime List—Even for Non-Fans
Anime fans are lighting up social feeds with their gateway must-watches, from Studio Ghibli staples to shonen juggernauts like Demon Slayer, Death Note and Attack on Titan — a crowd-sourced roadmap for first-time viewers.
Every so often the internet decides to build a starter pack, and this time anime fans stepped up with the stuff they say everyone should watch — even folks who swear they are not anime people. Shock to absolutely no one: Studio Ghibli leads the charge.
The starter stack fans kept naming
- Spirited Away (2001) — The go-to gateway movie. It follows a girl named Sen who stumbles into the spirit world and has to free herself and her parents after a witch turns them into pigs. It was a huge hit in Japan and worldwide, and it became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Fans suggest using it as your on-ramp, then moving to the next two Ghibli films before diving into the current seasonal churn.
- Princess Mononoke — Commonly recommended right after Spirited Away. It is top-tier Ghibli, full stop, and I would happily put it in the all-timer column.
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — Another early Ghibli essential that fans like to slot in before you start sampling the new seasonal shows.
- Grave of the Fireflies — Universally respected, emotionally devastating. People love it, and also warn you to plan your night around recovering from it.
- Mob Psycho 100 — A manga adaptation about a kid nicknamed Mob who has psychic powers and a whole lot of feelings. It ran for three seasons between 2016 and 2022, and one commenter called it one of the strongest stories about self-acceptance out there.
- Cowboy Bebop — Only 26 episodes from the late 90s, but it hit like a meteor and helped pull a lot of Western viewers into anime in the early 2000s.
- Samurai Champloo — From the same director as Bebop, Shinichiro Watanabe, who returned with this series about six years later. If you vibe with Bebop, this is an easy next step.
"Grave of the fireflies, but instead of 'at least once' it's 'only once'."
Quick note on the jargon: when people say "seasonal anime," they mean the wave of new shows that drop in quarterly cycles — the constantly rotating lineup you see every spring, summer, fall, and winter. Hence the advice to start with a few can’t-miss movies before you jump into that firehose.