Anime with Adult Protagonists

 

                My love for anime and manga started in my early adolescence, and the main characters were relatable since they were around my age.  Now as a woman who has voyaged far into adulthood, I’ve grown tired of the redundant, formulaic high school themes in anime with teenagers and tweenagers taking central roles.  I’ve searched and found animes that are geared towards more mature audiences – that are NOT hentai!  There are plenty of anime nerds, otherwise known as otakus, who are not perverts and appreciate Japanimation for its colorful art and complex storytelling.

                If you’re an adult otaku who wants anime that’s reflective of your grownup circumstances, there’s something for everyone.  There always is with anime.  Studio Ghibli is the choice for people who want to sound sophisticated but not oblivious to Japanimation.  Alternative to Hayao Miyazaki’s productions, there are still acclaimed films marketed to wider audiences, like Millennium Actress, Read or Die, and Akira.  However, this entry focuses on series rather than full motion pictures.

The following list involves anime with grownup protagonists and plotlines that are relatable with older age groups, produced as recently as 2021 and as early as the 1967.  The school scenery disappears, and say good-bye to the sailor school uniforms.  Characters are professionals or enduring life transformations.  The careers are diverse, whether the main character is an accountant, a racecar driver, or even a brain surgeon.  Some situations are fantastical, or absurdly comical.  Some premises take place in the future or the ancient past, or maybe just 1986 or 2017.  The setting doesn’t have to be Japan, either.  The only children in these series are related to the adult characters, hospital patients, or the random coworker who is a computer hacker.

 

1.       The Way of the Househusband (2021) – An ex-yakuza marries a beautiful working woman, and he lives his life as a house husband.  Despite leaving his life of crime, his gangster ways are still imprinted in his perspective on everything.  Even yoga positions are yakuza related to him.  There are a lot of yakuza jokes every time a white powdery substance is involved with cooking and cleaning, but the substance is never cocaine.  This show is definitely not for kids.  The main character, Tatsu (aka the Immortal Dragon) is about 30, and his wife is 26 and loves anime.

2.       God Troubles Me (2019) – On short notice 24-year-old Su Moting’s parents reveal that they are otherworldly, and kick her out of the house so they can start traveling.  Su is a picky young adult who searches for the perfect apartment, and once she signs the rental contract, her roommates turn out to be gods.  The landlord is a god too.  One god transfigures into a cat, and the other is a humanoid cellphone.  Both are controlling since mortal humans seem easily manipulated by cats and cellphones.  Su can be a jerk sometimes, but they all get along.  Moving out and living on your own is a milestone that adults can empathize with.  The series is in Mandarin Chinese, has short episodes, and there are no English dubs yet.  Although it’s not technically Japanimation, the animation style and abnormalcy in plot make it good enough for this list.

3.       Aggretsuko (2018) – This is like Hello Kitty for adults.  The female protagonist is a 25-year-old accountant, and the plot is centered in office life.  In Aggretsko’s free time, she sings heavy metal, in which she expresses her frustrations of everyday life.  The episodes involve grownup situations like relationships, networking, and problems like stalkers, and corporate corruption.

4.       Uncle from another World (2018) – A man wakes from a 17-year coma at the age of 34, and proves to his nephew that he has virtual reality powers that make ordinary telekinesis look yawn-worthy.  While he was comatose, he lived in an alternative universe that aired on television in the real world.  He and his nephew review the online episodes of his life in the other world, Granbahamal.  The worst part about waking up is the downfall of SEGA, the uncle’s beloved video game company.  A lot of millennials can identify with Uncle Yousuke, for his nostalgia for a time that no longer exists and his gradual adaptation into the present.

5.       Cells at Work (2018) – This is a sci-fi where the characters are humanized body cells.  The workplace is a human body.  The heroine is a red blood cell who tends to get lost while making deliveries, and she frequently meets a white blood cell who fights pathogens.  The other characters have names like Killer T Cell, Macrophage, Platelet, Helper T Cell, Dendritic Cell, etc.  This series is great for someone studying biology or nursing.

6.       Thermae Romae (2012) – The main character, Lucius, is an architect living in Ancient Rome.  He discovers a tunnel that spirits him to present day Japan.  From the future, he gets ideas for spas, theme parks, zoos, and other places.  In returning to ancient Rome, he encounters architectural problems in trying to implement his discoveries in his time period.

7.       Monster (2004) – A Japanese brain surgeon works in West Germany in 1986.  Dr. Tenma faces the ethical dilemma of patient intake based on socioeconomic status and fame, and upholding his hospital’s high reputation.  Dr. Tenma faces consequences for doing the right thing.  Then a string of murders occur inside the hospital.  Dr. Tenma is suspected, but could not be arrested.  Nine years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a murderous spree continues, and the main suspect is being treated by Dr. Tenma.  With his medical knowledge, he may find the answer to solve the murders. However, his work is based in ethics, not the crave for money or publicity.  This series has adult situations involving bureaucracy, discrimination, gold digging, and morality.

8.       Witch Hunter Robin (2002) – Robin was raised in Italy to track down genetically empowered witches who psychically attack people.  Robin also has witch powers but she only uses them for fighting evil witches.  In this series witchcraft is not a religious path, but a genetic phenomenon that lays dormant in any individual until the gene becomes expressed through supernaturally antisocial acts.  Obviously the villains are not happy, tree-hugging Wiccans.  Anyone with the negative powers in the dormant state is a “seed,” which includes Robin, who looks to be in her 20s.

9.       Hellsing (2001) - A royal order of guardians serves to protect England from supernatural monsters.  Led by a knighted woman, she discovers a vampire sworn to protect her, Alucard, who became her most powerful defender.  Alucard turns a police woman into a vampire, and she joins the guardians in fighting evil forces.

10.   Trigun (1998) – This is one of the few animes set in the Wild West.  An outlaw, Vash the Stampede, travels around fending off bounty hunters, and sometimes with the help of his motorcycle riding priest friend, Wolfwood.  Two journalists trail Vash and document his adventures.  One journalist falls in love with Vash.

11.   Cowboy Bebop (1998) – In contrast to Trigun, the main characters in this series are the bounty hunters.  Set in the future of 2071, Earth is no longer habitable and space is colonized.  The team consists of an Inter Solar System Police officer, an estranged hitman; a con artist with amnesia and a gambling problem.  The only child on the team is a skilled hacker.  Also part of the team is a genetically enhanced Welsh Corgi who is probably smarter than most people.  They are all aboard the ship, Bebop, hunting for criminals.

12.   Ghost in the Shell (1995) – A series of films surrounding a female cyborg, who nearly died in childhood.  Her brain was preserved and the rest of her was replaced with a prosthetic body with an operable computer chip connecting the mind and body.  She is literally a ghost living inside a shell body.  In this form, she prevents crime.  Her main weakness is that hackers can breach her mind’s computer chip.  There was also a live action version of this in 2017, starring Scarlett Johansson.

13.   Dragon Ball Z (1989) – A muscle bound warrior, Goku, who once collected the dragon balls and fought in tournaments, becomes a father.  Goku refused to conquer worlds with his brother, Raditz, who then kidnaps Goku’s son.  Raditz demands a hefty blood ransom, and the child eventually conquers the villain.  That’s only one adventure.  The Dragon Ball franchise has a lot of epic tales involving multiple alien races and intergalactic battles.  It runs as long as a soap opera for transcending fictional generations, but it’s definitely nowhere near as boring as a soap opera.  This world is filled with aliens, androids, and monsters, therefore the cast of Days of our Lives can take a hike.  Most of the DBZ characters have muscles that bodybuilders fantasize in achieving.  The men have chiseled faces unlike other animes where male characters have pointy, feminine jawlines.

14.   Speed Racer (1967) – The plot surrounds an 18-year-old racecar driver named Gou Mifune, who competes in his Mach 5 challenge car.  His family manufactures cars, and his father used to be a professional wrestler.  His girlfriend travels by helicopter during his races, and she is not the “damsel in distress type.”  Not all grownup situations are centered around office cubicles.  This anime even has a pet chimpanzee.  I remember this show being on MTV, so it was marketed to an older audience.

 

Top 13 Scary Scenes from Non-Horror Movies

 

Nightmare fuel is not just for horror films.  There are villains in rated PG movies that could pass for slasher flick monsters, like Judge Doom and Voldemort.  Some dark fantasy films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Dark Crystal have creepy qualities in common with the horror genre.  Other intense scenes are completely void of the paranormal but involve life threatening situations.

I compiled a list of scenes that either distressed me or were notable for emotionally jarring viewers.  This list started out with about six examples, then ten, twelve, and then thirteen.  The number 13 was unintentional, because the ideas just kept coming.  They are ranked from creepy to bloodcurdling based on my judgment, and that ranking is free for people to argue.  I was going to add The Witches (1990), but I decided that it could have been a children’s horror movie since the plot surrounded the antagonists who were decked out in monster makeup.  

Note:  I don’t like to spoil movies.  If you have not seen one of these films, please stop what you are doing, watch that movie, and please resume reading.  Either that, or you can just skip to the next section.  Also, there are some spoilers at the end of this entry.

 

 

13.  Tunnel scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) – Willy Wonka and the children board a small boat and travel through a tunnel, and then Willy Wonka recites some scary poem.  This emotionally affected a lot of children, but it never scared me.  The same kids who belittled me for fearing bees were afraid of this scene.  Though, I was not judgmental of them since I was afraid of ET anyway.  While we watched WW&tCF in second grade, I looked around, feeling concerned for my classmates, but wondering why they were afraid.  However, it wasn’t just my peers who feared Gene Wilder’s dreaded voice, but a wider audience of children was affected.  The scene was notable enough to make this list.

 

12.  Professor Quirrell’s Head from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) – Under the professor’s turban was the undead face of Lord Voldemort, who was living on the back of the professor’s head the whole time.  One of my friends said this part of HP1 was frightening and unnecessary, though it was in the book with a slight variation.  The Harry Potter franchise is nowhere near the horror genre, and this monstrous reveal is peculiar enough that Professor Quirrell could wander into a horror movie and fit in.

 

11.  Eyeball eating scenes from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) – The film is jam packed with horror movie material, but it is presented in the plot of a lovable children’s movie.  Samuel L. Jackson’s role as Barron has similar abilities to the T-1000 in Terminator 2, making him intimidating enough without him eating children’s eyeballs.  There is a scene where Barron and his evil accolades are consuming eyeballs in a dining room table feast as if they were delicacies.  This was all in attempts to regain human form in the least humane way.

 

10.  Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) - This guy belongs in a horror movie, not just a dark fantasy.  A silent monster sits at the head of a long table covered in tempting food.  The second a child eats the food, the monster awakens to eat the child.  There’s even a pile of children’s shoes belonging to the eaten.  Pale Man is foreboding enough to make the ranks of other horror movie monsters like Freddy Krueger and Pumpkinhead. 

 

9.  Happiness sucking laser from The Dark Crystal (1982) – Jim Henson wanted to prove that puppets weren’t just for children, so he made a frightening puppet movie to prove that.  Henson was definitely not a pervert, which sets him apart from a lot of Hollywood figures.  Instead of sexualizing his material to fulfill the adult genre, he decided to make it disturbing and involve a plot with genocidal villains.  I watched this movie in college, so it did not bother me, but it frightened one of my childhood friends, specifically the following scene.  The Skeksis capture people and force them to receive a red light beam from the dark crystal itself.  It saps all joy and transforms the captive into a slave.  Their eyes turn white in the process and they act soulless.

 

8.  Soul splitting machine from Golden Compass (2007) – Now that we just discussed a film about puppets attempting genocide and slavery, here is a movie truly intended for families.  It has an institution functioning like the Ministry of Love from 1984!  When children question and uncover arcane knowledge, they are sent to a prison with a room worse than an execution chamber.  The child and animal companion are forced into a machine with an electrical fence bisecting it.  When activated, the electrical current in the bisecting fence slowly slices the bond between the duo.  The child is rendered soulless, or seems to appear that way.

 

7.  Submarine scene from Zeus and Roxanne (1997) – Mary Beth takes a solitary dive in a small submarine, which gets caught in marine terrain, and the propeller is tangled in a net.  Stranded with no means of remote communication, the woman attempts to escape, resulting in the water fiercely flooding the interior.  She made some seriously stupid decisions, but before you judge, just know that we all make dumb mistakes.  It didn’t matter that she had a pending Darwin Award, I still felt terrified for her predicament.

 

6.  Shower scene from Captain Ron (1992) - The married couple is taking a shower on a boat, the drain gets clogged, and the door is obstructed, thus trapping them inside.  The faucet malfunctioned, and the water level was rising in the tight space.  If Captain Ron were not there to save them, the couple could have drowned.  This is supposed to be a comedy.

 

5.  Trash compacter scene from Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) – Luke, Han, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia are hiding in the trash, and the walls start caving in, to compact and dispose of the trash room’s contents.  The possibility of being crushed by walls was disturbing to me as a child.  C3PO and R2D2 stopped the process, because remote communication was possible unlike the Mary Beth’s submarine with no reception.  Although Star Wars is a far cry from a horror franchise, the people of Alderaan probably thought Darth Vader was worse than Jigsaw.

 

4.  Snake pit from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – The ending of this movie was disturbing and fits the paranormal aspects of horror for that scene alone, but I’d like to focus on a more natural threat, snakes.  The snake infested temple where Indiana Jones was marooned was terrifying and the prospect of being stranded down there is dreadful even for people without herpetophobia.

 

3.  Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) – Towards the end, the antagonist is run over by a steam roller, then his flattened body rises, and struggles to balance with spectre-like motions.  He inflates his body with a helium tank, and his eyeballs pop out.  The villain leaves his eyeballs on the floor, and reveals red eyes and gives a helium screech.  This unnerved me plus scores of children.  This family flick that’s half-animated managed to scare me more than ET.  Moreover, Judge Doom was supposed to be a mere cartoon.

 

2.  Buried alive, Kill Bill Vol. 2  (2004) – Most of the previous scenes were surreal or highly unlikely, but this event could happen if someone was malevolent enough to carry it out.  Uma Thurman’s character, the Black Mamba, attempts to exact revenge against Budd, and he puts her inside an old fashioned wooden coffin, nailing it shut.  Then he buries that coffin in the ground.  Before this egregious act, he gives her one flashlight.  Cinematically it helps with shooting the scene, but it was supposed to be his one speck of benevolence to Uma.  The scene is very tense despite her survival.

(The number one scariest scene is bad enough that I refuse to take a screenshot and post it here.)

 

1.  “Hoover it!” from She’s All That (1999) – This scene is scarier than anything from a horror film.  Grab a bottle of antacids.  This might make you sick.  This is a chick flick where the unpopular girl, Laney, gets transformed into a prom queen candidate; the antithesis of horror - aside from Carrie.  However Carrie will let you keep your stomach intact.  The most disgusting part is when a bully pranks Laney’s younger brother, Simon, by putting a large wad of tangled hair mangled with cafeteria floor debris onto his pizza.  The popular guy in school, Zack, stands up for Simon, by drawing the attention of the cafeteria, and pressuring the bully consume the pizza with the massive mound of puke-worthy material on top.  “Hoover it!” Zack says.  The bully eats it like he’s on Fear Factor, and the camera leaves nothing out.  I feel sorry for the actor who played the bully.  This is probably a deleted scene because it’s too nauseating.  Not even Freddy Krueger tried this in any of the nightmares he created.

*   *   *

Out of the thirteen films listed, five of them were based in realism, seven were fantasy, science fiction, or both, and one was half-animated/live action.  Four were comedies.  Two thirds of the surreal films were dark fantasies.  Willy Wonka’s factory looks cheery, but it’s a tempting torture facility and Pale Man has probably picked up a job application there.

Although the majority of the films listed had predominantly dark undertones, a significant portion was realistic fiction or had lighthearted plots.  Even in normal circumstances, frightening things can still happen.  Drowning can be petrifying. 

The only reason these chilling scenes don’t make it to horror is because everyone survives.  Ofelia escapes Pale Man.  Harry Potter defeats Professor Quirrell/Voldemort.  Captain Ron rescues the drowning shower takers.  The villainess saves Lyra in Golden Compass.  Out of the thirteen scenes, five involved being saved, three escaped their predicament, and two defeated monsters.  Two involved no horrifying outcome.  Barron and his fiendish friends were just shown consuming eyeballs.  It was just gross.  Absolutely nothing happened in Willy Wonka’s tunnel.  The candy man just spoke in a creepy voice.  Out of all the scenes listed, the only horrific outcome was the bully succumbing to ingesting the vicariously intestinal churning mass of grossness.  Though, he probably did not die.

I don’t shame people for being afraid.  Fear is a naturally occurring emotion that makes us human.  If you think about it, almost anything could be creepy.  Take anything from a movie, and imagine it walking into your bedroom at 4am.  Instant terror!