10 Best Kyoto Animation Anime Of All Time, Ranked

Of all the various anime studios in the world, few are held in higher regard than Kyoto Animation. Not only have their projects consistently boasted gorgeous art and animation for decades, but the stories they tell are often masterpieces in terms of both comedy and heart, and that’s something few other studios can claim.

Kyoto Animation is a studio that almost always succeeds both visually and narratively, and it’s to the point that many of their shows are top contenders for some of the best anime of all time. That’s especially true of a few of their greatest hits, and each of them makes a perfect case for why they’re so beloved.

10) Love, Chunibyo, & Other Delusions

In 2012’s Love, Chunibyo, & Other Delusions, Yuta Togashi is ready to abandon his cringey chunibyo past and be a normal high schooler, but his neighbor, Rikka Takanashi, is as delusional as he used to be, and while he doesn’t like having to relive his embarrassing past, he can’t help but play along as they develop feelings for one another.

With a story centered around people who imagine themselves as over-the-top anime characters, Love, Chunibyo, & Other Delusions, naturally, has plenty of great comedy, and Kyoto Animation’s signature style looks better than ever when playing into an abrupt fantasy sequence. Add in a cute romance plot between the two leads, and the series is nothing short of an underrated gem.

9) K-On!

2009’s K-On! follows the daily lives of Houkago Tea Time, a band formed by the members of a light music club. Naturally, many episodes of the anime focus on the girls’ growth as musicians, but the series often ends up being about the various antics they end up involved in, most of which are completely divorced from the musical elements.

As an anime centered around music, K-On! has an incredible original soundtrack, but beyond that, the incredible comedic chemistry between the cast and how the cute visuals complement them always make the show fun to watch. K-On! is often seen as the quintessential “cute girls doing cute things” anime, and it’s easy to see why it’s still so beloved.

8) Lucky Star

2007’s Lucky Star focuses on the daily lives of lazy otaku gamer Konata Izumi and her friends and family. Most of the series is focused on the comedy of the interactions between the cast, but the anime also heavily relies on jokes and parodies of popular 90s and 2000s anime, most notably The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

While Lucky Star dates itself with its reference humor, that’s more than made up for by the anime’s strong comedic writing, whether it’s through the banter between the cast or characters just doing goofy things in their daily lives. Lucky Star hasn’t aged all too well, but as far as slice-of-life anime go, it’s nothing short of an underrated classic.

7) Free!

2013’s Free! stars Haruka Nanase, a talented swimmer who quit swimming competitively after a bad encounter with his old friend, Rin Matsuoka. When Rin returns to Japan years after studying abroad, however, Haruka’s desire to reconnect with Rin reignites his passion for swimming, thus beginning the adventures of him and the other members of the Iwatobi Swim Club.

Between the strong character writing and how great the animation for the swimming sequences is, Free! is one of the best sports anime to watch, with all the great dramatic beats that one would expect from that. It’s a rare Kyoto Animation series to have a predominantly male cast, but sure enough, that doesn’t make their formula any less effective.

6) Clannad

2007’s Clannad stars Tomoya Okazaki, a high schooler with no ambition for anything after graduating due to his troubled home life. On a whim, Tomoya helps reestablish the drama club with Nagisa Furukawa, a girl who’s had to repeat her senior year due to illness, and their time together inevitably changes them in ways they never could have imagined.

Clannad is often seen as one of the most iconic romance dramas in anime, and with how well the series condenses the original visual novel into a heartfelt, linear story, it’s easy to see why. Few anime can reach the emotional highs of Clannad, and even after so many years, it remains an unmissable classic.

5) City The Animation

2025’s City the Animation is centered around the daily events that go on in a city that’s simply called City. Many of the adventures center around perpetual slacker Midori Nagumo and her friends, but overall, the story is about every weird person who lives in the City and the odd things they go through every day.

City the Animation is a spiritual successor to the classic Kyoto Animation series Nichijou, and sure enough, it features all the same wonderfully surreal animation and comedy, all of which is easily among the best of recent anime, in general. It was a criminally underrated anime of summer 2025, but it’s sure to go down as a modern classic.

4) Kanon

In 2006’s Kanon, Yuichi Aizawa moves in with his cousin to live in a city he hasn’t visited in seven years. As Yuichi slowly remembers what made the city so special, he becomes involved with several girls with connections to his past and, in many cases, an odd relation to the supernatural that only he can deal with.

While much of what Kanon does is more polished in Clannad, its most immediate successor, it’s still a charming drama in its own right that never fails to sell its heartwarming stories from start to finish. Kanon still stands out as one of Kyoto Animation’s best early works, and it’s a series that fans would be remiss to pass up.

3) Nichijou

2011’s Nichijou is about the daily lives of the citizens of Tokisadame, the most prominent being the trio of Yuko Aioi, Mio Naganohara, and Mai Minakami. They and everyone else in town, however, are extremely eccentric, and most stories in the series typically revolve around everyone taking otherwise mundane situations and making them as goofy and over-the-top as possible.

Kyoto Animation is just as famous for its comedy as they are for its drama, and with a stellar combination of surreal visuals and absurdist writing, Nichijou is the greatest example of that, by far. Even after almost 15 years, Nichijou remains one of the best short anime to watch on Crunchyroll, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

2) Violet Evergarden

The eponymous hero of 2018’s Violet Evergarden is a former orphan turned soldier who, after her war ends, becomes a special type of ghostwriter called an Auto Memory Doll in the hopes of learning to better understand people, and Violet especially hopes it will help her understand why her commanding officer told her he loved her before he died.

From the moment it premiered, Violet Evergarden has been praised as an emotional masterpiece for its thoughtful and mature examinations of love and human connections, all of which are beautifully expressed through absolutely stunning artwork and animation. Violet Evergarden is often regarded as one of the best Kyoto Animation anime to watch, and overall, it’s hard to argue with that.

1) The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya

In Kyoto Animation’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon is forced by Haruhi Suzumiya to join the SOS Brigade, a club dedicated to finding the supernatural. What Haruhi doesn’t know, though, is that the other club members are the supernatural beings she’s looking for, who are observing Haruhi’s godlike powers, all of which Haruhi has to be kept unaware of.

Between its incredibly creative direction and clever writing that still holds up after almost 20 years, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya reaches visual and narrative highs that are virtually unmatched by any other anime. It’s another contender for one of the best anime of all time, and there’s no better choice for the best Kyoto Animation anime of all time.

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These Are the 10 Best Anime of All Time According to MyAnimeList