Hello everyone, it’s time to bring out the bowls, pots and pans as I finally announce to the world in less than 10,000 words what anime you should have watched in 2025. The craziest thing is that I actually completed a seasonal anime for the first time in six years last year so you know last year was actually worth paying attention to.
I’m going to narrow down the best anime I watched to a small-ish number just so I don’t overwhelm anyone. You know, just a few hundred words each or so. Nothing crazy. Also these aren’t ranked either, so don’t think I ranked your favourite anime lower than your other favourite anime. Don’t give me any complaints in the comments please!
#1 – CITY The Animation
So to reveal the anime that finally broke the seasonal slump for me, it was CITY that did it and honestly who could blame it? While Pep Guardiola’s CITY slumped to 3rd in the Premier League table last year, it was KyoAni’s CITY that rose to the challenge and became one of my favourites of last year.
CITY The Animation is…animation. If you wanted to show a friend of yours something to understand the joys of animation, CITY would have to be one of the things to get them hooked. Every single episode brought something new to the table, tried to one up itself and surprise me. It’s easily one of the most incredibly produced anime of the decade.
Now you might be thinking that’s a bit much, considering that I’ve barely watched any anime as they’ve aired this decade, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t watched any 2020s anime. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work it out everyone.
Particular shoutout to CITY Ep.5 for one of the most multilayered and insane sequences that any anime has had period. It’s hard to put into words exactly how nuts the whole episode was. You simply have to watch it and see it speak for itself.
#2 My Melody and Kuromi
This one came pretty late in the year for me. My Melody and Kuromi made its way to Netflix in July 2025 but I didn’t get around to it until the year had almost ended! To be honest, that’s pretty typical for my viewing habits.
I rediscovered My Melody and Kuromi in that period between Christmas and New Years, a time when not much actually happens and you’re mostly just sitting on the sofa wondering what you want to watch next. What followed was another excellent entry in the My Melo universe. Not quite as wacky as Onegai My Melody but it made up for it in style.
It had Kuromi in it, who is the best and cannot be beaten. She’s the queen, she deserves the world and anyone in the world who hasn’t admitted that to be the case simply hasn’t admired her greatness yet. Though I will say, Piano did give her a run for her money in quite how good she was towards the latter half of the series. It was an unexpected but very rewarding turn and I greatly appreciated it.
Tomoki Misato directed the series, someone who already has the acclaimed Pui Pui Molcar under his belt. Can you imagine someone who has two incredible stop motion series under his belt at just 32 years old? Sure Nick Park had won an Oscar for Creature Comforts and was about to get a bunch more from Wallace and Gromit’s further adventures but neither of them have Kuromi in them.
Actually, come to think of it, I would absolutely love to see an Aardman produced My Melo series. That would be pretty grand.
#3 You and Idol Precure
I hadn’t watched much else for TV anime in 2025 so Precure will just have to do. This season was not the best season and while it was a return to form for the financial gremlins out there that care more about toy sales, it was less good than usual for a series suffering from Toei Animation’s descent into the hell that is the Reiwa Era.
You and Idol Precure was occasionally very good, when the usual good directorial suspects including the excellent Hanako Ueda and Yuuna Hirosue and series stalwart Yutaka Tsuchida but it lacked the animation muscle to make it something special.
Though what made this series more of a miss was the messy series composition which has plagued most Reiwa seasons of Precure with mismanaged story arcs aplenty. Perhaps Magical Stage should one day have an article about Reiwa seasons of Precure in a bit more detail, let us know in the comments (or ping me on BlueSky or Discord)!
Hey at least it had Series Director Chiaki Kon self inserting her dog into the show and making a whole episode around him speaking with the voice of her favourite voice actor. That was pretty cool!
#4 Cosmic Baton Girl: Comet-san
Now this article never said anything about the shows I watch having actually aired in 2025 right? I actually watched Comet-san for the first time in 2025 after it had been made fully subbed in 2024 by a friend who finished the subs off for everyone to enjoy.
I will just go ahead and say this, Cosmic Baton Girl: Comet-san is one of the best anime I’ve ever watched. Like easily a Top 5 show for me. It’s the best anime I’ve watched in the 2020s, that’s for sure.
What makes Comet-san great for me is that it’s about someone who’s experiencing the world, finding the beauty in things with a little bit of magic along the way. Sure there’s an overarching plot of finding the Tambourine Prince but who cares about that, we can ride rocket trees now!
To me, Comet-san is the perfect marriage of Ojamajo Doremi and Aria, two series that I love to bits. It’s got the silly faces, it’s got the wonders of friendship and family, it’s got that admiration of the world and it shows kindness in spades. Unlike Doremi and Aria though, Comet-san has a ‘Kuromi’ in Meteo-chan, a bratty and spoiled brat of a princess who is Comet-san’s self proclaimed rival (isn’t that familiar?).
I love Meteo-chan, she would totally love keeping a Kuromi Note of all the times that dreaded Comet-san has “wronged” her. Though I love Meteo because unironically, she has some of the best episodes in the entire show. Ep.17 is a masterclass in grabbing you by the heartstrings and is still one of my favourite episodes in the first half of the show. If that one doesn’t grab you into thinking this series is incredible, Ep.19 certainly will as it shows literally everything I love in an anime condensed into just 20 minutes and that’s not even mentioning the mecha episode sandwiched in between them.
We’re currently groupwatching the show on Definitive Anime Chat…thing (do join, we’d love the company!) and it’s just great reliving it all, especially watching alongside others who are watching it for the first time as well. We’re getting into the second half of the show now and believe it or not, the show just doesn’t slow down. It just keeps getting better and better culminating in an incredibly satisfying and tear-jerking conclusion. You just have to watch this!
#5 ITV: The Franchise Affair
Now that I’ve got all of your attention, we get to the actual point of this article. To get people to know that this excellent series exists. It’s no secret that I actually watch a lot more YouTube stuff compared to anime. I’m sorry, but it’s true. My favourite anime that released in 2025 isn’t an anime in the slightest, it’s a three part YouTube series about…ITV, Independent Television.
Bob The Fish, who produced this series is best known for his ITV In The Face series, looking at the history of each of the ITV Regions but I think this, more focussed version is more tightly produced and speaks to quite how far they’ve come from that old series.
I personally think the history of ITV is the most interesting of the major TV broadcasters here in Britain. The BBC does have its 100 year history but the history of that, or at least the history that I’m aware of doesn’t have the drama that ITV’s does and that’s down to the inherent nature of how ITV was set up. The franchise model.
ITV as it was initially created, was a franchise model that allowed various companies to run a region’s broadcasting including having their own branding and presence to give a local edge to broadcasting which the BBC really didn’t have apart from its news, radio and occasional local output. What spices this up is that the regulator would hold “franchise rounds” every few years to work out who would run each area.
The Franchise Affair covers the events of each of these franchise rounds, the candidates and what the after effects were. Now I’ve known about these on a more broader scale since I was a kid as I’ve always had this weird fascination with how telly works here in the UK but this series somehow expands upon it in ways I didn’t even know before. Like I always knew who won and lost each round but I never knew who the other unknown candidates were, who they were backed by and what happened to them.
As mentioned before, there are three episodes named after the three franchise rounds that actually marked changes in the network, namely 1967, 1980 and 1991. The first two episodes, while full of drama and insight, give the picture of a network that is changing for the better, evolving with the times and having regulators that actually seemed to care about how ITV operated. Ep.3 takes a predictably melancholic turn because it was the start of the end of what ITV used to be and what it is right now. ITV is not the same channel as it used to be in the first 40 years of its life and will never return to how it used to be.
I think with the media landscape of today, a regional ITV couldn’t possibly exist and it was inevitable that the colourful and interesting landscape that it used to be wouldn’t be feasible today. With the way we see companies regularly buying each other out, there’s no way little ol’ Border Television or Anglia Television could survive the hellscape that is 2026.
But hey, at least the idents live on through the recordings that nerds had done over the years. How else would we still be able to see the iconic Thames Television ident or ATV’s Zoom 2? The Franchise Affair tickles that itch I have in learning more about something that I was interested in before I was interested in anime.
I’m done now. There’s no more anime in 2025.
Can’t believe there was only five anime in 2025! To the people out there who think there was more of them. You’re wrong and there’s no way you can prove otherwise to me. But hey at least now you have five anime of 2025 to watch! Maybe you’ll want to go take a look at the best anime of 2025 too!
