The Best Shojo Anime of All Time, Ranked

Shojo built anime's emotional vocabulary — the meaningful pause, the reaching hand, the confession that takes forty episodes and lands like a truck. We ranked the demographic the fair way: community scores from our catalog, one entry per franchise (represented by its highest-rated season), with still-airing first seasons held out until they finish. The results run from 2021 all the way back to 1979.

1. Fruits Basket

Fruits Basket The Final Season

TV · 2021 · ★ 8.9

The definitive shojo — remade to perfection.

Orphaned Tohru Honda moves in with the Soma family and discovers their curse: hugged by the opposite sex, they turn into the animals of the zodiac. What starts as a gentle rom-com becomes one of anime's most profound stories about generational trauma and healing — and The Final Season lands every emotional payoff the 2019 remake spent three years earning.

2. NANA

NANA

TV · 2006 · ★ 8.5

Two Nanas, one apartment, zero easy answers.

Two women named Nana meet on a train to Tokyo: one chasing a boyfriend, one chasing rock stardom. Sharing apartment 707, their friendship survives bands, breakups, and betrayals in the most achingly adult romance shojo has produced. Twenty years on, nothing has filled the NANA-shaped hole.

3. Natsume's Book of Friends

Natsume's Book of Friends Season 6

TV · 2017 · ★ 8.5

The gentlest supernatural series ever made.

Takashi Natsume inherited his grandmother's Book of Friends — a ledger of spirits' names she defeated and bound. Alongside a potbellied cat god bodyguard, he returns the names one by one. Six seasons of quiet, melancholy kindness about lonely people (and lonelier spirits) learning to be seen.

4. Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You

Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You Season 3

ONA · 2024 · ★ 8.4

The slow burn that defined slow burns.

Sawako looks like the girl from The Ring, so her classmates keep their distance — until the most popular boy in school starts closing it. Kimi ni Todoke treats every millimeter of progress like a miracle, and its long-awaited Season 3 proves the formula never aged.

5. BANANA FISH

BANANA FISH

TV · 2018 · ★ 8.4

Shojo's darkest, most devastating thriller.

Ash Lynx, a teenage gang leader in New York, crosses paths with Eiji, a gentle Japanese photographer's assistant, while investigating the drug that broke his brother. A crime epic about exploitation, loyalty, and the one relationship untouched by either. Bring tissues. Bring several.

6. Revolutionary Girl Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena

TV · 1997 · ★ 8.3

The art film that wears a school uniform.

Utena Tenjou wants to be a prince, wins the mysterious Rose Bride in a duel, and gets pulled into a surreal tournament for the power to revolutionize the world. Ikuhara's masterpiece is dense with symbolism, decades ahead on gender, and still the most analyzed shojo ever made.

7. Kamisama Kiss

Kamisama Kiss◎ OVA

OVA · 2015 · ★ 8.3

The comfort-food supernatural rom-com.

Homeless schoolgirl Nanami accidentally becomes the land god of a rundown shrine — inheriting its prickly fox familiar, Tomoe, along with it. Bickering, yokai politics, and a romance centuries in the making; the OVA continuation is the franchise at its warmest.

8. The Rose of Versailles

Lady Oscar: The Rose of Versailles

TV · 1979 · ★ 8.2

The 1979 classic that built the genre.

Oscar François de Jarjayes, raised as a man to command Marie Antoinette's palace guard, watches the French Revolution gather from inside Versailles. Opulent, tragic, and radical for its era — the foundation stone nearly every show on this list is built on.

Just missed the cut

Honorable mentions with serious credentials: The Ramparts of Ice (the brand-new challenger already scoring ★8.2 mid-run), A Sign of Affection (the loveliest romance of 2024), Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart, and the eternally rewatchable Cardcaptor Sakura:

Cardcaptor Sakura

TV · 1998 · ★ 8.1

Cardcaptor Sakura — the magical-girl comfort classic, still undefeated.