The 10 Best 70s Anime, Ranked
Before the budgets and before anyone abroad was watching, these ten shows invented almost everything anime still does.
Every mecha pilot with doubts, every gentleman thief, every space captain with a scar and a code of honour starts here. The 70s were made on tiny budgets and tight schedules, and still produced characters so strong that fans in Japan, Italy, France and Latin America grew up with them like family.
These are the ten that defined the decade and still reward a watch today, with the patience you would give an old film.
1. Mobile Suit Gundam (1979)
1979 · TV series · 43 episodes · Sunrise
The moment robot shows grew up: a war with no clean side and a boy who never asked to fight it.
Amuro Ray is a fifteen-year-old who fixes machines, and when his colony is attacked he climbs into the Federation's new prototype because no one else is there. What follows is a war seen from the ground: refugees, deserters, enemy soldiers with families, and the masked ace Char Aznable, who became the template for every charismatic rival since.
It did not sell toys at first and nearly got cancelled. Then the films and reruns turned it into the most influential mecha series ever made.
2. Space Battleship Yamato (1974)
1974 · TV series · 26 episodes
A dying Earth, a sunken battleship rebuilt for the stars, and one year to come home.
Radioactive bombs have left humanity a year to live underground. The crew of the Yamato flies 148,000 light years to bring back a machine that can save the planet, and every episode ends with a count of the days they have left.
It was the first anime to treat sci-fi as a serious drama for older viewers, and its 1977 film helped start the anime boom of the late 70s. The ticking counter still works on you.
3. Lupin the Third Part II (1977)
1977 · TV series · 155 episodes · TMS Entertainment
The world's greatest thief, his crew, and the inspector who will never, ever catch him.
Lupin steals for the thrill of it, alongside the gunman Jigen, the swordsman Goemon and Fujiko, who is on nobody's side but her own. Inspector Zenigata chases them across the globe and is, somehow, the most lovable of them all.
The red jacket series is a playground: caper one week, spy parody the next, with Yuji Ohno's theme playing over all of it. Hayao Miyazaki directed two of its episodes under a pseudonym, which tells you the level of talent that passed through.
4. Galaxy Express 999 (1978)
1978 · TV series · 113 episodes · Toei Animation
A boy, a mysterious woman in black, and a train through the stars to a planet that gives away machine bodies for free.
Tetsuro is a poor kid whose mother was killed by a machine-man hunting humans for sport. He boards the Galaxy Express with Maetel to get a mechanical body and live forever, and each stop along the line is its own small, sad fairy tale about what immortality costs.
Leiji Matsumoto's melancholy is everywhere in it. It is a road movie in space, and it gets more beautiful the older you are when you watch it.
5. The Rose of Versailles (1979)
1979 · TV series · 40 episodes · TMS Entertainment
A woman raised as a man to command the palace guard, on the eve of the French Revolution.
Oscar François de Jarjayes protects Marie Antoinette at Versailles while the country outside starves. Over forty episodes she is forced to decide what loyalty means when the people she was born to serve are the ones who are wrong.
It is a historical romance, a political drama and one of the most influential shojo stories ever told, with direction in its second half by Osamu Dezaki that turns every emotional peak into a painting.
6. Tomorrow's Joe (1970)
1970 · TV series · 79 episodes · Mushi Production
An orphan from the slums of Tokyo finds boxing, and a rival he will give everything to beat.
Joe Yabuki is a delinquent with a gift for fighting, spotted by a washed-up trainer who sees something in him. In juvenile prison he meets Rikiishi, and their rivalry turns into one of the most moving stories about sport, class and pride that anime has ever told.
In Japan, Joe is still the image of the underdog who burns himself out. It is the foundation every boxing and sports anime is standing on.
7. Space Pirate Captain Harlock (1978)
1978 · TV series · 42 episodes · Toei Animation
He fights for no flag. Only for what he believes is right.
The year is 2977 and Earth's government is too lazy and comfortable to notice an alien invasion. Captain Harlock and his ship, the Arcadia, fight it anyway, with a crew of outcasts who chose freedom over obedience.
The scarred captain in the black cape is one of the coolest designs in anime history, and director Rintaro gives the show a gothic, romantic mood you will not find anywhere else.
8. Future Boy Conan (1978)
1978 · TV series · 26 episodes · Nippon Animation
Hayao Miyazaki's first series as director, and every Ghibli obsession in one place.
After a catastrophic war, the world is mostly sea. Conan has grown up on an island with his grandfather, and when a girl named Lana washes ashore pursued by soldiers, he crosses the ocean to save her.
Flying machines, a boy who can do anything, a girl with the courage to match, a city run on machines and a village living with the land: if you love Laputa or Nausicaa, this is where they were born.
9. Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (1972)
1972 · TV series · 105 episodes · Tatsunoko Production
Five young heroes in bird costumes against a global terror organisation.
Ken, Joe, Jun, Jinpei and Ryu are a team of orphaned ninjas trained to fight Galactor, and the show takes them through wars, betrayals and real loss. It is much darker than the costumes suggest.
Gatchaman set the shape of the five-person hero team that countless shows later borrowed, and its English version, Battle of the Planets, was many Western kids' first anime without them knowing it.
10. Mazinger Z (1972)
1972 · TV series · 92 episodes · Toei Animation
The first giant robot a pilot sat inside, and the start of the whole genre.
Koji Kabuto inherits an enormous robot from his grandfather and has to fight Dr. Hell's mechanical beasts with it. Before Mazinger Z, giant robots were remote controlled. Go Nagai put the hero in the cockpit, and the genre has never left it.
It is loud, simple and made for kids, and in Italy and Spain it was the defining cartoon of a generation. Rocket Punch.
If you watch only one, make it Mobile Suit Gundam and see where half of modern anime came from. If you want the decade's heart, give Tomorrow's Joe an evening and see why it still makes people in Japan cry.
How we ranked: titles are drawn from the anime fans name most often across the major community rankings of the decade, then ordered by Anime Crush on how well each one plays today. Year and studio are from the original Japanese release.