A haunted bathroom, a city of schools, a student council at war, a volleyball gym and a hero academy: five anime where the school is the whole world.
A good school anime is never about homework. The school is a small world with its own rules, and the bell, the club room and the student council are where characters find out who they are. These five build the best schools in anime.
One of them is a 2009 deep cut that school lists tend to skip, and it earns its place.
1. My Hero Academia (2016)
2016 · TV series · 13 episodes · bones
A boy born without a power gets into the one high school that trains heroes.
Izuku Midoriya is one of the few people in his world born without a Quirk, and he still wants to be a hero like All Might. When All Might chooses him, Izuku lands in Class 1-A at U.A. High School.
Bones adapted Kohei Horikoshi's manga in 2016. Class 1-A has twenty students and the show gives nearly every one of them a moment, which is why U.A. feels like a real school and sits at number one.
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2. Haikyu!! (2014)
2014 · TV series · 25 episodes · Production I.G
The shortest player on the court joins a volleyball club everyone has written off.
Shoyo Hinata is too short for volleyball and plays anyway. At Karasuno High he has to share the court with Tobio Kageyama, the setter who beat him in middle school, and the two become the team's strangest weapon.
Production I.G adapted Haruichi Furudate's manga in 2014. The gym, the bus rides and the training camps make Karasuno the most lived-in school club in anime.
3. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War (2019)
2019 · TV series · 12 episodes · A-1 Pictures
Two student council geniuses in love, and neither will confess first.
Kaguya Shinomiya and Miyuki Shirogane run the student council at Shuchiin Academy. Each is sure the other is in love, and each believes that whoever confesses first loses, so every lunch becomes a battle plan.
A-1 Pictures adapted Aka Akasaka's manga in 2019. The whole war is fought inside one council room, and the school's rules are the battlefield.
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4. A Certain Scientific Railgun (2009)
2009 · TV series · 24 episodes · J.C.STAFF
The deep cut: a whole city built out of schools, and the girl ranked near the top of it.
Academy City is a city of schools where students are trained to develop psychic powers. Mikoto Misaka of Tokiwadai Middle School is one of its seven Level 5s, nicknamed Railgun for the coins she fires.
J.C.Staff made it in 2009, a spin-off of A Certain Magical Index. It belongs here because the friendships at its centre, Mikoto, Kuroko, Uiharu and Saten, are pure after-school life.
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5. Toilet-bound Hanako-kun (2020)
2020 · TV series · 12 episodes · Lerche
A girl summons the ghost of a school legend, and every wish he grants has a price.
Nene Yashiro wants a boyfriend, so she summons Hanako-san, the ghost said to live in the third stall of the girls' bathroom at Kamome Academy. Hanako is a boy in a school cap, and every wish he grants costs something.
Lerche adapted AidaIro's manga in 2020, drawn like a picture book. It is the creepiest school on this list, and the most beautiful.
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Heroes in training: My Hero Academia. A club that becomes a team: Haikyu!!. Romance played like a strategy game: Kaguya-sama. A city of schools: Railgun. A ghost story with a bite: Toilet-bound Hanako-kun.
How we ranked: Anime Crush picked series where the school is at the centre of the story, then ordered them by how much the school itself shapes the people in it.
