Top 12 Best Time Travel Anime [Best Recommendations] ⋆ Page 2 of 2 ⋆ Anime & Manga

#6- Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (or Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica) is a dark magical girl series featuring girls with a wide array of powers and fantastic events, so it’s not suprising that time travel makes an appearance and when it does, it’s extremely heartwrenching.

Madoka is a good example of how time travel can lead to the perspective of things being entirely flipped around.

Madoka is a Funimation property and you can find it streaming on their website as well as Hulu.

#7- Inuyasha

Inuyasha is a well-known work by the prolific Rumiko Takahashi. The story centers around a girl named Kagome, who falls into her family shrine’s well and pops out in 1496, during Japan’s feudal era. This is a very fantastical version of Japan, though, one where demons and monsters are real.

Kagome discovers she is the reincarnation of a priestess from this era called Kikyo and oddly enough, ends up befriending the demon boy Kikyo gave her life to subdue. Throughout the story, Kagome travels back and forth between the past and present and struggles to balance both these worlds.

The story doesn’t do much much in regards of Kagome’s actions in the past having any impact on her present day life, but it does focus on the drama of her being a reincarnation of a priestess from a past era quite a bit.

The story was first written in 1996, is very lengthy and features a lot of sexual harassment humor. Inuyasha is available on Funimation’s website.

#8- Sailor Moon R

The second season of Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon R, deals heavily with time travel. A mysterious little girl drops out of the sky one day and it eventually becomes apparent that she’s from a thousand years in the future, where Tokyo is a utopia that has recently been destroyed by a malicious faction of people called the Black Moon. These villains have also traveled back in time, both to pursue this rogue little girl and also to ensure they will rule the future.

This is also the season where the Soldiers meet Sailor Pluto, the guardian of space and time, who commands the ability to control the flow of time directly. While Sailor Moon doesn’t think too hard about the implications of shifting timelines (and this season has plenty of plotlines as a result) this is definitely a fun little romp in the time travel genre with a lot of the wacky tropes you’d expect- like young people interacting with their own future kids and those kids getting to see what their parents were like when they were kids. The time traveling characters also stick around throughout the rest of the series.

Sailor Moon R is available on Hulu.

#9- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya features lots of supernatural weirdness, so naturally time-travel is included. Perhaps the most infamous use of time travel is “The Endless Eight” in the second season. The eponymous Haruhi has reality-bending powers she is unaware of, so when she doesn’t want summer to end, she unconsciously forces everyone to relive the last day of summer again and again. This leads to eight episodes that are exactly the same with only slight alterations before one of the characters finally manages to break out of the time loop. Talk about saving animation budget!

Not may anime could get away with such a stunt, but Haruhi is enough of a phenomenon that it kept going strong as a franchise and there’s plenty more time-traveling nonsense to be had.

Haruhi can be viewed through Funimation’s website.

#10- Higurashi: When They Cry

Higurashi: When They Cry is a story about a peaceful town that is plagues with mysterious, yearly murders. Basically it’s another murder mystery story where time is constantly being rewound to save someone’s life. It’s hard to get much more into detail without major spoilers, but suffice it to say things are very complicated, dark and horrific.

You can watch Higurashi: When They Cry on Hulu, though it’s only called “When They Cry” there.

#11- Fire Tripper

Fire Tripper is a one-shot animation and manga by Rumiko Takahashi that is pretty similar to her more well known time travel anime, Inuyasha, in a lot of respects. A normal Japanese school girl is thrown back in time to Japan’s civil war era and falls in love with a boy from this past era.

Unlike Inuyasha, however, she meets this boy when he rescues her from an attempted rape, she begins to wonder if she herself may have originally been from this past era and worries she’s related to boy she’s fallen in love with. It’s very weird and a bit like a soap-opera.

#12- Summer Storm

Summer Storm is also known as Natsu no Arashi. The protagonist, Hajime, befriends a girl who turns out to be a ghost who lived during World War II. She can travel back in time and uses the power to rescue those she knows from dying in air raids. She’s only able to travel back in time if she’s accompanied by a living person who she has a connection with though, and that person naturally is Hajime.

The show apparently has some pretty fanservice-filled episodes, but it’s definitely an interesting concept. The anime can be viewed on Crunchyroll.