Quirky Work / Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You is about a boy who was accidentally blessed from birth to have 100 soulmates. That on its own is fertile ground for an absurd story premise, but the boy in question has improved himself through 100 rejections from infancy to his middle school graduation, and practically wields The Power of Love as a superpower when he starts collecting his girlfriends, each one crazier than the last.
• Akahori Gedou Hour Lovege is about two wannabe comediennes who take part-time jobs as superheroines. Due to them destroying the city every time they fight evil, they get mistaken for evil creatures and become feared by everyone.
• Arakawa Under the Bridge and its sequel, about a corporate heir who lives under a bridge with a bunch of Crazy Homeless People because he owes a life-debt to a strange young girl. There's a reason Studio Shaft decided to animate this one.
• Assassination Classroom is about a class of ordinary junior high students and their teacher "Koro-sensei", a yellow cephalopod-like creature that moves at Mach 20 speeds, which would be strange enough on its own. What pushes it into the surreal is that the students have to kill their teacher within a year before he causes an Earth-Shattering Kaboom... yeah. Not only are attempts on Koro-sensei's life an ultra-common occurrence in the classroom, but the teacher himself happily gives pointers in the art of assassination to his students, even though he is their target.
• For a Slice of Life comedy yonkoma, Azumanga Daioh has a quirky and sometimes very odd sense of humor, with scenes like Sakaki's fantasy sequences about a cat-like creature claiming to be Chiyo's father, or pretty much any conversation involving Osaka. The series also makes numerous references to Japanese culture which non-Japanese audiences would find hard to understand.
• Bananya: Adorable as all get out, but still widgety. Cats that live in banana peels? Really?
• Black★Rock Shooter: Let's get this straight. We have the story starting in a Mental World with a Stripperific outfitted girl fighting other dream versions of girls, no clear heroes or villains, just some girls fighting each other for some reason, and this is before we meet the Yandere Wheelchair Woobie, Kagari, whose favorite hobby seems to be chucking gross-colored macaroons at people in both the real and Mental World. And an older woman who serves everyone coffee, but calls it "dirty water" when asked if she likes it. Then there's some Fractured Fairy Tale about a bird soaking up rainbow colors until it turns black and dies. And the color of the bird the hero most admires is actually the black dead one.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: the characters confuse their enemies into submission, confusing the viewer in the process. The main character is a Kenshiro knock-off with a blonde afro who uses "fist of the nose hair", and the enemy is an evil empire that wants to shave everyone's head. That covers the first couple of episodes, and it gets weirder.
• Butt Detective is a children's anime about a talking butt that solves crimes. Many foreigners found the concept of the show weird, with some of them comparing it to the mid-2000's output of [adult swim].
• Case Closed is about a teenage detective trapped in a six-year-old boy via Applied Phlebotinum, who solves morbid and seemingly impossible crimes with many gadgets (anesthetic included) while keeping his acquaintances in the dark. This premise is regarded as the reason it never caught on in the North America because it's considered too silly as a serious Mystery Fiction and too violent for kids.
• Cat Soup, the story of a cat who takes a surreal journey through the Land of the Dead to get his sister's soul back. It's considered to be weird even by the standards of weird Japanese things.
• Chintsubu is a manga about boys who have talking penises. This one is so bizarre that it's often brought up in internet conversations purely as a benchmark of "how weird can Japanese media get."
• Cromartie High School is a parody of old shounen shows, about a normal(ish) guy that starts going to school full of "badasses". And a gorilla. And a robot (that doesn't realize he's a robot). And a mute man that looks strangely like the deceased lead singer of Queen.
• Dandadan: A Conspiracy Kitchen Sink where the female protagonist is abducted by aliens, which unlocks her Psychic Powers, and the male protagonist's genitals are stolen by a Youkai called "Turbo-Granny" (who is a real urban legend in Japan, albeit a more recent one than most legends about youkai), which then possesses him and becomes his Superpowered Evil Side. And that's just the first chapter.
• Donyatsu is a post-apocalyptic Slice of Life about cats which, for some reason, have bodies modeled on various donut-shaped snack foods.
• Eden of the East is a bizarre conspiracy thriller that starts with a young woman from Japan meeting a mysterious amnesiac man with no clothes on on a college trip to Washington, DC. Things only get weirder from there.
• Excel♡Saga, a bizarre gag series about an eccentric woman working for a would-be world conqueror with a very limited budget trying to take over the city of Fukuoka, Japan. The American release even has the title written in faux-Japanese letters.
  • From the same people: Puni Puni☆Poemi. Two OVA episodes of sheer insanity about a crazy teenage girl who refers to herself by the name of her voice actress, whose best friend has a blatant crush on her and comes from a family of sisters with not very useful superpowers. The heroine later gets magical girl powers, including a Transformation Sequence that involves shoving a knife up the rectum of a talking dead fish, and tries to use them to fight for justice and avenge her parents' death.
• Fighting Foodons, which gives a whole new meaning to the word "food fight". More specifically, due to magic cards called "Meal Tickets", food can be brought to life, and so chefs are constantly competing to create the strongest food warriors.
• FLCL. It's pronounced 'fooly cooly' (not even the characters know the meaning), and is about a crazy woman who beats a troubled pre-teen boy with a bass guitar to summon giant mecha out of his head so she can kill them, in between hitting him with her Vespa just for fun.
• Getsumen to Heiki Mina. Magical Bunny Girls who fight aliens trying to cause trouble at sporting events. And their attacks are vegetable-themed.
• Gintama. Its humor relies on a lot of Japanese puns, references to Japanese pop culture, Japanese-style humor, and a basic knowledge of famous historical Japanese figures. Though later on they also have gags like "Willis Smith" and sneezing the name "Mai-ke-ru Jackuson!" And a whole lot of in-universe running gags and random Widget Series staples. And it has two Star Wars parodies.
• Girls und Panzer: Moe girls pilot tanks as a sport on top of a gigantic floating city.
• Gloom Party takes the cake. It's a yonkoma series that the English publishers, DMP, knew would be incomprehensible to an American audience, since a large amount of the gags are Japanese puns, or refer to Japanese phenomena. Therefore, they added the words How to "read" manga to the title, made sure that the American edition contained only the strips that Western readers wouldn't understand, and added a short explanation of the joke to every strip, turning it into a guide to incomprehensible Japanese humor.
• Goodnight Punpun, in which a mute little bird (think Woodstock but three feet tall), drawn in line style while everyone else is drawn realistically, tries to comprehend his bad home life and the behaviour of people at his kindergarten. Occasionally, he summons God for answers; God has an afro and is getting tired of the same questions.
• The Gothic World Of Nyanpire: An abandoned black cat is found dying alone during a rainy night. The same night, a vampire shows up and feels bad for the kitten. He decides to cut his finger and feed a drip of his own blood to the cat. Which results in the cat turning into an actual living vampire cat. He gains fangs, wings, and a yellow cross on his stomach, and later gets the name "Nyanpire" since he's a vampire. He lives with an owner who owns a Siamese cat named Chachamaru. He later befriends a Samurai cat named Masamunya who starts developing a crush on him. And a fallen angel from heaven named Nyatenshi who is constantly seen chasing a cat named Katsuo by holding a stick over a sardine that Katsuo has.
• Gugure! Kokkuri-san: A self-proclaimed doll girl named Kohina decides to summon the fox spirit on her own and ends up being haunted by the Kokkuri...who is so appalled by her low living standards that he appoints himself to be her guardian. He is later joined by a masochistic Inugami, who is obsessively in love with Kohina and an alcoholic bum of a Tanuki who freeloads in the Ichimatsu home to create more weird hijinks in Kohina's life.
• Haré + Guu: A boy and his mother live in the jungle, until the mom adopts a Humanoid Abomination in the form of a little girl who has another world in her stomach. Weirdness ensues.
• The two spinoffs of Haruhi Suzumiya, Haruhi-chan and Nyoron Churuya-San, definitely qualify. Just read the lyrics to the Haruhi-chan theme song.
• Hayate the Combat Butler, a series about a boy whose parents stick him with an enormous debt to the Yakuza, so he tries to abduct a little girl and ends up as her butler. The series also features aliens, robots, ghosts, demons, talking animals and involuntary time travel.
• Heaven's Design Team is about a group of designers being commissioned by The Big Man Himself to design animals to fill the Earth because he can't be bothered to do it himself.
• Hentai Kamen. It's about a martial artist slipping a pair of panties on his head (by accident) and transforming into... a guy with underwear on his head.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers (and Hetalia: World Series): World history + countries turned into impossibly cute/hot guys + Ho Yay = this show (especially the English dub, in which most, if not all, of the dialogue is more risque than what the Japanese version has).
• Heybot! ostensibly parodies Merchandise-Driven competition series while being the weirdest one ever, as the premise involves a kid and his screw-themed robot partner partaking in joke-telling contests. Random chaotic situations (added emphasis to random) and crude humor ensue.
• Hyouge Mono, a series with feudal warfare, Samurai, and a guy who's obsessed with tea ceremonies and pottery art. Though it is based on an award winning manga, so something went right somewhere.
• Idol Angel Yokoso Yoko: This anime actually WAS made by someone on drugs. Takeshi Shudō had a substance abuse problem and would delegate the job of scriptwriting to different people, hence the jarred and inconsistent structure. It started off as an average Idol Singer Coming of Age Story, and then shifts the focus from the main characters to random side characters who had no prior importance to the story, shoehorns a Green Aesop multiple times out of nowhere and ends with a Distant Finale that implies a Bad Future occurred.
• Ippatsu Kiki Musume - Literally meaning "Sudden Danger Girl", sometimes translated as "Miss Critical Moment". A short-format anime series where an Anime Chinese Girl wakes up to find herself facing imminent death (such as being locked in a sauna or halfway down a python's gullet), tries to save herself (which fails either due to her employing Insane Troll Logic or because the universe hates her), and is ultimately rescued by complete coincidence.
• Jewelpet becomes more bizarre and laden with Japanese ancient and pop culture references starting with its third season, which alienates a lot of non-otakus.
• Story wise, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure starts out as a fairly normal take on a zombie/vampire tale, albeit with some definite twists. But then there's the characters' names, which almost all reference western rock and roll (Robert E. O. Speedwagon, Tompeti, Oingo and Boingo, etc.). And the art, which largely consists of muscular men in elaborate clothing striking model-esque poses. And some crazy character designs, such as Jotaro, whose hat seems to morph into hair about halfway around his head. Then in part 2, Battle Tendency, the cyborg Nazi shows up and the craziness just grows exponentially. Part 3, Stardust Crusaders, is both the story arc where things really start to become totally insane, and initially the only part of the manga to be officially released in the US (until the earlier parts got released). America even got the Capcom fighting game based on Stardust Crusaders, which is the origin of the ZA WARUDO meme.
• Joshiraku: Cute girls having quirky conversations about inconsequential subjects in the dressing room of a rakugo theater = rakugo being a uniquely Japanese form of comic storytelling by a single performer sitting still in the middle of the stage with only a fan and a piece of cloth as props.
• Kamen no Maid Guy – that's Masked Maid Guy in English. A gigantic masked sociopath in a maid uniform terrorizes an absurdly well-endowed samurai schoolgirl for her own good. You just don't get that particular kind of "huh?" anywhere else on Earth.
• Kill la Kill - A teenage girl dons a Sentient Stripperiffic Sailor Fuku while wielding a giant half-scissor blade to fight her way through a high school ruled with an iron fist by its Absurdly Powerful Student Council in a post-apocalyptic world where clothing is fascism and also aliens, all to find out who killed her father. And it's taken totally seriously in universe.
• Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy. It's a parody of Professional Wrestling, except the wrestlers actually have superpowers. Same goes for its predecessor, Kinnikuman.
• Kujibiki♡Unbalance is part parody, part homage to every anime genre Japan has produced. The resulting mix of postmodernism and Clichestorm is strange, especially to viewers who don't know the genres in question.
• The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is weird enough by itself, being about a team of out-of-work college graduates (including a Buddhist with the power to communicate with the dead, a guy who can dowse for dead bodies, and an average Joe who claims to channel a snarky, foul-mouthed alien through a hand puppet) who start a business dealing with the remains of restless spirits. It's also weird about Japan, showcasing vestiges of ancient traditions still practiced there.
• The Legend of Koizumi. World leaders use extreme high-stakes Mah-Jong to decide everything from deals to papal elections to SAVING THE WORLD! Everything is over the top shounen, playing all of the stereotypes of nations and their leaders entirely straight.
• Lucky Star is a very slow-paced Schoolgirl Series with the schoolgirls in question having a lot of Seinfeldian Conversations, which premiered at a time when anime and manga of that kind were still relatively uncommon. The anime adaptation also makes a lot of references to Otaku culture and Japanese media, quite a few of which aren't very well-known overseas; non-Japanese viewers would likely find many of the references rather confusing.
• Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Basically, Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- meets Excel♡Saga. Two kids jump through distorted, Alternate-Universe versions of their town trying to get back home. Each of them parodying different cliches of Anime, Otaku, and Japanese culture in general. To people not familiar with Japan, the series is pure, incomprehensible randomness.
• Magical Witch Punie-chan, which is sort of a mix between Puni Puni☆Poemi and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, with a protagonist who compensates for her lack of hyperness with pure evil.
• Midori Days: Boy who is often mistaken for a school bully wakes up one morning to find a miniaturized version of a girl from his neighborhood attached to his right arm. Literally.
• Midori No Makibao: An anime about horse racing, for kids, by Studio Pierrot. We couldn't make it up if we tried.
• Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun has an In-Universe example. Miyako's manga end up as such due to Maeno always pushing for the inclusion of tanuki, no matter how out of place they are given the genre.
• The short film Mori no Ando is... strange to say the least.
• The basic premise of My Bride is a Mermaid is explainable (boy gets saved by mermaid; must marry her to keep up The Masquerade), but the execution of the premise is nothing short of insane, involving Mermaid Yakuza, a Terminator (really), and more Art Shift than one would think could be crammed in.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion starts off looking a little quirky (mostly the crosses that show up everywhere), but once Leliel arrives (episode 16), it becomes an escalation of psychological jargon, strange visions, obscure Biblical references and stock footage. There's also The End Of Evangelion, which ramps the weirdness and horror up.
• Nerima Daikon Brothers, from the director of Excel♡Saga. An anime musical series about farmers who want to become musicians but are constantly low on cash. One of the characters falls in love with a panda. Aliens appear.
• Nichijou manages to sum itself up pretty well with the cover of the manga's first volume, which depicts an completely ordinary classroom aside from the deer standing on Yukko's desk. Despite taking place in a contemporary Japanese city, the series' setting has enough oddities of its own to count as a Cloud Cuckoo Land, and it seems almost tailor-made for setups to jokes (some of which wouldn't make much sense to non-Japanese viewers). Its Show Within a Show, Helvetica Standard, is somehow even weirder.
• Ninja Nonsense. Attempting to explain the weirdness (especially Onsokumaru) will get you some weird looks.
• One Piece. Okay so you have a kid who wants to be not just any pirate, but the KING of the pirates, and he eats a magical fruit that turns him into a Rubber Man, then he befriends a Cyborg powered by cola, a woman who can make extra limbs bloom like flowers, a woman who appears to Weather Manipulation powers, a break dancing french chef, and a man who uses three swords, at the same time! And then there's a talking, shapeshifting reindeer doctor and a singing skeleton who's also a Master Swordsman. And those are just some of the main characters. The antagonists are even crazier.
  • The fact that One Piece is so insanely popular in Japan, but rarely becomes more than a Cult Classic even among manga in other countries, is probably one of the things that cement this trope.
• Oshiri Kajiri Mushi, literally Butt-Biting Bug. Butt. Biting. Bug. This is an anime based on a children's song about a type of bug that makes people happier and more social... by biting their butts.
• Ouran High School Host Club relies heavily on Japanese puns and wordplay, and might be a little bit strange to someone with little or no understanding of either.
• Ox Tales. A cartoon, based on the Dutch comic Boes, about a Dutch farmer and his misadventures around his farm, including a lot of surreal Body Horror gags involving farm and exotic animals.
• Pani Poni Dash!. It's about a school full of very weird students. And a ten-year-old MIT grad teacher. And a cat who says he's God. And a bunny who only exists to be abused. And space aliens who have little to no impact on the plot except to make Star Trek jokes. And a class rep who defies all logic or sanity. And apparently it's all shot on a soundstage and the cinematographer is very bad at hiding it.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is surreal both plot-wise and design-wise, using Western animation art styles for the most part. Namely in the style of 90's American cartoons that were WHAT series in their own right.
• Patalliro! is an old-school example. It's a very weird shoujo comedy with BL elements that started in the late 70s and is still running today.
• Penguindrum: Two brothers must find a mystery object known as the 'Penguindrum' for an entity residing in a penguin-shaped hat that is possessing and keeping alive their Delicate and Sickly sister, in company with small cartoonish penguins that only they can see. And then the copious amounts of Mind Screw start.
• Persia, the Magic Fairy is about a Wild Child raised in Africa, who decides to head back to Japan to join her parents after years of being raised by literal animals and scatterbrained zoologist Dr. Goken. His two grandsons, Gaku and Riki take Persia to her plane headed to Japan, but the plane hits Lovely Dream, the Land of Faries. Since Persia is the only one awake, the Queen of Lovely Dream tells Persia that she must collect Love Energy to save Lovely Dream from freezing, if she fails Gaku and Riki will become girls. She then is given a magic wand and becomes a Magical Girl that fights a fantasy sink of villains including vampires and lions.
  • Also, in the original manga it was based on, there were no Magical Girl elements. However, Studio Pierrot'really wanted to replicate the success of Magical Angel Creamy Mami...
• Pop Team Epic, a yonkoma with Negative Continuity, still manages to achieve this status by way of its heavy reliance on Surreal Humor. Even understanding all the Japanese references and wordplay won't explain comics like this.
• Potemayo. A boy finds an over-possessive moe-blob in his fridge. And he calmly adopts it, naming it after what he had in the fridge. Then another one appears, except this one is a Tsundere, scythe-wielding moe-blob that Beam Spams from the worms on the side of its head, and leaves gifts of charred, bleeding animal carcasses on the desk of one of the boy's classmates. That's the first episode.
• Pui Pui Molcar is a series of shorts about the misadventures of guinea pig cars. Not cars in the shape of guinea pigs, mind: guinea pigs in the shape of cars, that walk on their wheels, have windows built into their skin, and poop out trunk cargo when stressed. Sometimes it just follows a normal day for them, but other times they can be squaring off with zombies or participating in high-octane action movie stunts.
• Rumiko Takahashi has created a lot of weird manga, with Urusei Yatsura having things like a giant ghost cat who enjoys having tea parties with a little person monk and a school principal and a Jerk Jock who commutes to school in a giant helicopter-mansion, and Ranma ½ having hot water springs that can turn you into everything from a girl to animals.
• Saint Young Men is about Jesus and Buddha sharing an apartment in modern-day Japan.
• Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo: Stunningly average, bespectacled high school girl sees her boyfriend hugging the strange New Transfer Student with Idiot Hair. After speaking with her best friend / love interest from medieval Europe, she concludes that the best course of action is murder/suicide by way of the Confederate forester chainsaw martial art passed down to her by her Texan grandfather. It's weirder than it sounds.
• Sankarea is definitely an oddity. Let's see, the main character is a boy with very unusual interests who ends up accidentally turning a naive, isolated girl into an impossibly cute zombie. They become a couple and try to live an ordinary life while fending off her Pervert Dad, her jealous stepmother, and a hot Mad Scientist who wants to use her for research.
• Sarazanmai has ass-eating kappas, a pair of cops who break out into random homoerotic musical numbers, and the villain is a talking otter. Since much of the series revolves around kappa and the folklore surrounding them, most non-Japanese viewers who aren't familiar with kappa are inevitably going to be very confused.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. Horribly suicidal homeroom teacher underpins various Japanese social problems by presenting them as Spoof Aesops, and his entire class' names directly indicate their personality, as well as the particular social problem they (hilariously) represent — with the exception of the delusionally optimistic Kafuka, named after Franz Kafka.
• Senyuu.. "One day, without warning, a huge hole appeared in the world. And from it, emerged many demons..." including Godzilla and a freaking Gundam. It only gets weirder from there. Including this◊ thing.
• Seven of Seven: A normal schoolgirl is split into seven copies of herself... who then all try to go after the boy she was interested in. Eventually, they take turns being the 'real one'.
  • And it was created by the guy who directed Giant'. Freakin' 'Robo.
• Sgt. Frog. Umm... Wild Mass Guessing? Jhonen Vasquez was Separated at Birth from Mine Yoshizaki. Magic Plastic Surgery was involved. As were Human Popsicles. Along with ridiculous amounts of whatever the Japanese put in their candy. At the turn of the millennium, they both decided to make weird series about Ineffectual Sympathetic Alien Invaders. Eagle Land, being so lame they're lame, killed Invader Zim after two seasons, despite its fanbase. Japan, which prides itself on being geek Mecca, has made seven seasons of this madness, along with twenty volumes of manga - there are entire shelves of Keroro swag, just like in the opening sequence of the first series!
• Space Patrol Luluco. A middle school student is forced to take over her father's job as a Space Cop when he freezes himself by accident. She fights crime by turning into a gun Megatron-style.
• Stitch & the Samurai is Jidaigeki where a warlord befriends Disney's blue koala-like alien fluffball Stitch.
• Super Milk Chan. A five-year-old girl lives in a house with her robot maid and complains about all the bills she has to avoid paying to her Camp Gay landlord. She's a superhero but she constantly blows off the President (of Everything), who attracts flies. That's just the beginning of the insanity in this show.
• Tokyo Pig is about a young boy and his Housepet Pig, who he created by drawing in a magic diary.
• Tuxedo Gin centers around a teenage boxer who is killed by gangsters and reincarnated as a penguin.
• Tono to Issho is Jidaigeki made really freakin' weird.
• Ultimate Girls combines Magical Girls and Giant Mecha, throws in a robotic, talking phallic symbol for a mascot, and every episode is chock full of innuendo.
• Ultimate Teacher is beyond description. The most normal thing about it is that the school is so bad, there's a graveyard for dead teachers. Most of the 50 minute OVA is a giant Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. Zombies? Check. Men wearing girls' gym shorts? Check. Guy who fights by flinging quarters? Check. That's not even getting into the genetic experimentation. It cannot be quantified.
• Upotte!! has Moe Anthropomorphism of assault rifles... and Sniper rifles... and Sub-Machine guns (represented by kindergarteners). KanColle has a similar concept, except with naval warships of the World War II era replacing firearms, with an anime in January 2015.
• Usavich. It airs on Japanese MTV.
• Wandaba Style has four wanna-be Idol Singers trying to hold their first performance on the moon with the help of a Mad Scientist and his humanoid "satellite".
• Welcome to the NHK will seem completely nonsensical to someone that doesn't know about Japan and otaku culture.
• Wooser's Hand-to-Mouth Life. A bizarre, weirdly dark Random Events Plot Gag Series about a perverted yellow rabbitoid.
• The World God Only Knows. Dating sim otaku is landed with a demonic contract to make girls fall in love with him in order to drive out the evil spirits hiding in their hearts, and decides to do so by using dating sim strategies, which turn out to work astonishingly well. There is no possible way an idea like that could have come from anywhere but Japan, plain and simple.
• Yakitate!! Ja-pan is a show/manga about bread. No, it does not teach you how to make the bread (one exception for bread-in-a-rice cooker). It focuses on tournament-style battles between bakers. And puns. Lots and lots of delicious Japanese pans.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!. A bunch of high schoolers and adults solve the world's problems by playing a children's card game. Also there's Ancient Egyptian demons, psychotic computer programs, and hairstyles that defy all possible logic. The follow-up series are even weirder.