Anime like Rail Romanesque

Yakunara Mug Cup Mo

Also known as Let's Make a Mug Too.

Studio: Nippon Animation , Half H.P Studio , TOKYO MX , Maho Film , Nippon Columbia , BS11 , Planet , 81 Produce , Zipang , CBC TV , CBC Radio
Status: Finished
Genres: Comedy , Slice of Life

Together with her father, who had quit his salaryman job, Toyokawa Himeno moves to Gifu prefecture's Tajimi city. That's the city where her mother is from, whom she had lost when she was still young. Himeno is now attending her mother's alma mater, where her classmate Kukuri Mika invites her to tag along to a special place. That place turns out to be the pottery club! There, she learns for the first time that her mother was a legendary potter, and is consequently pulled into the world of pottery.



Tags: Cute Girls Doing Cute Things , Iyashikei , Primarily Female Cast , School Club , Rural , Educational , Female Protagonist , Primarily Teen Cast , Family Life , Food

Rail Wars!

Also known as Rail Wars!.

Studio: Passione
Status: Finished
Genres: Action , Ecchi , Romance

The "dream railway paradise entertainment" story is set in a parallel world where Japan did not privatize its national railways. Naohito Takayama is an ordinary high school boy who dreams of a comfortable future working for the top-rated Japanese National Railways. He is assigned as a trainee in the Railways Security Force full of odd characters such as Sakurai, a troublemaker who hates men. On top of that, an extremist group called "RJ" plots to privatize the Japanese National Railways.



Tags: Trains , Male Protagonist , Heterosexual , Police , Cute Girls Doing Cute Things , Work , Nudity , Female Harem , Primarily Female Cast , Guns , Idol , Female Protagonist

Girls und Panzer

Also known as Girls und Panzer.

Studio: Actas , Lantis , Movic , Sentai Filmworks
Status: Finished
Genres: Action , Sports

You may have heard of kung fu, but the girls at Oarai High School practice gun-fu—really, really BIG 75mm gun-fu, in fact. It's called Sensha-do, and it's the martial art of operating armored tanks! They take it seriously too, and since winning the national Sensha-do championship is such a huge deal at Oarai, they sometimes go to extreme ends in order to get the best students from Panzer class to sign up. Which is how Miho Nishizumi, who HATES operating tanks, gets drafted to join doomsday-driven driver Mako, even-triggered gunner Hana, highly receptive radio operator Saori and combustible tank-fangirl and loader Yukari as the incomparable Anko Team. They may not be on the half-track to fame and fortune, and maybe a few of them would rather shop for tank tops than become tops in tanks, but once their focus is locked and loaded, they're absolutely driven.



Tags: Tanks , Primarily Female Cast , Female Protagonist , Military , School Club , Cute Girls Doing Cute Things , Primarily Teen Cast , Ensemble Cast , School , Historical , Parody , CGI , Ships , Volleyball

Train Heroes

Studio: TV Tokyo
Status: Finished
Genres: Action

2100A.D. The world has entered a new age of super high-speed railways. The World Railway Conference has introduced the Laser Rail, a whole new form of travel in which trains are no longer confined to the ground.

To operate on the Laser Rail, the Train Base is established. Here, trains from across the globe, installed with artificial intelligences and robot bodies. Thus the Train Heroes are born.

Within the Train Base, these Train Heroes undergo strict training sessions. On occasion, they are called upon to assist in disaster rescue and relief.

Note: This is a joint Japan-China project. Collaboration between TV Tokyo and Carloon Animation Company (Chanzhou, China).



Tags: Cars , Trains , Full CGI

Onsen Yousei Hakone-chan

Also known as Hakone-chan.

Studio: Asahi Production , Ashi Productions
Status: Finished
Genres: Comedy , Slice of Life , Supernatural

The story follows Hakone, a hot spring spirit who descended to a spa resort on Earth. However, with her long slumber, she looks like a little girl on the outside. The high school boy Touya stumbles across her at a hot spring and ends up joining Hakone in retrieving her original powers.



Tags: Primarily Female Cast , Mythology , Shrine Maiden , Youkai , Super Power , Ghost , Female Protagonist , Male Protagonist , Seinen

Himote House

Also known as HIMOTE HOUSE: A share house of super psychic girls.

Studio: Bouncy
Status: Finished
Genres: Comedy

The comedy anime centers on five girls and one cat all living as housemates in Nakano, Tokyo: the three Himote sisters (Tokiyo, Kinami, and Kokoro) whose family manages the "Himote House," Kokoro's classmates Tae and Minamo, and the cat Enishi. The girls live their daily lives trying to figure out ways to be popular, and they (and the cat) all possess a mysterious secret power…



Tags: Full CGI , Surreal Comedy , Parody , Meta , Primarily Female Cast , Primarily Adult Cast , Super Power , Ensemble Cast , Episodic

Tetsuko no Tabi

Studio: Group TAC , Toei Video , Liberty Animation Studio
Status: Finished
Genres: Comedy

Based on a seinen manga by Kikuchi Naoe and Yokomi Hirohiko, serialised in IKKI.

The "story" is that a manga artist is asked by her boss to accompany him and a travel-writer on various train trips around Japan and draw a manga about it.

The kicker though, is that it's completely non-fiction —the creator really did go on all these trips, and the manga simply records what happened, with no embellishment. There's a little disclaimer at the front that says "This is non-fiction, so I apologize for the lack of drama," and indeed, it mostly is just about them riding trains from place to place, waiting on platforms, etc.

The "travel writer" turns out to be a super train-otaku who has vast knowledge of the train network, but also micro-manages all their trips, planning every detail down to the second. He cares mostly about following the schedule and successfully achieving his planned goals (e.g. visiting all stations on a line in a completely bizarre order to accomodate infrequent trains). The mangaka doesn't really care about trains; she's cynical, sarcastic, and rather lazy (she mainly just looks forward to the next eki-ben); he's completely gung-ho as long as he's following the schedule, and the inevitable conflicts are pretty entertaining.

Throughout, though, it feels real —if you've travelled by train in Japan it will all seem very familiar, not just the scenery, but also the atmosphere and feel— and the artist does a great job of pacing and applying little tweaks to keep it consistently entertaining. In an additional bit of recursiveness, some of the characters who show up in the manga (who of course are real people, who really did show up) do so because they (really) read previous episodes of the manga!

In addition of course, you can learn about various out of the way and interesting Japanese train lines and stations; some of them really do look cool. There's always this vague sense of surreality about it however, the trips are all planned by the train-guy (goal: visit all 9,843 stations in Japan) who seems to consider everything as part of a checklist rather than an experience to be enjoyed. You learn a bit about train-otaku culture too; there's really only the one guy in the story, but train-otaku culture is a sort of constant peripheral presence.



Tags: Trains , Seinen