The Best Anime About Japanese Folklore
Like all countries, Japan has plenty of its own unique folklore. A lot of Japanese folklore is very different from anywhere else in the world. Their origins are steeped in Japanese history and tradition, and many of the stories are very old. Most are even tied to very specific places in Japan, and you can still hear those stories whenever you travel to those areas. Some common themes in Japanese folklore are talking animals with magic powers, demons and ghosts, and spirits or monsters called yokai. Often, the supernatural world and the human world crossover one another, and humans have encounters with magic and other things that they cannot explain.
Typically, folk stories in Japan are neither explanations for things that people did not understand, nor are they necessarily stories with morals to teach. More often than not, they are just meant to be entertaining, and that is what they have been used for centuries of storytelling. These traditional folk stories still affect modern Japanese media today — and of course, that includes anime! While a good deal of anime are set in Japan, most are either modern or historical Japan rather than delving into folklore. But if you’re looking for some stories that are influenced by Japanese folklore, here are the top five anime you can watch!
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The Boy and the Beast is a standalone anime film by Studio Chizu that tells the story of an unlikely friendship between, well, a boy and a beast! The boy is Ren, a child who feels he has nothing and no one left in the world when he takes to wandering the streets of Shibuya. It’s there that he first meets the beast, Kumatetsu, who leads him to the beast land of Shibuten. Neither
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