# What is the best steampunk anime?

> Airships, steam trains, clockwork dolls and one automail arm. Ghibli classics share the field with cult TV series.

*By YPB Team · Published November 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-steampunk-anime*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Castle in the Sky** — score 1000/1000
   Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 Studio Ghibli film about two children, a gang of air pirates and a legendary floating city, full of airships and mining-town machinery.
2. **Howl's Moving Castle** — score 862/1000
   Hayao Miyazaki's 2004 Studio Ghibli film, adapted from Diana Wynne Jones's novel, about a wizard's walking castle in a country at war with flying battleships.
3. **Steamboy** — score 596/1000
   Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 film set in Victorian England, where a boy inventor guards a 'steam ball' that powers a giant steam-driven fortress.
4. **Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress** — score 517/1000
   Wit Studio's 2016 series in which survivors cross a zombie-overrun island aboard armoured steam locomotives.
5. **Metropolis (2001)** — score 517/1000
   Rintaro's 2001 film, scripted by Katsuhiro Otomo from Osamu Tezuka's manga, set in a retro-futurist city built around a giant tower called the Ziggurat.
6. **Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood** — score 517/1000
   Bones' 2009–2010 adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa's manga, set in an industrial, early-20th-century-style country where state alchemists serve the military and the hero has a steel automail arm and leg.
7. **Unbreakable Machine-Doll** — score 517/1000
   Lerche's 2013 series set at a magic academy in an alternate Britain, where students duel with combat automaton dolls.
8. **Appare-Ranman!** — score 423/1000
   P.A. Works' 2020 series about a Japanese engineer and a samurai who build their own car to enter a race across America.
9. **Sakura Wars (2000)** — score 423/1000
   Madhouse's 2000 TV series based on Sega's game, following a theatre troupe that pilots steam-powered armour in an alternate Taisho-era Tokyo.
10. **Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water** — score 310/1000
   NHK's 1990 series directed by Hideaki Anno and animated with Gainax, loosely inspired by Jules Verne, following a young inventor and a circus girl who end up aboard Captain Nemo's Nautilus.
11. **Last Exile** — score 0/1000
   Gonzo's 2003 series about two young vanship pilots carrying messages through a war fought by fleets of airborne battleships.
12. **Samurai 7** — score 0/1000
   Gonzo's 2004 science-fiction retelling of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, in which farmers hire samurai to fight mechanised bandits.
13. **Princess Principal** — score 0/1000
   Actas and Studio 3Hz's 2017 spy series set in a steampunk London divided by a wall, where five schoolgirls work as agents.

Tags: animation, japan, steampunk