A few years ago, either you had a good video store on hand or you were attentive to the licenses that were falling through Spain or it was quite difficult to watch certain animes, especially when they were disappearing from television. Luckily, in a few years streaming platforms have been growing more and more and have realized that anime sells and that its users like it.
The demand for streaming anime has doubled since the pandemic broke out, which seems that we have all become a little more otakus by rewatching some childhood series. So now more than ever we have a good handful of platforms where you can watch anime series and movies.
crunchyroll
Surely the absolute queen in terms of streaming anime, because it is the platform that adds the most series and movies each year and that also allows us to follow dozens of new releases each season.
Crunchyroll has the largest catalog of anime that we can find and their simulcasts with Japan work great. It allows you to view certain content for free, but it has several premium plans that give unlimited access with the subscription.
Unfortunately, not all of Crunchyroll’s content is dubbed or subtitled in Spanish, so it’s not fully accessible, albeit little by little. Little by little they are adding more dubbing in Spanish. If we want to see some of the biggest anime of recent years such as ‘One Piece’, ‘Kimetsu no Yaiba’, ‘Shingeki no Kyojin’, ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ or ‘Spy x Family’ (to name a few), Crunchyroll is the platform.
Netflix
Netflix It is also a wonderful option to watch anime, because in addition to licensing seasonal anime and other classics, it also premieres its own original series and movies such as ‘Record of Ragnarok’ or ‘Romantic Killer’ and has plans to continue expanding the batch every year.
In addition to the rest of the content, its anime catalog has been growing more and more and also offers many subtitling and dubbing options in different languages from the day of the premiere, which is always good. Seasonal simulcasts have also been released and we can follow many series as they are released in Japan, as has happened with ‘Komi-san can’t communicate’ or ‘Blue Period’.
In the Netflix catalog we can find All Studio Ghibli movies and many other classics from recent years such as ‘Hunter x Hunter’, ‘Violet Evergarden’, ‘Black Clover’, ‘InuYasha’ and ‘Hajime no Ippo’. If we want a variety of content and not just anime, it is also a good bet… although perhaps measures to prevent account sharing and its new fees have taken away some of its appeal.
Amazon Prime Video
Although it lags a little behind, in Amazon Prime Video We can also find a good list of anime series and movies, although perhaps it strays a little more from the commercial with some of the series in the catalog. As it happens with Netflix, Its great advantage is that it has a lot of content in addition to animeand also gives us quite a variety of series and movies.
If we want really big titles like ‘Naruto’, ‘Kimetsu no Yaiba’, ‘Shingeki no Kyojin’ or ‘Haikyu!!’ and big franchise movies like ‘Boku no Hero Academia’, on Prime Video we have a fairly wide catalog.
Although Amazon Prime Video has also been doing several excellent series but that sound less like ‘Dororo’, ‘Paranoia Agent’ or ‘Banana Fish‘, with which we have a relatively small collection if we compare it with its competitors but very varied.
Disney+
Disney+ little by little it has been getting on the anime cart and it has also been done with several simulcasts to follow anime week by week as they are released.
For now its great assets have been ‘Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’, ‘Summer Time Render’, ‘Tokyo Revengers’, and ‘Tengoku Daimakyo’, although it will continue to grow little by little. Although he has been betting on original anime such as ‘Star Wars: Visions’ and has the vibrant ‘The Tatami Time Machine Blues’ In its catalogue, Disney+ is still very naked in terms of anime.
Of course, the House of Mouse has signed a massive agreement with the publisher Kodansha to broadcast the anime based on their sleeves, so the situation may change shortly.
filming
Equal filming It is not the first platform where we thought we could see anime, but it also has a very nice collection full of classics and a little more “vintage”. If we want to get nostalgic, we have some series available to move the potato like ‘Heidi’‘Eriko’, ‘The forest of Tallac: Jackie and Nuca’, ‘Marco’, ‘Anne of Green Gables’,’Kimba, the white lion’ or the Hayao Miyazaki’s Sherlock Holmes... but the thing does not stop there.
Filmin’s anime catalog is small but full of more recent heavyweights like ‘Tokyo Godfathers’, ‘Mirai, my little sister’, ‘The boy and the beast’ or ‘The case of Hana and Alice’. if we want a slightly more gourmet anime experience, Filmin is a good option that gives us quality anime in addition to the rest of its catalogue.
RakutenTV
In RakutenTV, as in Filmin, we can find a somewhat limited catalog but quite nice. Although in this case, focused mainly on rental movies. if we like Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, Satoshi Kon or Masaaki YuasaHere we can find some of his best works.
We also have anime movies that are real gems and may have gone more unnoticed lately if we compare them with the big franchises: ‘In this corner of the world’, ‘The Wonderland’, ‘The children of the sea’, or ‘I want to eat your pancreas‘, with which RakutenTV also has a lot to offer if we want quality anime cinema.
HIDIVE
HIDIVE has been one of the most recent platforms specialized in anime, but which has grown very fast. It still has a long way to go to compete with Crunchyroll, but it has been doing very well with the simulcasts that it signs each season and it has already become an option to take into account.
It already had a quite varied anime catalog where we can see both series and movies and OVAs, and this year it has hit a good rush with the second season of ‘Tsurune‘, the new series of ‘Urusei Yatsura’, ‘Insomniacs after school‘ and ‘Oshi no Ko’.
For now the content of the platform is mainly in English, from the platform itself to dubbing and subtitles. If we expect at least Spanish subtitles for now, it doesn’t seem like they’re thinking of that market, although we can access HIDIVE without problems and subscribe to access the entire catalog.
AnimeBox
The most recent commitment to streaming anime in Spain has come from the hand of Selecta Visión with the intention of taking on Crunchyroll. TO AnimeBox It still has a long way to go to be able to compete with the anime giant, but in its favor it has to continue adding new series and movies every month and also all its content can be enjoyed with Spanish dubbing (and some specific titles also in Catalan and Basque).
It also has some of the biggest recent series like ‘Shingeki no Kyojin’, ‘Naruto’, ‘Fairy Tail’ or ‘Made in Abyss’, but personally I think that its best asset is to recover some more classic anime such as ‘Yu Yu Hakusho’, ‘Ranma’ and ‘Slayers’, which were quite missing from streaming. It also has a small section of simulcasts that is yet to grow, but for now it has been done with ‘Oshi no Ko’, so it’s going strong.
In AnimeBox there is also a section with interviews and making-of with which we can see how the creators developed some of our favorite anime and curiosities of the process.
In Espinof | The best anime of recent years and where you can watch them in streaming