Summary

Ever since the studio exploded onto theanimescene back in 2013 with the introduction of Sushio and Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Kill La Kill, Studio Trigger has garnered a reputation among fans for off-the-wall animation and a delightfully bonkers approach to writing and directing.

Whether you’ve known about Trigger’s works for a while or only recently got into the studio’s library with shows like Delicious In Dungeon or Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, these 12 anime are easily Studio Trigger’s best works.

A skeleton police officer holds a gun surrounded by flames.

12Inferno Cop

Welcome To Hell, Loser

Inferno Cop is an oddball adventure that feels a lot like Ghost Rider, if Ghost Rider was a cop who couldn’t give a single hoot about anything except for beatin' bad guys, bein' awesome, and gettin' revenge on the evil cult of the Southern Cross.

The show is very self-aware, and the limited animation style lends the entire experience a sense of humor that is tough to outdo, with Inferno Cop beating… well, the ‘hell’ out of everything from newborn babies to anentire apocalypse’s worth of zombiesover the course of 13 episodes.

A young witch with long brown hair and a dull purple robe sits confidently and smiles at the camera, surrounded by various fantasy monsters, characters, and flowers.

11Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade

Feel Good Magic With A Trigger Twist

Little Witch Academia started when Yoh Yoshinari, mech designer for Neon Genesis Evangelion, decided to make a cute little short film which eventually turned into a movie and a 24 episode TV anime. That being said, the movie is still the best the series has ever been.

Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade sees a lovable cast of magical school outcasts team up with a group of troublemakers in order to make the school’s annual magic festival a success. The animation is wildly expressive, and the characters are charming and memorable.

A bright bold Japanese logo in front of a collage of characters from Ninja Slayer From Animation, including a red hooded ninja, a group of anime girls, and various angry anime faces.

10Ninja Slayer From Animation

A Solemn Ninja Out For Revenge

Ninja Slayer feels a lot like Inferno Cop, but with everything that made that show what it was getting pushed even farther. The end result is far and awaythe funniest animeStudio Trigger has ever made, with a dash of edgy humor and ironic satire just for good measure.

Ninja Slayer features the same style of animation seen in Inferno Cop, and follows an equally edgy story about a man who made a deal with an evil ninja spirit in order to take revenge on his murdered family.

A horned girl in a military uniform with long pink hair smiles and reaches out above a red background.

9Darling In The Franxx

Mechs, Drama, And The End Of The World

Sure, the story does get a bit confusing toward the end, but the series still manages to say a lot about population decline and the state of the world. Plus, it introduced us to one of anime’s most iconic and beloved characters: the pink-haired and red-horned Zero Two.

Set in a unique dystopian future and lush with rich world-building, Darling In The Franxx’s lore, characters, and highly expressive mech animation immediately captivated audiences back in 2018, and it’s still one of Studio Trigger’s most unique productions.

An anime girl with a tail and fluffy ears sits on a rooftop with a wolf man in a bright, neon city.

I think I’ve taken a liking to you…Won’t you be my darling?

8BNA: Brand New Animal

Crime, Grime, And Animal Fur

BNA is one of the more expressively animated Studio Trigger works. The concepts and ideas on display in this actionmystery seriesare presented with incredible confidence and a distinct sense of style, and that’s especially true of the show’s quirky tanuki lead, Michiru.

It might be style over substance for the most part, but when this series gets going, itreallygets going. When humans begin mysteriously transforming into animals, the regular world exiles the animal-humans to a specialized city where crime is rampant and corruption runs deep.

Split image featuring a shrugging green alien girl, an anime girl in a skirt with short brown hair sitting next to a blonde boy on a heart shaped planet, and an evil blonde boy pulling glowing red strings.

7Space Patrol Luluco

Fight For Justice!

In a world where aliens are commonplace, a typical anime heroine named Luluco just wants to be normal, but when her dad, a space police officer, accidentally eats confiscated contraband, he becomes entrapped in ice. Luluco must join the Space Patrol in order to set him free.

A short, bombastic celebration of everything the studio had made up until that point, Space Patrol Luluco is out of this world. Less devout Trigger fans might not get as much out of the experience, but for those in the know, this will quickly become an all-time favorite.

An anime boy with white hair has a concerned look on his face, and a woman with white hair stands under a deep red sky.

6Kiznaiver

One For All. All… For… One.

Kiznaiver is more tonally serious than Studio Trigger tends to get, but with results this captivating, it kind of makes us wish the studio would tackleheavier storiesmore often. Featuring a quirky cast of characters and some very heavy implications, you’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.

The story follows a group of unlikely friends, brought together by a shared sense of pain connected to a mysterious scar. As they learn more about the origins of their pain and each other, the city they live in gradually begins to lift the veil on its darkest secrets.

Various colorful anime characters are posed below a bright bold logo.

One of the hardest things to do is to throw away all the truths you were taught about life and accept them as lies.

5Promare

Trigger’s Over The Top Theatrical Outing

Promare was Studio Trigger’s first theatrical film, and the excitement behind the production is evident from the very first frame. In true Trigger fashion, the story is all over the place, aliens are involved, the characters are loud and expressive, and the animation is over the top.

With little nods and references to the studio’s previous works alongside some truly stellar designs and action scenes, Promare is as Trigger as it gets, and is worth watching on the biggest screen you can possibly find for maximum effect.

Art of the main cast of the Netflix original anime Delicious in Dungeon running from a dragon while carrying food.

4Delicious In Dungeon

Why Don’t We Just Eat The Monsters?

While shows like Toriko and Made in Abyss emphasized eating fantasy monsters in the past, none have taken the theme to quite this level. The story revolves around a group of misfit adventurers on a quest to rescue a fallen party member, eating as much as they can on the way there.

The series' impressive world-building andtasty-looking foodare presented with delightfully lo-fi animation, and while it’s a little less extreme than you might expect from a Trigger show, Delicious In Dungeon is still one of the studio’s tastiest offerings.

A red haired anime boy waves dismissively in front of a television screen showing a large robot warrior.

3SSSS.Gridman

Glorious Tokusatsu Action

For fans of tokusatsu classics like Godzilla and Ultraman, look no farther than Studio Trigger’s lively revival of the Denkou Choujin Gridman series, as well as its equally entertaining sequel: SSSS.Dynazenon.

The anime follows an amnesiac protagonist as he struggles to understand his destiny, regain his memories, and battle sometruly iconic kaiju threatswith the aid of Hyper Agent Gridman and his classmates. One of the most successful Trigger outings, SSSS.Gridman also received an anime film, Gridman Universe, in 2023.