What are some anime that are weirdly rated? (Age-wise)

Title speaks for itself. Any anime with a interesting classification in your country is allowed. (Mine is Australia)

My personal examples:

Gunbuster stands at a PG rating, which puts it at the same level as Sonic X

Both Uzaki-chan Want's To Hang Out! and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid are MA15+ rated, which is even with High School DXD

These are just my opinions

Dragon Ball is considered PG but i'm surprised it doesn't have an ecchi tag for how spicy those first episodes are. Plus all the violence and death.

Yugioh was rated G on 4kids tv but genuinely gave me more nightmares and scared me as a kid more then any R Rated movie. The whole shadow realm concept, plus the soul stealing that was prominent in many arcs.

DB mods obviously have seen this thread and set https://myanimelist.net/anime/949/Top_wo_Nerae_Gunbuster to R+.

It's probably better to use the official "DB mod request" thread than to create "user land" ones like this one. See: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1510673&show=7650

On MAL pretty much everything, if it's not hentai isn't just classified as "mild nudity".

To Love Ru? Mild nudity. Highschool DxD? Mild nudity. Interspecies Reviewer? Mild nudity. Redo of Healer? Mild nudity.

Here in Australia, Elfen Lied is an MA15+, but I was really surprised that it wasn't an R18+. 

I mean, there's not much difference between a G and a PG in my opinion, but I'm surprised that Cardcaptor Sakura is a G. and not a PG. Even in my late teens, I found some scenes really intense and even scary (I'm probably just a scaredy-cat though xD). Honestly, I think it would meet the criteria of PG better.

Oh yeah, on YouTube/Google Play, Evangelion is marked as ' Made For Kids' which it totally isn't lol.

devilman crybaby should be - G 
no cap

How do we even find out the rating of an anime?

The only rating I remember was for Sailor Moon, which was Y7. I remember it because I thought myself a rebel for watching it before turning 7. I'm surprised to learn it had a stricter rating than Yu-Gi-Oh, which easily deserved a Y7 of its own.

To be honest I've never understood the rating system here on MAL. Don't get me wrong I'm not criticizing the criteria they use, but it seems rather inconsistent.

Almost all of Mamoru Hosoda's work is rated G, however of the two I've seen "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" has at least two references to masturbation and "Wolf Children" has a brief but still very clearly a sex scene and another scene where a kid's ear is violently torn off. Personally I would've given both at the very least a PG rating. Just because it is aimed at little kids doesn't mean it should be rated as such.

One of my favorite films, "Patema Inverted", has a PG-13 rating, and while it does deal with some dark topics, it has as much if not less violence and frightening scenes as the two films mentioned above and other G rated movies. I feel that PG-13 is slapped on a bunch of anime here as it is sort of a middle of the road. Stuff like "Puparia" which has absolutely no violence, nudity, fanservice, or frightening scenes is still rated like at this level.

It seems that anything that contains even brief female nudity is automatically slapped with a R+ rating. "Ranma 1/2" and "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya" are pretty tame, but for brief scenes they both have a R+ rating on this site. In my home country they have a TV-14 and a PG rating respectively, which I feel is far more accurate.

Sorry for complaining so much, given my age now I rarely even consider the age rating an anime has before watching it, and I don't think most people do. And don't get me wrong, the ratings in my home country are just as nonsensical. Just my 2 cents. 

Funimation's streaming site rated the series TV PG. But assuming it's more so for the different types of relationships offered up in the series as a few would be regarded as controversial to Western audiences such as Sakura's precocious crush on Yukito, one of Sakura's classmates having a crush on a teacher, and a couple relationships between distant family members that could be perceived as incestuous.

haha I guess the surprisingly explicit scenes of fish being gutted got Houkago Teibou Nisshi (cute girls go fishing) a PG-13 rating.

Hina is literally me. I'd go into shock too, seeing that.

DEFINITELY not true for Australia

You two examples are both rated PG here.

More examples that I can think of are Domestic Girlfriend and Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, which are both at an M rating.

Elfen Lied is not that bad. It was mostly hyped up by some edgy teenagers for "have you seen this bloody anime, it's so cool, it's so bloody! Much gore!" ... it's not that gorey. That's nothing you can't watch with 15, imo.

A crush on an elder is nothing unusual. The problem is Sakura's dad's marriage to his underage student.

How can he be married to an underaged student? You have to be 18 to marry, I think Japan is not that different... looking it up, it isn't. That sentence doesn't make any sense.

Some age gaps are icky to weird in anime, but she still can't be underaged, when the age of marriage is 18.

Here in MAL the PG rating is used for children, when it SHOULD be used to indicate stuff too strong for being G but too soft for being PG-13. PG-13 honestly is way too overused in this site. Stuff like Haibane Renmei, Haikyuu!!, Gin no Saji or Summer Wars are both too much for being G but too little for being PG-13 so PG would be a good rating.

Also, there are anime where I'm surprised they're PG-13 when they could deserve an R rating. Looking at you, Odd Taxi.

It's mostly randomly decided by mods that didn't even watch the anime. Plus it's an American website so they are rather strict about nudity and don't care about violence.


Not good and hyped I agree. But not gorey? Did you even watch the anime?

I found that many old animes on MAL that aren't popular have the wrong ratings.
 Many animes from the 90s and 80s that have rape scenes, drugs, sex, alcohol, and violence are rated pg13 somehow.

This is for manga but Viz’s ratings have always surprised me. They don’t really change on a volume by volume basis. Dragon Ball is all ages? It should be Teen. Bleach is only Teen while Rurouni Kenshin is Teen plus? Bleach is way more brutal than RK with POOLS of blood, dismemberment, decapitations, and body disfigurement. The key difference I believe in the rating is realistic (RK) vs fantasy (Bleach) violence descriptor. But the Shinigami 99% resemble humans. I don’t really understand it at all.

I'm not talking about a real marriage; Cardcaptor Sakura is fantasy. Besides, 18 is considered underage in Japan.

It takes place in real Japan tho, so would expect that they might mirror it in most ways. But I only remember her bit blurry tbh, so well okay.



I mean, it tried to be, but I 15+ sits right with me. Most teenagers that age also have seen movies like Saw and others, why shouldn't they be able stomach Elfenlied.




That's pretty much it. They are like "my little kid can't see that on tv, very disturbing, there is only violence nowadays on tv :(" and the same people are like "let's take the 5 yo to a 'Krampusumzug' every year to tell them they will wipe bad kids and read them the most fucked up bedtime stories!" haha... these masks and all were pretty amazing and after the first shock I absolutely loved them and the more morbid bedtime / children stories.
And then the rest of the year they go like, like my mom was: My kid can't watch violence on tv! :(
Ofc I did anyway, so these ratings are quite useless.

I hate to say this, but in the last years parents are much more, I dunno... americanized, they become absolute helicopter parents to control every "bad influence", some tried to forbid these traditions, at least in a way so kids couldn't see them from near, or eerie children stories, because they don't seem fitting anymore for them.

Age rating classifications have changed over time.

I remember originally watching "Weather Report Girl" in the late 90s the copy I owned at the time on VHS had an Age rating of just R and only classified at most as "erotica". MAL on the other hand has "Weather Report Girl" tagged as a Hentai. I Recently re-watched this title when I bought a Japanese regional copy of it for sale on LaserDisc and it simply has no rating on it or just simply being "unrated".

I was actually kind of shocked when I 1st noticed MAL tagging it as Hentai with a Rx Rating when it clearly isn't even close to being Hentai in my opinion. 

"Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid" which is only tagged as Ecchi with a R+ rating is far more graphic when it comes to nudity and over all sexually explicit content involving sexual intimacy between female characters than "Weather Report Girl" could ever offer and "Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid" actually involves characters depicted as being minors in Western eyes. "Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid" is more of a Hentai than "Weather Report Girl" ever could be.

Even back when I was in my late teens in the 90s I never even thought about "Weather Report Girl" as anything more than just a perverted comedy with extremely "mild" sexual content. Even if "Weather Report Girl" is a completely trashy comedy Anime it's a hilarious trashy comedy Anime that I couldn't imagine even some gross horny teenager getting off to watching in their parents basement.

@eblf2013

I think the subject matter of suicide and depression make Haibane Renmei 13 imo. Not to mention the first scene in episode 1 and a few later are actually quite graphic for something that would be rated pg.

I originally over looked this comment. One reason why I think "Dragon Ball" likely has a PG rating is specifically because those who grew up watching it likely saw the Western dubbed version that was extremely edited for TV when it 1st aired nationally in the West on Cartoon Network.

I doubt many would actually go back and re-watch the entire series just to see how different the original Japanese run is compared to it's western edited counter part. Even so Dragon Balls perverted humor is G rated in my opinion compared to even western films.

A lot of anime in Australia are rated MA for no apparent reason

Yes, it's infrequent but when it appears... it's incredibly impactful to see. I see your point. Another part that seems too strong for being PG would be the last episode overall, something too strong to see in an overall calm anime. Not because of any graphic scene but the overall tone was so... impactful.

Yeah it being so infrequent is why it makes it impactful for sure. Glad you could see my point.

@youcansmileagain
That crush on Sakura's teacher never goes anywhere in the anime.

Anime shouldn't have an age restrictions in the first place

Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens is rated PG-13 on MAL despite being the most child friendly entry in the franchise. Also, was kinda surprised to see Shaman King at a PG-13, when watching it and reading the manga it didn't really feel like a PG-13 series, I think it was rated TV-Y7 here in the US. The only scenes I can think of that may have given the series this rating is the time that Faust did surgery on Morty, and Tokageroh's backstory, but they are like very small portions of the series

that's good to know, i watched it a long time ago so I must be misremembering.

all harem isekais should be G it's fun for the chilldren

I'd be hard pressed to find many ratings that fully make sense to me to be honest. The criteria for what gets what rating is entirely arbitrary, and I think that goes for most rating systems. There's this bit I still find pretty funny with the South Park movie where they were explicitly told they couldn't go over a specific amount of "bad" words, so they did exactly 1 less than that.  I know it's not anime related, but it gets the point across, I think.

Don't they do the "Erotica" thing now?

you will never be a real fisher

sao should be pg-13 the whole way except for ordinal scale

As far as I know MAL uses the erotica tag for ecchi aimed at female audience.