The Eccentric Family

有頂天家族 (Uchouten Kazoku)

7.8(68,125)

MAL Score

Ranked #1131

Popularity #1477

Award Winning
Drama
Supernatural
Anthropomorphic
Mythology

Episodes: 13
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jul 7, 2013 to Sep 29, 2013
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

In Kyoto, tanuki and tengu have long lived in the city’s shadows, sharing the streets with humans who remain unaware of their presence. Yasaburou Shimogamo, the third son of a prominent tanuki household, drifts through his days with an easygoing spirit—tending to an elderly tengu, slipping into different forms through shapeshifting, and crossing paths with the enigmatic Benten.

Yet beneath the city’s calm lies an old wound: Yasaburou’s father, once the leader of the tanuki community, was killed and eaten by humans known as the Friday Fellows. As the Shimogamo brothers navigate their own dangers and rivalries, they edge closer to the truth behind that night, fighting to avoid a fate as brutal as their father’s.

Otaku Consensus

The Eccentric Family stands out as one of Summer 2013’s more quietly distinctive productions: Masayuki Yoshihara’s direction and Shoutarou Suga’s series composition let P.A. Works balance surreal comedy, family melancholy, and Kyoto-specific urban fantasy without turning the material into standard supernatural action. Its strongest admirers praise the adaptation’s originality, adult-leaning cast, and character development; the recurring criticism is that its fatalistic tanuki worldview and heavy focus on family legacy can feel emotionally evasive or frustrating rather than cathartic.

Why You Should Watch

Watch The Eccentric Family if you want urban fantasy built from social rituals, family obligations, and mythological absurdity rather than battles or exposition dumps. It scratches a similar itch to The Tatami Galaxy through Tomihiko Morimi’s Kyoto sensibility, but trades manic academia for warmer, stranger domestic drama; it also overlaps with Natsume’s Book of Friends in its interest in youkai living beside humans, while being more mischievous and philosophically knotty. Viewers who like adult casts, shapeshifting identity play, dry comedy, and stories where grief sits underneath ordinary banter will find more to chew on than the MAL synopsis suggests. It is especially rewarding if you want a supernatural anime that treats “family” as a messy civic institution, not just a source of backstory.

Key Characters

Y
Yasaburou Shimogamo(VA: Takahiro Sakurai)
Yasaburou is the series’ slippery emotional center, admired by fans for turning laziness, curiosity, and performance into a genuine philosophy of living.
Y
Yaichirou Shimogamo(VA: Junichi Suwabe)
Yaichirou gives the Shimogamo family its public-facing seriousness, making him the brother most tied to duty, reputation, and the burden of inheritance.
Y
Yajirou Shimogamo(VA: Hiroyuki Yoshino)
Yajirou is one of the show’s strangest emotional anchors, a character whose comic absurdity carries a surprisingly heavy sense of regret.
Y
Yashirou Shimogamo(VA: Mai Nakahara)
Yashirou adds a softer, more anxious counterweight to his brothers, grounding the family dynamic in vulnerability rather than bravado.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
P.A. Works’ production uses Kyoto not as a postcard backdrop but as a layered urban habitat where tanuki, tengu, and humans occupy the same civic space with different rules of awareness.
2
The anime adapts material by Tomihiko Morimi, whose work is strongly associated with offbeat Kyoto storytelling; that pedigree helps explain the show’s mix of folklore, philosophical banter, and everyday absurdity.
3
Original character designs are credited to Kouji Kumeta, then adapted for animation by Kousuke Kawatsura, giving the cast a stylized looseness that fits the show’s shapeshifting and gender-play elements.
4
AniList’s tag spread is unusually revealing: Mythology at 94%, Urban Fantasy at 93%, Family Life at 88%, Shapeshifting at 87%, and Philosophy at 78% place it closer to literary supernatural drama than genre comfort food.
5
Its 13-episode structure functions as a compact single-cour family mystery rather than a monster-of-the-week supernatural series, which is why viewers often remember it for accumulation and payoff more than individual set pieces.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The series aired from July 7 to September 29, 2013, completing a 13-episode run during the Summer 2013 season.
Fun fact 2: The key staff combines Masayuki Yoshihara as director, Shoutarou Suga on series composition, and P.A. Works as the animation studio, a lineup that shaped the anime’s controlled tonal shifts between comedy and tragedy.
Fun fact 3: The art direction is credited to both Harumi Okamoto and Yuusuke Takeda, while Yasuo Fujii handled prop design and Hiroshi Kamegai handled the title logo design.
Fun fact 4: Reception data shows a strong but not blockbuster profile: 7.82 on MyAnimeList from 68,125 votes, rank #1131, popularity #1477, plus an AniList score of 77/100 and 931 favorites.
Fun fact 5: User reviews in the provided sample are sharply split: several 8–9/10 recommendations call it original and underwatched, while negative reviews object to the tanuki society’s normalized fatalism and the story’s emphasis on the father’s legacy.