Best Anime Like Upright
After experiencing Upright, can dive deeper into questions the purpose and existential weight of our choices while delivering targets the intellect with complex, multi-layered ideas. Carefully balances character development with narrative progression makes this a perfect follow-up for your next session.
Standard feature-length experiences.
Best for fans of who appreciate concise storytelling.
★ Top Picks

Everything Sucks!
It's 1996 in a town called Boring, Oregon, where high school misfits in the AV and drama clubs brave the ups and downs of teenage emotions in the VHS era.

Dead to Me
A hotheaded widow searching for the hit-and-run driver who mowed down her husband befriends an eccentric optimist who isn't quite what she seems.

McLeod's Daughters
When Jack McLeod passes away, his two daughters inherit Drovers Run, a vast cattle ranch in the Australian outback. Ultimately, Tess and Claire decide to run the ranch together, with their housekeeper, Meg, her teenage daughter, Jodi, and a local girl, Becky. Their lives are hard and the obstacles many, but the rewards are every bit as grand as the wild open land they've inherited.

My So-Called Life
The life of a 15 year-old high school student, whose angst-ridden journey through adolescence, friendship, parents, and life teaches her what it means to grow up.

The End of the F***ing World
James is 17 and is pretty sure he is a psychopath. Alyssa, also 17, is the cool and moody new girl at school. The pair make a connection and she persuades him to embark on a darkly comedic road trip in search of her real father.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Rebecca Bunch is a successful, driven, and possibly crazy young woman who impulsively gives up everything - her partnership at a prestigious law firm and her upscale apartment in Manhattan - in a desperate attempt to find love and happiness in that exotic hotbed of romance and adventure: suburban West Covina, California.

Shrinking
Jimmy is struggling to grieve the loss of his wife while being a dad, friend, and therapist. He decides to try a new approach with everyone in his path: unfiltered, brutal honesty. Will it make things better—or unleash uproarious chaos?

Big Sky
Private detective Cassie Dewell partners with ex-cop Jenny Hoyt on a search for two sisters who have been kidnapped by a truck driver on a remote highway in Montana. When they discover that these are not the only girls who have disappeared in the area, they must race against the clock to stop the perpetrator before another woman is taken.
More Anime Like Upright

Party of Five
Five brothers and sisters are determined to stay together following the tragic loss of their parents.

Bump
An unexpected pregnancy complicates the lives of two families. The series centers around Oly, an ambitious and high-achieving teenage girl who has a surprise baby.

Bates Motel
A "contemporary prequel" to the 1960 film Psycho, depicting the life of Norman Bates and his mother Norma prior to the events portrayed in Hitchcock's film, albeit in a different fictional town and in a modern setting. The series begins after the death of Norma's husband, when she purchases a motel located in a coastal Oregon town so she and Norman can start a new life.

13 Reasons Why
After a teenage girl's perplexing suicide, a classmate receives a series of tapes that unravel the mystery of her tragic choice.

Fleabag
A portrait into the mind of a dry-witted, sexual, angry, porn-watching, grief-riddled woman, trying to make sense of the world. As she hurls herself headlong at modern living, Fleabag is thrown roughly up against the walls of contemporary London, with all its frenetic energy, late nights, and bright lights.

Mom
Aan irreverent and outrageous take on true family love‐and dysfunction. Newly sober single mom Christy struggles to raise two children in a world full of temptations and pitfalls. Testing her sobriety is her formerly estranged mother, now back in Christy's life and eager to share passive-aggressive insights into her daughter's many mistakes.

Mr. Corman
With better luck, better choices, better posture... Josh Corman could’ve been a rock star. Now he teaches fifth grade, and though he loves his students, he still struggles to find happiness and meaning in a world that sometimes feels short on both.

In the Dark
Murphy is a flawed and irreverent woman who just happens to be blind and is the only “witness” to the murder of her drug-dealing friend, Tyson. When the police dismiss her story, she sets out with her dog, Pretzel, to find the killer while also managing her colorful dating life and the job she hates at Guiding Hope, the guide-dog school owned by her overprotective parents.

Ballers
Looking at the lives of former and current football players, the show follows former superstar Spencer Strasmore as he gets his life on track in retirement while mentoring other current and former players through the daily grind of the business of football.

Freaks and Geeks
High school mathlete Lindsay Weir rebels and begins hanging out with a crowd of burnouts (the "freaks"), while her brother Sam Weir navigates a different part of the social universe with his nerdy friends (the "geeks").

Supernatural
When they were boys, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. Subsequently, their father raised them to be soldiers. He taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America ... and he taught them how to kill it. Now, the Winchester brothers crisscross the country in their '67 Chevy Impala, battling every kind of supernatural threat they encounter along the way.

Shameless
Chicagoan Frank Gallagher is the proud single dad of six smart, industrious, independent kids, who without him would be... perhaps better off. When Frank's not at the bar spending what little money they have, he's passed out on the floor. But the kids have found ways to grow up in spite of him. They may not be like any family you know, but they make no apologies for being exactly who they are.
Why These Anime Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Upright (2019): Comedy and Drama themes, comparable animation style, and similar narrative pacing. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface anime most likely to resonate with fans of Upright.
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