Owing to our ever-hectic day-to-day life, it becomes difficult to make room for sitting down and watching prolonged series that elicit hours of our time. Fortunately for us, the Eid vacation generally brings about a much-needed and refreshing break, and a bit of free time to spare.

That being said, here are five short anime series you can spend your vacation binging on.

Kino's Journey

Kino's Journey, or Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World, is a 13-episode-long series that follows an anthological structure. Each episode follows Kino, an agender teen who sets out to become a traveller, and their companion Hermes, a talking motorcycle. 

Essentially, each episode begins and ends in the same way – the duo makes their way to a completely new town with staunchly different customs and traditions, meet the people there, and faces some sort of a moral conflict due to the nature of the times. While it may sound repetitive, the entire series has wonderful story writing and the characters' contrasting personalities ensures that this narrative pattern works without a hitch. 

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

When it comes to mecha anime, few shows are able to hit the mark as impactfully as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Released in 2007 and produced by Studio Gainax, the show is set in a world where most of humanity has been driven to live underground due to the terrors that inhabit the world above. Simon and Kamina, two brothers who share polar opposite ideals, are handed the opportunity to take hold of their own fate and dig through to the heavens above.

Throughout its 27-episode runtime, Gurren Lagann is entertaining, inspiring, absurd, meticulous, beautiful, heartbreaking, and so much more. It is a treat for the eyes and candy for the soul and should be experienced by everyone as such.

Terror in Resonance

With Studio MAPPA and veteran director Shinichiro Watanabe at the helm, Terror in Resonance tells the story of two young "terrorists". Through carefully-curated online videos, they keep providing clues to the police as to the location of their next bombing.

Within the span of just eleven episodes, Terror in Resonance tells the tragic story of two boys who aren't supposed to exist, and the mystery behind their anti-heroic motives.

Odd Taxi

2021 was a great year for anime overall, producing highly acclaimed shows such as Mushoku Tensei, Horimiya, etc. among others. However, a series that has been criminally swept under the rug is Studio OLM and P.I.C.S' joint masterpiece, Odd Taxi.

This 13-episode-long mystery thriller presents itself as a comforting and slow watch where all the characters are animals in an otherwise normal Tokyo. However, as each episode progresses, it becomes clear that nothing is quite as it seems and that every action is somehow intertwined as part of a much larger secret. The densely-packed episode structure has a major payoff at the end because the ultimate, gutting reveal puts everything into place.

Houseki no Kuni

Set in a mysterious, post-apocalyptic future, Houseki no Kuni follows crystalline organisms known as gems. Every gem must carry out a role to protect themselves against an extraterrestrial species, known as Lunarians, who frequently attack them to harvest their body parts.

Phos, a fragile and comparatively young gem, wants to help the others in combating the Lunarians but is unable to do so for their frail structure. The show follows the young gem's pursuits to become more helpful to their friends, but not without realising that everything comes at a steep price.