Japanese animation (known as anime in the West) has gone from a niche, geeky interest to a mainstream juggernaut enjoyed by people all over the world. Of course, if you’ve come to this article after searching for “anime wallpapers” then you already know how much great anime is out there. It spans every genre, every taste and every type of story you can imagine.
So where can you go to personalize your desktop computer to reflect your love of your favorite anime? These are five of the best sites to easily find the best anime wallpapers for your desktop computer.
WallHaven.cc
Following in the footsteps of the now-defunct 4Scrape and 4Walled, Wallhaven offers an intuitive wallpaper database and search tool with a dedicated section for anime wallpapers and decent filters to remove adult or borderline content.
You can arrange wallpapers by popularity, recency or in a random order. There are comprehensive filters to find pictures of a particular resolution or shape as well. Keywords and tagging are community-driven, so there are times when you’ll find something that’s not safe for work, which has been mislabeled. The good news is that you can correct these tags yourself.
Another really handy feature is available if you register for an account and are logged in. The site will remember which wallpapers you’ve already seen and mark them.
The scope and range of anime wallpapers on this site is staggering and you’ll even find plenty of related geeky wallpapers under the “General” section as well. This is a great first stop to quickly put together a robust anime wallpaper collection.
Wallhere
Wallhere is very clearly aiming for Wallhaven’s crown, with an interface and overall look that’s very similar at first glance. Once you actually start using the site you’ll realize they are actually quite different.
First of all, there’s no dedicated anime section, even though there are plenty of anime wallpapers on the site. We’ve found the easiest workaround for this is to simply search for the keyword “anime” and you should see just about everything that’s available.
The filters on offer are not quite as detailed as Wallhaven’s and there’s only a single NSFW switch, rather than the three-tier system of the other site, but with a little extra effort you should be able to narrow things down to what you’re looking for and cut out all the noise.
One mildly annoying thing is that you need to be logged in for full-quality image downloads, but once that’s sorted, it’s pretty easy.
Minitokyo
Minitokyo is one of the most venerable anime wallpaper sites on the web and has been around for ages. It’s an anime pop culture site in general, but is famous for its wallpapers as well as very high resolution scans of anime and manga media which can be used to create wallpapers or as wallpapers themselves.
Compared to sites like WallHaven and Wallhere, Minitokyo does feel a little dated. You’ll also find many of its wallpapers on other sites, but this is where they originate and some of the more unique and less mainstream ones will only be found here. The scans are also invaluable, even if you just want to use them as wallpapers directly.
r/Animewallpaper
r/Animewallpaper is a Reddit community that puts out a constant stream of quality anime wallpapers. You can request specific wallpapers to be made by the community, directly chat to the maker of a given wallpaper.
Unlike dedicated sites, such as Wallhaven, you’re dealing with the best that can be done with the Reddit site’s functionality, The Anime Wallpapers community has figured out their own conventions to help you filter out wallpapers you aren’t interested in. For example, each post is tagged with “Mobile” or “Desktop”. Clicking on one of those tags only shows you posts of either type.
Posters are also diligent about putting the resolutions in the post title. You can use Reddit’s general search function to search r/Animewallpaper for specific keywords and generally find what you want that way. It’s not slick or fast, but some of the best wallpapers are to be found here. Many of these will take a while to make it to places like WallHaven and Wallhere or simply be forgotten on this Reddit page. It’s a real treasure trove if you take the time to explore it.
Wallpaper Abyss
Wallpaper Abyss lives up to its name, with an absolutely massive collection of wallpapers on offer. Its anime subsection was just short of 180 000 wallpapers at the time of writing. You might expect it would be hard to find what you need with such a massive collection of images. In fact, Wallpaper Abyss has a pretty good filter and search system to help narrow the options.
You can choose to only see images of a specific resolution and even change the display of wallpapers from paginated to infinite scrolling. While it may not look quite as slick as the newer sites on the web, Wallpaper Abyss has it where it counts.
Anime Wallpapers Desu
Back in the old days, before anime was such a mainstream interest, it wasn’t easy at all to find good wallpapers. Fans had to visit some pretty unsavoury sites at times to find the images they wanted.
These five sites are the ones we consider the best for the majority of fans, but there’s certainly a long list of great sites to add to this group. So do share your own favorite sites down in the comments and tell us about your favorite series while you’re at it.
If you want to try your hand at making your own wallpaper, check out our guide and maybe you’ll be adding your own creations to the above sites one day.