Your friends might be overselling it. Even as an anime fan myself, most anime is mindless drivel with works that leave a lasting impression few and far between

Your friends might be overselling it. Even as an anime fan myself, most anime is mindless drivel with works that leave a lasting impression few and far between. Hard to make a recommendation without knowing what genres you like but the recent "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" was a very well done story told from the perspective of a member of a fantasy-style adventuring party who outlived her fellow party members that reveals its tale through her memories of her friends and the changes their party's travels left behind on the lives of ordinary folk. Cowboy Bebop (the 1998 anime series, not the dreadful recent live-action movie) and Trigun are considered classics in the space western genre, with a solid mix of drama and occasional humor. As others have mentioned, the movies from Studio Ghibli are rightly regarded as classics, although I would personally limit that to their pre-2002 movies; their later movies have somewhat of a more mixed reception. To western audiences, Princess Mononoke is probably the most well known. If you want something less fantastical, Kiki's Delivery Service might be worth looking at. In terms of rom-coms, I'd suggest the less well known His and Her Circumstances, despite its incompleteness. A lot of its humor and drama is conveyed through energetic visuals that wouldn't really be feasible when filming human actors.