Anime — entry 006 of 15
Jikan
Jikan is a free, keyless wrapper around MyAnimeList's public web data, confirmed live at api.jikan.moe/v4 with a real anime lookup and a wide-open Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header. It has no official affiliation with MAL and can lag behind it after a MAL outage, but it remains the most widely used way to query MAL data without OAuth.
Jikan is a free, keyless REST wrapper around MyAnimeList's public web data — it scrapes and caches MAL pages so you can query anime, manga, characters, and seasons as plain JSON without an account or OAuth flow.
GreatAPIs Score
Auth quickstart
- No API key required — requests are public and keyless.
Your key is stored only in this browser (localStorage) and sent directly to the API — never to greatapis.
Get an anime by MAL id
GEThttps://api.jikan.moe/v4/anime/1
{
"data": {
"mal_id": 1,
"url": "https://myanimelist.net/anime/1/Cowboy_Bebop",
"images": {
"jpg": {
"image_url": "https://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/anime/4/19644.jpg"
}
},
"title": "Cowboy Bebop",
"title_english": "Cowboy Bebop",
"title_japanese": "カウボーイビバップ",
"type": "TV",
"episodes": 26,
"status": "Finished Airing",
"aired": { "string": "Apr 3, 1998 to Apr 24, 1999" },
"duration": "24 min per ep",
"rating": "R - 17+ (violence & profanity)",
"score": 8.75,
"scored_by": 1068404,
"rank": 49,
"popularity": 41,
"genres": [
{ "name": "Action" },
{ "name": "Award Winning" },
{ "name": "Sci-Fi" }
],
"synopsis": "Crime is timeless. By the year 2071, humanity has expanded across the galaxy, filling the surface of other planets with settlements like those on Earth. These new societies are plagued by murder, drug use, and theft, and intergalactic outlaws are hunted by a growing number of tough bounty hunters..."
}
}Developer reference
https://api.jikan.moe/v43 requests/second and 60 requests/minute per IP, unlimited daily -- confirmed against Jikan's published OpenAPI description (jikan-rest storage/api-docs/api-docs.json). MyAnimeList itself can also rate-limit Jikan's own requests to it, which can surface as a 429 on Jikan's side. Responses are cached for 24 hours (Last-Modified/Expires headers).
Gotchas & limits
- Rate limit is 3 requests/second and 60 requests/minute per IP (unlimited daily) — MyAnimeList itself can also rate-limit Jikan's own requests to it, which can surface as a 429 on Jikan's side too
- Every response is cached for 24 hours; check the `Last-Modified` and `Expires` headers rather than assuming always-fresh data — `X-Request-Fingerprint` is only present on single-resource endpoints like `/anime/:id`, not on query/list endpoints
- Jikan is unofficial and scrapes MAL, so it lags behind and depends on MAL's own uptime — confirmed live on 2026-07-25: `/anime/1/full` returned a 504 `BadResponseException` ("Jikan failed to connect to MyAnimeList") while the plain `/anime/1` endpoint above kept serving its cached copy
- Only GET requests are supported — there's no authenticated write access to update a MAL list