Dale Reki is a respected 18-year-old traveller known to many in the city of Kreuz as one of the best adventurers out there. While hunting for magical beasts in the forest, he finds a little girl of the demon race named Latina. She is hungry and alone after her father dies, so Dale decides to take her in as his own. Her sweet, compassionate nature renders Dale a doting parent, enjoying the various challenges of parenthood while juggling his life as an adventurer. However, various mysteries surrounding Latina concern Dale and the people around him. Latina herself grows as she is exposed to a somewhat human life.

Uchi no Ko is similar to Somali and the Forest Spirit for the simple fact that both anime feature a child and adult relationship. The relationship between these characters is also made a little different by the fact that one of them is inhuman while the other one is, which highlights the oddity of their being together. Both Latina and Somali face some challenges as a result of being the only one of their kind in their respective worlds, namely the discrimination for being a demon experienced by Latina and the danger posed to Somali because being human makes her certain prey to the various creatures of that universe.

Inuzuka Kouhei is a recently widowed high school teacher who has been doing all the parenting of his daughter Tsumugi, but he feels like something is lacking. With his lack of cooking ability and his job, Kouhei has left feeding his daughter down to ready-made meals from convenience stores. When Tsumugi mentions how she and her dad have not had a meal together since the death of her mom, Kouhei feels frustrated with himself; however, Iida Kotori, a student at his school, suggests that he and Tsumugi come to her mother’s restaurant for dinner. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find the restaurant empty but it turns out that Kotori often eats alone because her mother is away. The three begin to cook and eat meals together as Kouhei looks to bring a smile to his daughter’s face with each bite.

While the other shows on this list are about human/non-human relationships, Amaama to Inazuma is simply an anime about a normal father wanting his daughter to eat delicious, nutritious food every day. The fact that both Somali and the Forest Spirit and Amaama to Inazuma feature characters’ parental relationships with children makes them similar; however, the slice of life element of both stories also brings them closer to each other. Both shows are elevated by the endearing energy brought by their resident child character, and the sense of harmless mischief and hyperactivity that Tsumugi from Amaama to Inazuma possesses is similar to Somali’s curiosity and childishness.

Hatori Chise is a 15-year-old Japanese girl who has completely given up her life and decided to sell herself to any buyer willing after being abandoned by her peers for eccentricity. Sold for 5 million pounds, Chise’s fate was uncertain. Bound in chains, she is led through a slew of robed gentlemen down a corridor leading to a study where her mysterious new owner, Elias Ainsworth, awaits. Introducing himself as a magus, he teleports himself and Chise to his cottage in rural England where he then expresses his desire to make Chise his apprentice in magic and eventually, his bride.

Chise is a slightly older child protagonist than the others on this list; however, at 15 years old, Chise is still very young, especially in comparison to the inhuman Elias’s ambiguous maturity. Elias and Chise’s relationship is posited to be a marriage; however, the initial premise is Chise being Elias’s magical student. In that regard, The Ancient Magus’s Bride and Somali and the Forest Spirit are similar because Elias and the golem that is Somali’s father are both emotionless, non-human entities that gain new experience through their nurturing of human young.

Yakuza member Nitta Yoshifumi is having a calm day at home enjoying his collection of prized vases when a strange capsule containing a little girl hits him square on the head. The little girl introduces herself as Hina and she quickly reveals her identity as an individual with incredible psychic powers. The tricky part to Hina’s powers is the fact that she can’t simply stop using them as the pent-up tension causes her to unleash them in the most destructive way, so Nitta decides to become her guardian in an attempt to protect… well, everyone else! When Nitta uses Hina’s powers for some yakuza-related activities, he comes to realise just how useful she is for his endeavours as long as her extraordinary power isn’t used on him!

Hinamatsuri is a comedy anime, which sends it in a very different trajectory to Somali and the Forest Spirit; however, both anime have a similarity with how child characters are introduced to and have familial relationships with adult characters who are often just random people. Hina is an outlier to the world of Hinamatsuri in that she is a superpowered child in a world that isn’t much unlike the reality in which we live. In a similar fashion, Somali is an outlier in her world as much as Hina is in her own.

Moving back to his hometown in Kagawa, Tawara Souta returns to his former home and the udon restaurant his parents used to own. In the restaurant, Souta finds a little boy sleeping, but to his surprise, the “boy” sprouts a pair of ears and a tail! Souta takes him in and names him Poko. It turns out that Poko is a rumoured shapeshifting tanuki that has lived in Kagawa for years. Souta’s hometown experience is filled with nostalgia and memories of the place where he used to live.

Like with Somali and the Forest Spirit, Udon no Kuni features a familial relationship between a character who is human and a character who is not. In both Somali the Forest Spirit and Udon no Kuni, the non-human party in the mix is some kind of spirit. Both children, Poko and Somali, are hyperactive and cheerful, giving their guardians many interesting experiences. Oh, the joy of parenting!

Once upon a time, there was a land divided into two worlds: Outside and Inside. The Outside world was overrun by creatures that had the ability to curse anything they touched, so humanity only lived safely on the Inside. However, when a little girl named Shiva wanders from the Inside to the Outside, she is taken in by an entity from the Outside called Teacher, and they live harmoniously in the forest.

A title which embodies many of the central ideas and plot devices at work in Somali and the Forest Spirit, Totsukuni no Shoujo presents a non-human and human protagonist pairing and places them in a magical, fantasy world. Somali and the Forest Spirit and Totsukuni no Shoujo have parental or guardian/child relationships between their main characters, in worlds where the human child would usually suffer a terrible fate.