Some things are eternal, but should characters be among them? In Western cartoons, it's common enough for characters never to age. The kids from South Park can't get out of fourth grade, and who knows how old the Scooby Gang should be by now. These characters aren't vampires or immortals who remain unchanged because the story demands it, but characters trapped in perpetual adolescence nevertheless.
Modern anime series often avoid this inevitable pitfall, but long-running shows have a habit of denying characters the right to change over time. Ash Ketchum isn't alone when it comes to kids who simply aren't allowed to grow up.
10 Ash Ketchum Must Stay Young And Marketable
Ash Ketchum has been ten for decades now, and that's unlikely to change. Whereas the Pokémon games often install new or adjustable protagonists, the anime series soon realized that Ash and Pikachu, as an item, were essential to the show's success. The reasons for this are hard to define, and many find Ash to be an inept hero at best.
It's important to remember that Pokémon is a show intended for small children, not teens. Small children prefer consistency and familiarity. What would happen if Mickey Mouse grew old? Ash Ketchum's design has fluctuated, but his fundamentals remain the same simply because that's what sells.
9 How Long Has Conan Been Tiny?
Case Closed's legacy can't be overstated. The series has been airing since 1996 and has clocked in more than 1000 episodes, but has Conan Edogawa ever managed to undo the disaster that transformed him into a small boy? Of course not, or at least never permanently.
As the most episodic of popular shonen anime, Case Closed has a format that works and there's no viable reason to change it. Each episode presents a mystery, and Conan solves it, meanwhile contending with the qualms of being a high school genius stuck in an elementary schooler's body. Perhaps given the experimental medicine Conan ingested, he can't ever age. But even if that were the case, the other cast members should have by now. This is one mystery Conan's unlikely to solve.
8 Crayon Shin-Chan Will Never Grow Up
Once again, Shin-Chan's perpetuity proves that kids' shows follow their own rules when it comes to the passage of time. Like Case Closed, Shin-Chan has surpassed one thousand episodes.
If each episode represented just a single day, Shin-Chan would be eight years old at the very youngest. Of course, he's stuck forever as a five-year-old who struggles to speak coherently because that is one of the series' perennial charms. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
7 Daily Lives Of High School Boys Knows Its Characters Are Trapped in Time
Few shows have such a solid sense of identity as the comedy classic Daily Lives of High School Boys. And it's true that these characters never age, and that makes sense, as the show was only given one all-too-brief season. But Daily Lives is extremely good at breaking the fourth wall, and the reason the boys are confirmed to be forever unchanging comes down to a single joke one of them makes.
When the characters discuss what they would like to do upon graduating, Hidenori points out that it doesn't matter what they say because they'll forever be trapped in their second year of high school. The joke is a prime example of the anime's timeless wit and self-awareness.
6 Ah! My Goddess Characters Won't Graduate College
Honestly, Ah! My Goddess doesn't have a solid excuse for its behavior. The characters are supposed to be university students, but they've been in college for more than two decades now. The series is partly a comedy, and comedies deal less often with characters growing older, as they tend to be more episodic in general.
While goddesses and demons need never age at all, it's harder to wrap one's mind around Keiichi Morisato, the protagonist who's never going to graduate college because he's living in an anime harem.
5 Ouran Pokes Fun At This Trope
Ouran High School Host Club succeeds on two fronts. Yes, it's a fantastic anime romance story, but it's also a fantastic parody of anime tropes, too. Somehow it manages to accomplish these things without feeling cynical. It's no wonder why even though the series is fifteen years old fans are still demanding a long-awaited sequel.
Given the show's sense of realism, it's likely the characters would grow up, given the chance. However, the manga makes a few jokes about it first, telling the readers to ignore the seasons changing and time passing while the main characters remain in the same year at school.
4 Doraemon & Company Are Eternal
Doraemon, like Shin-Chan and Ash, is the star of a long-running children's series, so why should he be expected to age? Add to that the fact that Doraemon is of course a robot, and aging him up would actually seem stranger than leaving him alone. But Doraemon is surrounded by human characters, and they don't age either.
Despite this, there are flash-forwards to future events in which characters appear as adults...but in what possible year could those flashforwards take place? Doraemon traveled back in time from the 22nd century. Maybe the characters will get that far into the future before aging at last.
3 Leeron Littner Doesn't Get Old For The Finale
Leeron Littner is a character who always stands out in a crowd, even in a mecha series as over-the-top as Gurren Lagann. Queer-coded and flamboyant, Leeron is a talented mechanic who proves immensely helpful to Simon and company over the course of the series.
But though Leeron Littner is hard to miss no matter the circumstances, after the show's time-skip it's a whole other story. Even though other characters have grown old and gray, Leeron looks exactly as he always has. There's no reason given for this, but whatever the case, such a choice by the GAINAX animators can't help but feel very deliberate.
2 Ranma 1/2's Timeline Is A Mess
Ranma 1/2's filler episodes are notorious even now, decades after the series aired. What began as a playful shonen comedy with a unique genderbending twist soon devolved into bad, sexist jokes and low-stakes episodes.
During the course of dragging out the series, several Christmas episodes and summer specials took place, but the characters never aged with the passage of time. This is true in the manga as well, which ran for ten years but didn't let Ranma and company escape the constraints of 10th Grade.
1 Clannad's Characters Simply Don't Look Right
Clannad's characters do technically grow up and age. In Clannad: After Story, series protagonists Tomoya Okazaki and Nagisa Furukawa continue living out their lives after high school. The show transitions from school-age slice-of-life to adult slice-of-life, and its themes grow more mature as the story develops into a heartbreaking tragedy.
The problem with Clannad isn't the writing, but the art. The childlike moe character designs were never a good idea, but they feel especially garish once the main cast enters their early 20s. Virtually everyone looks the same as they did in high school, and the children look almost identical to the adults. Character art doesn't get much more confusing than this, and this aspect has prevented many modern fans from enjoying this anime classic.