MyAnimeList Anime & Manga Scraper

Scrape MyAnimeList - the largest anime and manga database on the internet - without an API key, without a login and without cookies. This Actor reads MAL through Jikan v4, the well-known unofficial, keyless MyAnimeList REST API, and returns clean, flat JSON/CSV/Excel rows: top rankings, seasonal charts, search results, scores, ranks, member counts, studios, authors, genres, synopses and more.

Point it at a chart or a list of titles, hit start, get a dataset.

---

What you get

Mode	What it scrapes	MAL data behind it
top	Top anime chart	Most popular / most favorited / currently airing / upcoming
search	One search pass per query	Full MAL anime search, ordered by members
season	Seasonal anime chart	Every anime of a given year + season (e.g. 2026 winter)
manga	Top manga chart, or manga search when queries are filled	Ranked manga with chapters, volumes, authors, serializations

Every record is one anime or one manga title.

---

How is this different from my other anime Actors?

I ship three anime scrapers because the databases behind them are different - the metadata, the community scores and the coverage do not match.

Actor	Data source	Best for
MyAnimeList Anime & Manga Scraper (this one)	MyAnimeList via Jikan	The largest anime + manga database, MAL community scores, MAL ranks & popularity, member/favorite counts, seasonal & top charts, studios, producers, licensors, serializations
Anime Scraper	AniList-style anime catalog	Broad anime catalog lookups and general title metadata
Kitsu Anime Scraper	Kitsu.io	Kitsu's own ratings, user counts and streaming-oriented catalog data

Short version: if you need MAL scores, MAL ranks, MAL member counts, MAL seasonal charts or manga chapters/authors, use this one. If you want a second opinion from a different community, run one of the others alongside it and join on the title.

---

Use cases

• Anime recommendation engines - build a scored, genre-tagged, demographic-tagged corpus with real popularity signals (members, favorites, scored_by) to train or seed a recommender.
• Streaming catalogs - keep an anime/manga catalog page current with synopses, cover images, trailers, studios, episode counts and airing status.
• Fandom analytics - track how a season's titles rise and fall in rank, popularity and member count week over week.
• Content licensing research - see which studios, producers, licensors and manga serializations sit behind the titles with the biggest audiences before you negotiate.

---

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	top	top, search, season or manga
queries	array	["one piece","frieren"]	Search terms for search (anime) and manga modes
topFilter	select	bypopularity	bypopularity, favorite, airing, upcoming
mediaType	select	any	tv, movie, ova, special, ona, music, any
year	integer	current year	Season year, e.g. 2026
season	select	current season	winter, spring, summer, fall
maxItems	integer	100	1-1000 records

Example input - top TV anime by popularity

{
  "mode": "top",
  "topFilter": "bypopularity",
  "mediaType": "tv",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example input - winter 2026 season

{
  "mode": "season",
  "year": 2026,
  "season": "winter",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Example input - top manga

{
  "mode": "manga",
  "maxItems": 50
}

---

Output

Anime record:

{
  "type": "anime",
  "mal_id": 52991,
  "title": "Sousou no Frieren",
  "title_english": "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End",
  "title_japanese": "葬送のフリーレン",
  "media_type": "TV",
  "source": "Manga",
  "episodes": 28,
  "status": "Finished Airing",
  "is_airing": false,
  "aired_from": "2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00",
  "aired_to": "2024-03-22T00:00:00+00:00",
  "duration": "24 min per ep",
  "rating": "PG-13 - Teens 13 or older",
  "score": 9.3,
  "scored_by": 712345,
  "rank": 1,
  "popularity": 132,
  "members": 1234567,
  "favorites": 78901,
  "season": "fall",
  "year": 2023,
  "broadcast_day": "Fridays",
  "broadcast_time": "23:00",
  "synopsis": "During their decade-long quest to defeat the Demon King ...",
  "studios": ["Madhouse"],
  "producers": ["Aniplex", "Dentsu", "Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions"],
  "licensors": ["Crunchyroll"],
  "genres": ["Adventure", "Drama", "Fantasy"],
  "themes": ["Mythology"],
  "demographics": ["Shounen"],
  "image_url": "https://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/anime/1015/138006l.jpg",
  "trailer_url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgH2Cv0OT2k",
  "url": "https://myanimelist.net/anime/52991/Sousou_no_Frieren",
  "source_api": "jikan-mal",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T12:00:00+00:00",
  "chapters": null,
  "volumes": null,
  "published_from": null,
  "published_to": null,
  "authors": null,
  "serializations": null
}

Manga records use the same rectangular shape, but fill chapters, volumes, published_from, published_to, authors and serializations - and leave episodes, studios, producers, licensors, broadcast_*, duration, rating, season and trailer_url null. Fields are never cross-filled between the two types, so an anime column always means anime data.

---

Rate limits (important)

Jikan is a free, community-run proxy in front of MyAnimeList and enforces:

• 3 requests per second
• 60 requests per minute

This Actor ships a real limiter: at least ~0.45 s between calls plus a rolling 60-second budget, so it stays under both ceilings out of the box. HTTP 429 responses are retried with exponential backoff, and transient 5xx responses (Jikan occasionally answers 504 - Jikan failed to connect to MyAnimeList when MAL itself is unreachable) are retried as well. If a run ends with zero items because of rate limiting or an upstream outage, the Actor fails with an explicit message telling you which of the two happened - just re-run a few minutes later.

Practical consequence: throughput is capped by Jikan, not by the Actor. 1,000 records is 40 pages, i.e. under a minute of API calls plus pacing.

---

Pricing

Runs on the pay-per-usage model. Typical cost is around $0.5 per 1,000 items on a 512 MB run, since the workload is a handful of small JSON calls per 25 records - no browser, no proxies.

---

Legal

Only public MyAnimeList catalog data is collected: titles, scores, ranks, counts, staff/studio credits, synopses and cover URLs. No user profiles, no personal data. Jikan and this Actor are not affiliated with or endorsed by MyAnimeList.

---

Related Actors

• Anime Scraper
• Kitsu Anime Scraper
• MangaDex Scraper
• TVmaze Scraper