Watching every anime that aired in 2007 has given a lot more perspective when it comes to how the landscape of anime was in the 2000s. Considering myself a 2000s kid, I felt like I would be missing a crucial part of my history if I didn’t submerge in late-2000s anime. Already having seen Lucky Star, Haruhi, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, Ponyo, and Fairy Tail as some of my first anime, with some vague memories of watching Yu-Gi-Oh and Dragon Ball Z Kai on demand at my cousins’ house, I had some of that clout  stacked in my brain already. Though, there were a lot of popular series I’d only heard about in passing during the mid-2010s while having never seen them myself like Toradora, Black Butler, and Soul Eater (I still haven’t seen the former two). Though, I honestly consider 2008-2011 to kind of blend together as its own fandom era, with maybe an extension from 2008-2014/2015 just due to how distinct the culture of that era felt from what would be before or after it. 

That first paragraph was what I wrote a few years ago in 2022 when this idea had started coming to my mind. I discontinued that blog post because I guess my brain moved onto different things before fully fleshing out the idea. Though, in the years since, I’ve been going back to a lot of 2000s media, just because that era is very special to me. I was only alive for a little over half that decade, so my memories of it are pretty foggy, but a lot of media from that time was formative to my tastes at a very early age. The pop rock music, the neon aesthetics, the thick outlines, the crazy fashion, the corny humor, it was the foundation that built my creativity, which I began exploring at the turn of the decade when I began writing little stories in my journals. I liked creating characters in the Wii’s Mii Channel, some based on my own stories. I always liked making stories from a very early age, and the late-2000s was where my sensibilities first began to form. The first show which I remember identifying as my favorite was The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. Something about the seaside shanty town setting, the rougher look of the visuals with this grimey color palette that I always associate with stormy seas, the off-kilter, occasionally gruesome sense of humor, it all congealed into such a unique blend that really captured my imagination. That “adventure” in the title was a huge draw to the show as well. The dynamic between the main trio of the wise but at times nagging Bubbie, the shady but occasionally caring K’nuckles, and the wide-eyed, naive Flapjack just made for an oddly compelling take on a somewhat dysfunctional family unit that still had the sense that they cared for each other despite their hangups. Having an interesting group of travelling buddies going on crazy adventures is a big part of what made shows compelling to me as a kid, and I gravitated to anything that even remotely steered toward that premise. 

Pokemon, while not something I’d get deeply into until XY in the 2010s, was something that always appealed to me whenever I caught episodes of the anime on Cartoon Network, due to its structure of a group of friends with good chemistry travelling the world encountering all manners of unique creatures and sometimes getting caught in crazy scenarios. One of the Diamond and Pearl episodes I vividly remember watching on TV is one of the episodes of the Team Galactic arc where Looker was trying to discover what the evil team was up to while happening to get caught up with Team Rocket. Both of them were a bit in over their heads, as Team Galactic and the ruthlessly powerful Hunter J were well on their way to collecting the Lake Spirits. I always liked that scenario where characters who would usually be antagonistic toward each other are faced with a threat that neither of them can take alone. In the broader context of the show, it also gives a greater sense of scale to what Team Galactic is doing if Looker from the government police is trying to track them down and the gang’s ordinary foes in Team Rocket are completely outmatched in this situation. I always found that sort of dynamic made things more compelling, this feeling of something greater beyond your control rendering your antagonism trivial in the face of a force that renders you much smaller than you can know from your limited perspective.  

I’ve been watching videos of Disney commercials from the late-2000s and early-2010s just out of curiosity to see how much I remember. I know I was watching Nick Jr. during the late-2000s with stuff like the Backyardigans, Yo Gabba Gabba, and The Upside Down Show (which probably influenced how I began using my hands as little characters, having them be brothers with names starting with S), but I wasn’t sure when exactly I started watching things like Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, and the main Nickelodeon channel. I was wondering if I even watched Disney Channel during the late-2000s, since it was hard to see if my vague memories of the commercials were just getting confused with commercials from the early-2010s. Then I saw the G-Force commercial, and realized this absolutely had to be something I saw during 2009, because there’s no way I would’ve watched G-Force as a kid without seeing that. The Up commercial too where they just showed a scene of the movie also feels familiar. That particular clip was more vivid in my mind than most of the rest of the movie after that point. I had Up on DVD (which is still in my room), which I probably got in 2009, so I’m guessing I found out about it from commercials on Disney Channel. That also calls into question whether I was watching DC in 2006-2008, since I know for a fact I was watched the first Cars movie around that time, since my birthday party in either 2006 or 07 was themed around that movie. I also had the Cars video game for Xbox 360, which I may have gotten in 2009, since that was when my dad first gave his console with all his NBA 2K and Call of Duty games. I think Viva Pinata Party Animals was the first game I actually played on that console, since dad’s games (and most Xbox 360 games for that matter) were geared for an older audience. A part of me wishes I was like 10 years older at that time, since I missed out on a lot of Xbox 360 games were really focused on that teen and mature demographic, leaving kids like me kinda out to dry outside of the usual shovelware… like the Cars video game. There were a couple Sonic games on the console, but my story with Sonic started in the 2010s, and the one Sonic game I did get for that console was All Stars Racing Transformed in 2012. Awesome game. It surprisingly still holds up, as I bought the PC version on Steam last year so I could play it online before Sonic Racing Crossworlds came out, and it still rules.

Before getting obsessed with the blue blur, I was more of a Mario kid. Mario Kart DS was probably the first game I remember truly getting obsessed with as a kid, and it started my lifelong attachment to the Mario Kart series and becoming a fan of racing games in general. Mario Party DS was another game that I got a lot of mileage out of. I got a Nintendo DS Lite probably in 2008, since I asked my mom for a handheld console after seeing an older kid at school with some translucent green(?) rectangle thing which he was playing games on. Just due to the time period, since this was in like 2007-2008, I now guess that it was a Game Boy Advance SP. I think it looked something like this. Though, I remember it having a simpler button layout and not having the hinge, something more like the Gameboy Color, like this. I dunno why a kid would have a Gameboy Color in 2007, but in my memory the handheld looks closer to that than the GBA SP. Though, memories are fallible, and I only ever saw it once. Either way, my mom got me neither handheld and I ended up with a DS Lite instead. It had a slot for GBA games, so I could’ve played those had I actually known what that slot was. It was probably in the manual that came with the box, but I didn’t read all of that. Though, I kinda wish I did, because the GBA has a lot of cool games in itself own right which I’ve only been getting around to recently like Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Sonic Battle and Sonic Advance 1-3, and Final Fantasy 5 & 6 Advance. As much as I love the sprite art of the GBA, the DS might take the cake as my favorite handheld of all time. The dual screen was such a unique gimmick that was used in a bunch of different ways by the variety of different games on the DS. I didn’t play as many DS games in my childhood as I would’ve liked, as I missed out on some great games like Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, the Sonic Rush games, Pokemon Platinum, and The World Ends With You. I would get Pokemon HeartGold and Pokemon Black 2 in the 2010s, though a couple years after they were released and after the Nintendo Wifi Connection servers had already shut down, since I only got deep into Pokemon in gen 6. One bizarre standout from this period was Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, which is a game I never finished, but played quite a lot due to its unique sketchy art style and the concept of bringing art to life being fascinating to me. I vaguely remember some scary undercurrents in that game, but looking up the game online, I’ve heard the ending is apparently really dark. That makes me curious to finally finish the game and see what all the hubbub is about. It’s certainly an outlier among the DS games I played. It wasn’t shovelware like Cars 2, Phineas and Ferb 2nd Dimension, or Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?! I had fun with those games btw, and the AT one was apparently developed by WayForward, from the Shantae series which I was also introduced to as a kid with Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse on the 3DS. It really does make sense, since the style of presentation in the cutscenes is pretty similar. There are a few more games I played on DS as a kid like Sonic Classic Collection, which introduced me to the Genesis Sonic games, but that wasn’t until the 2010s, since like I said, I was more of a Mario kid before that. I was introduced to one of the classic Sonic games before playing Classic Collection, though, and that was Sonic and Knuckles, which I was already playing on WiiWare. 

I got my Wii on my birthday in 2009, going by the system’s calendar I scrolled years back through. I didn’t have much on the console back then except for the perennial classic pack-in title Wii Sports. My favorite game was always bowling, and I love playing the game with my family. It really is as perfect an introduction to the Wii as I could’ve asked for. It’s not super complex or anything, but it makes the entire concept of the Wii just make complete sense, putting the motion controls to the test in 5 different minigames, all played by your Miis. Miis are everywhere in this game, all with varied designs that show you just how much customization you can give to these little guys. One of the things I spent the most time doing with the Wii was not playing any one particular game, but creating characters in the Mii Channel. I literally filled the plaza to full capacity, which was only 100 Miis  (some of which I imported from other people on the Check Mii Channel), but still. It was pure genius to have a character creator that was incorporated into a bunch of different games across the Wii’s library and basically became intertwined with the identity of the console and Nintendo itself for awhile. They were both customizable enough to be a fun creative canvas for making funky looking avatars and cartoonishly stylized enough to be instantly recognizable as Miis specifically instead of a random more realistic-looking character creator. Seeing stuff like Mii heads over the certain statues or Miis in the crowds of the Mario Kart Wii, having your Miis be playable in Sonic Colors’ Game Land, or having whole games populated by Miis like Wii Sports Resort really made it fun for me to create as many unique characters as possible to see how they’d look in these games. The various ways big and small that games would incorporate Miis into them were all so charming to see, and it really made the Wii’s games feel connected in some small way. It’s one of the many things that gave the Wii such a distinct and memorable identity.

In terms of what I was watching on TV at the time, the late-00s are kind of a blur in that regard. I think I remember watching Cartoon Network, because I remember getting nightmares from watching a Scooby Doo episode and feeling scared going to sleep at my old house, back when I needed a night light and a sound machine so I wouldn’t feel afraid of the dark. I also had this chest which I used to keep stuff like toys inside of. There was a map I used to love inside there that I unfortunately lost at some point, which made me pretty upset back then. GPS just can’t replace the exciting sense of adventure of figuring out where you are on a map and learning how to navigate I wasn’t that aware of Demi during her time on Disney Channel outside of the occasional wand ID, Princess Protection Program, or promos for the Camp Rock movies, but damn, she made some absolute banger pop rock music in that era. When I watched PPP, I do remember being really struck by how beautiful the song Two Worlds Collide in the credits was. They played it during some commercials for the movie too, so I heard it quite a lot. I was more of a Selena Gomez fan at the time, which is why I was interested in Princess Protection Program in the first place. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell the two apart, because I guess I was just that bad with faces back then. The whole movie does hinge on them switching lives, so they were playing off the idea that they could be mistaken for each other. Seeing the music videos for Tell Me Something I Don’t Know and Naturally on Radio Disney were my first introductions to Selena’s music, along with songs like Magic from the Wizards of Waverly Place movie. Looking back and finally listening to that whole Kiss and Tell album in full, I really loved the way rock was so instilled in the mainstream zeitgeist of the 2000s, with crunchy electric guitars all over the albums of even some of the most mainstream teeny bopper artists of the time.

It’s strange because I don’t know if I could fully classify myself as a 2000s kid, since my memories of that time period are pretty vague and I was so young at that point in time. I was born in the 2000s, and I clearly remember certain moments from my preschool/kindergarten days and I grew up with a decent amount of media from that decade (music, tv shows, video games, movies, etc.). Though, I have a lot of blind spots, even from the late-2000s. And yet, there are several pieces of media from that decade that defined my childhood. Avatar, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Flapjack, Total Drama, Phineas and Ferb, Spongebob, Mario Kart Wii and DS, the late-2000s Pixar movies, they’ve all left pretty sizable impacts on me really early on. I wouldn’t say anything here was the absolute most formative pieces of media in my life like Adventure Time would be in the 2010s, but they’re some of the first pieces of media I gravitated toward, and a lot of them still hold special places in my heart nowadays. Growing up in this time and with these shows and games is part of why I constantly come back to this era specifically to fill up those blind spots. The 2010s definitely makes up more of my childhood, and I obviously have a lot of fond memories of that time too. Though, when I’m specifically talking about pieces of media, I generally prefer the 2000s over any other time period. It’s like the best of modern and classic styles of writing and design for me. It’s a very transitional time for all sorts of mediums that led to a lot of experimentation and weird art, and that’s exactly what I love to see. Maybe the macabre, at times surreal atmosphere of Courage the Cowardly Dog developed that appreciation for games and shows with a similar tone. Maybe the prevalence of pop rock in late-2000s Disney and radio in general was the spark for my interest in rock music of all kinds. Maybe the years spent growing accustomed to rougher graphics of the DS, Wii, and to an extent the Xbox 360 was what made me so eager to return to older video games (that and playing older games on the Wii and later 3DS’s virtual console). Maybe watching Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Ponyo, and Naruto as a kid primed me to be drawn toward 2000s anime. Maybe Avatar sparked my interest in serialized action-adventure narratives. Maybe the Wii’s channel layout and distinct, instantly memorable UI contributed to my interest in 2000s graphic design and general aesthetics of the time. I know for a fact watching 90s and 2000s Disney films like Lilo and Stitch, Princess and the Frog, The Little Mermaid, etc. as a kid contributed to my longheld preference for traditional 2D animation, and my childhood disdain for the increasing prevalence of cheap-looking flash animation or full CG cartoons. I still loved Pixar movies of course, but that was the absolute peak of CG animation at the time, with a lot of other movies and studios riding their coattails, much to my disapproval. That sort of appreciation for the rustic feel of traditional animation is something that developed in me from a very early age and never fully left. That’s part of why I got into anime to begin with. I deeply missed the 2D animation that Disney used to be known for, before dropping it completely at the turn of the decade when Tangled became a huge success. I liked Tangled, but I was never particularly fond of the effect it had on Disney throughout the 2010s, with a lot of movies having a similar sense of humor and style of character design to that movie. I liked Moana and Zootopia fine enough (I liked Big Hero 6 fine at the time as well, but I’ve lost a lot of interest in the movie over time) but they didn’t emotionally impact me or invoke the same whimsy in me as my favorite older Disney movies. Having rewatched the movie recently, I think Lilo and Stitch remains my outright favorite Disney movie, and it’s probably the most popular Disney animated movie of the 2000s (not counting Pixar) for good reason. I finally checked out Emperor’s New Groove, Treasure Planet, and Atlantis, and I had a great time with all of those too, moreso than any Disney movie in the past 15 years. It’s not like everything Disney made back in the 2000s was gold. As I was writing this, I almost completely forgot about Bolt, despite having the DVD and watching it several times as a kid. I don’t even know why exactly I watched it more than once. It’s one of those 2000s Disney movies that feels like a bootleg Dreamworks movie, along with Chicken Little which is even worse. I had Shrek and Over the Hedge on DVD too, both of which I liked way more than Bolt, so yeah I have no idea why I watched this film so much at the time. I remember my Xbox 360 occasionally having issues whenever I tried watching this movie on it. I don’t know what the deal was with that. It didn’t seem to be batteries. It would just often give me some little message about an issue it was having. Regardless, I remembered Bolt because I was listening to a lot of old Disney Channel music recently, and I found out that Miley Cyrus apparently sang the ending song for Bolt. Disney-era Miley is such a fascinating era of her career to me, because I completely ignored Hannah Montana back when it was still airing. One of my classmates having a Hannah Montana lunch box, but more than that, I vividly remember the TV Guide being absolutely flooded with Hannah Montana episodes one day. I saw some Hannah Montana when I was at a relative’s house and one of my female cousins was watching it on the living room TV. I tried watching the show a few years after it ended out of morbid curiosity because PhantomStrider had it at #1 on his Top 10 Worst Disney shows list. Nowadays, due to the 15-20 year nostalgia cycle, the kids who grew up with it loudly proclaim it to be one of the best Disney shows ever made. I watched episode 1 a few days ago because I saw it in my yt recommendations, and it was decent. I was amused. I think the character dynamics are well established as well as the bond between Miley and Lily and Miley’s family. I didn’t find the characters themselves to be particularly interesting individually, but I can understand why kids could relate to them. The humor was charming in that standard DCom way that’s a mix of witty and cheesy. The largest impression I got from watching this and the crossover episode with Suite Life of Zack Cody was that Disney Channel just had a very specific way of writing their DComs that just has this infectious charm to it. It is the pure embodiment of 2000s children’s entertainment, but has enough heart to it to be endearing. I watched a lot of Disney Channel original movies recently as well, including the Camp Rock movies, the Highschool Musical movies, and the Hannah Montana movie, and I’d describe them in a similar way. I don’t think that sort of magic can be recaptured unless new writers have a genuine stylistic proclivity toward that sort of campy way of writing instead of just trying to imitating that sort of writing in a forced way, which is what I’m afraid is gonna happen with the upcoming Camp Rock 3. Either that, or it’ll completely change the writing style to something more modern and/or just inelegant. Camp Rock 2 already was pretty mediocre, so it’s not like I need them to replicate everything about the original movies 1 to 1. Trying to make a good sequel to Camp Rock in 2026 feels like a weird situation, since the appeal of Camp Rock is not that it’s a tightly-written movie with super deep characters. The most memorable parts of that movie were the goofy bizarre scenes like “She’s really good” and the group marching in lockstep and shouting “Camp Rock!”. Though, I think the first movie in particular worked because the characters there had enough of an actual arc, a solid message of embracing self-expression and uniqueness, and decent character arcs where several of the characters embrace that message in their way. There were still quite a few generic, corny, or downright baffling moments in that first movie, but as long as the character writing is strong enough to get the audience invested in the film’s emotional core, then I think a Camp Rock 3 could actually work. I just look at how the revivals of iCarly, That’s So Raven, and Wizards of Waverly Place just sort of came and went without making that much of a splash, and I get concerned about this trend of rebooting 2000s properties. It seems nowadays, everybody wants the 2000s back. There are a lot of things about the 2000s that I want back. I love emo, scene music, pop punk, pop rock, old-sounding synths, the swoopy hair, the outrageous, colorful fashion sense, the neon shirts, the v cuts, the edgier aesthetics in general, the more unique, eyecatching UI, graphic design, and design sensibilities in general, maximalism, thicker line art in cartoons, 2D animation in theaters at all, mid-budget video games, games not taking 7+ years to make, Xbox actually making good games, Playstation making good exclusives, phones actually looking unique instead of everyone using a boring-ass iPhone, people not talking about everything in relation to some soulless algorithm, characters in movies and cartoons not having to respond to everything slightly weird with a “well, that just happened”-esque comment. I don’t know if I’d call myself a 2000s kid, but I love the 2000s, even if I didn’t grow up with all of it. What I did grow up with are things I still cherish deeply, and going back to media from that era only makes my appreciation for that era grow further. It was a time period that was foundational to my development and that I get excited to return to and discover new things from, and for that the 2000s will always hold a special place in my heart.

This was my story.

After considering 2021 one of the best years of anime in at least the past decade, I was half-hopeful, half-skeptical as to whether 2022 would sustain that level of quality. For the first three seasons of the year, I thought it absolutely didn’t, with summer 2022 feeling like a giant low point for TV anime quality-wise, with only one show that I overall enjoyed, and for several reasons I felt an all time high of jaded cynicism, preparing to leave the medium forever and denounce it all as almost entirely juvenile trash that I had finally grown out of. However, this fall, or even starting in September, things turned around. More than that, I felt an absolute whiplash in my experience with the medium. I felt… hopeful. I saw so much anime that legitimately excited me, a swelling sentimentality toward the medium all coinciding with a particular huge milestone in my anime fandom. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that the past 4 months were an outright miracle for my relationship with anime, and revived my hope that anime could actually grow up with me as a medium and develop artistically into something actually artistically inspiring to watch, or that can at least hold my attention. The community was exciting, seeing people who are usually ambivalent toward the dumbass seasonal cycle actually talking about and enjoying shows this season. New directors, old directors, directors whose styles have been growing before my eyes in the past few years, the smorgasbord of stylistically ambitious animators they brought along with them have all, more than anything, reminded me of the Power of Anime and why I would ever care about this medium in the past, present, and future. Now, it’s sparked just enough of a fire in me to want to write out my thoughts for everything anime-wise that brought me joy during the highly transitional time of 2022.

Other anime I kept up with:

Fruits Basket: Prelude

Alright, before that I just want to talk about other anime I kept up with from 2022, just to get my thoughts out since this may be the only time I talk about most of them. Coming off Fruits Basket season 3 being one of my favorite anime of the 2020s so far, this movie mainly reminded me of all the franchise’s most crippling flaws. Centered around an age-gap romance between a teacher and student, where Kyouko’s gang roots are rejected and softened up by this predator’s enigmatic kind acceptance, and it overall just drags for the majority of the runtime through melodrama I couldn’t give a shit about until that guy was finally fucking dead so Kyouko’s feelings and personal struggles as a new, single mother could be given the total spotlight. The more I think back on this movie, the less tolerance I have for its existence. It wasn’t atrocious all the time, but it was a bit disappointing to see Kyouko’s backstory be so poorly handled, especially since I really liked her personality and the moments we got from her in the TV series. I would’ve loved to see her have a more positive relationship with at least a few members of her biker gang, showing a type of solidarity that may have helped her through her rough parental situation, partially fulfilling that familial role in her life. You’d also have to make her love interest someone her own age. Though, like Wonder Egg last year, I can only write fanfics about the show I wished existed in place of what we got (basically I’ll just take these ideas and create my own narrative in whatever medium I can). I’m not nearly as distraught by this movie as I am by Wonder Egg’s ending, because it’s at the end of the day just a side story, and it doesn’t particularly break the themes or even Kyouko’s character from a long and satisfyingly conclusive TV series. This is just the worst anime I actually finished from last year, and I’ll probably never feel like writing about it for any longer than this even if I actually write another blog post on this site. Kyouko’s still the best part of this movie and I’ll still continue to love her and Fruits Basket. 

Ame wo Tsugeru Hyouryuu Danchi

From director Hiroyasu Ishida at Studio Colorido, off the backs of one of my favorite anime of 2018 in Penguin Highway as well as the many shorts Ishida’s directed, comes another surprisingly grounded portrayal of the messiness and emotional turmoil of its child characters while still dignifying them with a level of intelligence that almost but not quite unrealistic, with their logic still feeling rooted in a child’s perspective. Besides just not being a fan of the overly photo-realistic CG and background art clashing with Colorido’s typical simplistic designs, I just found most of the characters a bit too annoying and/or not quite interesting enough for me to care about a good portion of the narrative across 2 hours. I still would recommend this movie, as I feel the level of realism in its character writing combined with the magical realism of its plot and the couple of surprisingly emotionally weighty topics it covers all make for one of films that a child me would find on Cartoon Network and be left with it ingrained in the back of my memory. It feels like one of those kids movies that would hold up as a nostalgic adult. You know the ones.

Lupin III Part 6 (2nd cour)

“Mid-pin” was a term I learned in 2021 from Caribou-kun’s video about watching every single Lupin anime and giving his thoughts about his experience with the franchise. I am woefully underexperienced with this franchise, to the point where Lupin Part 6 is the first entry of the franchise that I’ve seen to completion. Though, having seen a few episodes of Parts 4 and 5 as well as The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, this season does seem like a step down. Production values and narrative ambition (or more importantly thematic focus) just felt a bit too inconsistent across its run, where I only needed one arc of Part 5 to get intrigued by what it was building thematically. Part 6 certainly has standout moments, with the largely episodic format lending to some entertainingly absurd scenarios and the appearance of Mamoru Oshii as a writer on the bizarre eps 4 and 10. I also just appreciate the old school slick character designs, down to their cartooniness and the hair on Lupin’s hands. Since I missed out on watching Part 5 weekly back in 2018, a partial motivator to finish the show just came from wanting the experience of watching what might be the final part of Lupin III as it comes out. Not great, but not a bad note to go out on, with the finale at least being memorable. More than that, I just appreciate how much Lupin III being such a storied franchise makes it so it inherently has such a unique charisma and swagger from any other anime airing at the same time.

Yurei Deco

Science Saru’s style as a studio has always been greatly appreciated by me with how they are built on the cartoony, semi-surreal style of Masaaki Yuasa and forging or gathering distinct staff members, with more of them coming from all across the world to basically embody the vision I have for where anime should be heading toward. Unfortunately, I have yet to watch Yuasa’s actual 2022 directorial work Inu-Oh, which I plan to get around to this year. Instead, the big name I was focused on with this project was writer Dai Satou, head writer for Eureka Seven, Ergo Proxy, and 2020’s oft derided anime-original Listeners (that I nonetheless appreciated for its weird narrative adventurousness, mechs, and banger music). This show didn’t fare too much better in terms of reception, but fortunately it seemed to develop a bit more of a cult following. Here, Satou plays with some more overtly heady concepts in his winding exploration of people left on the fringes of a futuristic highly technology and social media-integrated society with various allusions that more well-read people than me could make more sense of. The debut of Tomohisa Shimoyama shows promise not so much due to the strength of the storyboarding or animation quality, but in the sheer overwhelming color cyclone of the show’s aesthetic in portraying its cyber-ized world, seemingly taking the route of visualizing how people on the internet can represent their identities with literally any imagery they want, extending to the surprisingly diverse character designs in terms of body types. The show remained at least interesting all throughout, with any potential pretentiousness offset by its generally jovial tone, like a sci-fi kids book. It’s clear Dai Satou still has a lot of interesting ideas rattling around in his head, and I’ll be interested in seeing what he ends up writing next.

Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road

Ahhh, yes. Isekai and yuri, two genres I have extremely different storied relationships with. I could write a whole blog post on both (and I won’t), but let’s just say I’m not surprised the only isekai I cared about enough to finish was the one with explicit yuri, and even then it’s still just decent due to the usual mediocre aesthetics, inconsistent production values, and overly wordy, convoluted light novel-y exposition. The ED directed by Keiichirou Saito is fantastic and an early sign of someone with a unique creative voice with its painterly, wispy aesthetic paired with one of my favorite Choucho songs. The OP’s a banger too, with Paper Bouquet being easily my favorite Milli song. I like the main 4 characters, with even the initially annoying Momo getting rounded out across the show and having a fun dynamic with the lovable badass, butch lesbian princess Ashuna. Akari’s characterization is certainly bizarre in a very light novel-y convoluted way, but I still enjoyed her budding relationship with Menou, who has her own baggage and her own badass moments. The final villain is comically violent, but in a way that I appreciate due to its emphasis on body horror and how the villain herself is in on the joke. If there’s anything holding it back from actually making the list, it really is just how light novel adaptation-y it is. If this got the production values, directing, and color design prowess of Mushoku Tensei and substituted more of that dialogue about lore stuff with more shots just portraying that world to make it feel more alive (there were some shots like that in the show, but again, less dialogue). There’s a part of me that still feels like this is just another isekai, but with elements that just happen to appeal to me specifically. Though, considering this is also the show where they kill off the generic male lead and go on to have its yuri romance flourish, I rest assured it at least has a pretty strong ethos.

Tokyo Mew Mew New 

I think I’m a magical girl fan. Even this relatively less acclaimed entry in the genre (even by other magical girl fans) has kept my interest through both anime adaptations and the manga. I’ve been interested in this reboot for years since it was announced, even moreso when Takahiro Natori was directing it (who also directed the recent Aria movies and worked under Junichi Satou on a lot of Aria and Tamayura). Unfortunately, the adaptation is pretty janky all-around. Tokyo Mew Mew certainly is messy, as it has been in every version. There are good parts to the reboot, like the greater emphasis on Mint’s characterization, Mint x Zakuro in general, rearranging the story events that happen in ep 6 made them more emotionally resonant, a few cool animation cuts, Lettuce’s design and portrayal, and Bu-Ling being less annoyingly oblivious than in certain moments of the 2002 anime (and generally just being funny). On the other hand, Zakuro’s introduction is utterly neutered compared to TMM 2002, Ichigo’s parents seemingly don’t exist in this version, less screen time for goofy moments for Quiche and the rest of the villains means less fun, the show often just doesn’t look great, and everything focusing on Ichigo and Aoyama’s relationship ranges from alright to aggravatingly dumb. I’ve experienced every version of TMM in anime and manga, and the best parts of the franchise that keep me watching are the main 5 and their bonds. Like many of original manga writer Reiko Yoshida’s best works, the girls’ developing friendship and chemistry with each other are what make the show entertaining and at its best when leveraging that to see them help each other grow. Basically, it’s a good magical girl show at core, and I’m just hoping the second season coming this year that’ll probably wrap up the adaptation can put its best foot forward.

My Hero Academia (season 6 1st cour)

Somehow I have made it to the 6th season of MHA without totally losing interest in it. It was one of the anime that got me deeper into the medium back when season 3 was airing in 2018. Knowing the reputation of most long-form shounen battle anime adaptations, I had an inkling in my mind that wondered whether this series could actually go the distance or if it would somehow fall apart like other shows of its kind that go past 65 episodes. Aaaaand then season 4 happened, and then season 5 happened, and now people barely talk about the show. There have been a ton of big-time shounen anime from 2018 onward that have eclipsed MHA in quality and even popularity, so why am I still here watching this show. Firstly, this season had much more hype going into it from manga readers with shit truly hitting the fan. The adaptation has finally gotten back on par with season 3 in terms of production values, with a lot more actually impressive cuts of animation and a few moments of surprisingly impactful directing (e.g. the big scene with Twice and Toga, which was the high point of one of the most interesting character arcs in the entire series). It’s not great; it still has pacing issues and the directing on a baseline still feels overly flat. However, I kind of buy that this season will be an actual high point in the series. The biggest reason I’m still watching this series is mainly because this seems like the last high point arc in the series. From what I’ve heard from manga readers, it gets pretty divisive from here, and nothing I’ve heard about where it goes sounds particularly interesting to me. Since this was one of my firsts, I feel sentimental enough that I want to at least see it through to the end of this season (especially since the staff seems to be throwing all their weight behind it this time, probably because they aren’t having a movie production coincide with it in the same year), then take the good memories and run while the getting’s good.

Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War 

Bleach is cool. Tite Kubo’s designs are varied and sick, both in fashion sense and in big sword artwork. The anime’s soundtrack is sick, with Evangelion composer Shiro Sagisu putting out his best and most stylistically diverse work ever and returning for more awesome remixes that even I got nostalgic over, despite not even having seen most of the original series. Noriyuki Abe is a sick action anime director who imbues the original series with a lot of ambiance and ingrained my memories with stark white lights peering through the night. The OPs and EDs are mostly sick, full of style and swagger both visually and sonically, giving me many new artists to add to my Spotify. And the new director Tomohisa Taguchi is sick, filling my memories of this series with thick black and gray tones, intense neon red, orange, and blue lights, and especially that iconic pink that’s most prominent in this cour’s OP. I was impressed in various episodes with just how stylish certain episodes of the series were and the surprising amount of great animation in certain episodes. It’s not particularly great on a writing level. There are some neat character moments, and it brings all the hype that I’d expect from a shounen anime, but I wouldn’t say I’m super interested in the themes of the series. Its sense of pacing feels very old school, having a looooong whole arc with these many moving parts and high and low points, where modern shounen seems to be moving toward shorter arcs and shorter lengths for their manga compared to the decades-long runs of Hunter x Hunter, Dragon Ball, Jojo’s, any of the big three, etc. Regardless, I think the anime is cool. Like MHA, I wanted to stick with this anime for the sake of sentimentality and making memories. Unlike MHA, I am looking forward to seeing it through to the actual ending if the remaining 3 cours hold up stylistically. I’m glad to join the hype of Bleach’s return with longtime fans. 

Honorable mentions:

Kaze no Yukue (music video)

I haven’t seen One Piece Film Red, but this music video was beautiful in terms of visual storytelling and its 2000s old-school aesthetic and color design, which is of course an anime era I could never get enough of. Megumi Ishitani also directed and storyboarded the acclaimed One Piece episode 1015, an insane peak in terms of long running TV anime production. Her range in being able to go between directing absolutely bombastic action, potent yet grounded emotionally intimate scenes like in this MV, or sheer creative visual energy channeled through her shorts is absolutely astounding. She’s a creative tour de force that I hope only gets bigger roles in the industry in the future, because she’s truly a rising star and brings some greatly welcome creativity to the often sterile world of modern anime aesthetics.

Ms.Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon S: Nippon no Omotenashi – Attend wa Dragon Desu

Dragon Maid s2 was one of my favorite anime of last year, marking KyoAni’s glorious return to TV anime and reminding me why they are absolutely unparalleled in television productions. They released a ton of special episodes across the past two years; all of them were pretty fun, and this one sure was one of them. I remember enjoying it a good bit.

Kaguya-sama (season 3)

I’ve had pretty mixed feelings on Kaguya since the very beginning. Sometimes it feels too anime trope-y, sometimes the humor actually lands. The character designs and overall aesthetic are on the fringe of being bland, and I think the directing is severely overhyped, but there are still points where Shinichi Omata’s imagery, theatric presentation, and shifts in color are interesting and engaging (I still remember the bobblehead gag from s2). Chika and Kaguya bounce between being annoying and actually fun to watch (with the latter having some solid character moments throughout). In terms of this season in particular, the rap battle episode was hilarious and a highlight of the spring season, as well as the special ED animated by Vercreek being one of my favorites of the year and lyrically being a strong encapsulation of Shirogane’s primary character arc of growing self-acceptance and honesty. The final arc in the last few episodes was also a highlight of the series, obviously. It felt like an extremely satisfying climax to the entire show’s story so far. Overall, like other seasons, season 3 was a series of high points on a baseline that’s just kinda okay for me. For having some of the more memorable scenes of the year, I enjoyed a Kaguya season in the end yet again. Looks like I’m strapped in for the long run, since the manga’s ending, and I’ll be looking forward to the anime reaching that endpoint too.

Road of Naruto

As someone who’s only experienced the Naruto franchise firsthand through scattered episodes on Toonami, watching all the OPs (and relistening to all my favorites on loop), and seeing clips of the best animation in sakuga MADs and experienced a lot more of it secondhand through extensive YouTube analysis, I could only get a fraction of the emotional impact out of this short ONA as many long term fans. Yet, seeing the original series chara designer and veteran animator Tetsuya Nishio take on chief animation direction for this video that essentially sets a reanimated greatest hits compilation of the show’s narrative beats to some of its most iconic opening songs was hype enough to get across some of its pathos.

Pui Pui Molcar (season 2)

Stopmotion furball cars return with an unexpected season 2 of Pui Pui Molcar. While not as appealing or fun as the first season due to being confined to a driving school and having a bit of a staff shakeup between seasons, I’m still glad it came back and it still had some memorably bizarre scenarios.

Kaginado (season 2)

Kaginado season 2 is much more of a “highs and lows” situation than season 1 last year, with certain episodes dragging moreso but the ending being surprisingly bittersweet in classic Key fashion. Since most people had no idea this show existed, this is essentially a farcical crossover of most of visual novel studio Key’s franchises that got adapted into anime over the past two decades, often known for being these massive tearjerkers but most often personally appealing to me with their zany or sardonic sense of humor that feels like it walked straight out of the 00s anime zeitgeist even in their later shows. Angel Beats and Clannad have had the most emotional impact on me out of all their shows, Air is cool too from what I saw, and seeing them all crossover and have delightfully irreverent, meta bullshit interactions with each other was some of the funniest shit I saw all year. While Key used to be extremely popular even in the western fandom, they haven’t made any huge hits in awhile, so I’m guessing this show is hitting for a pretty small audience that I’m glad to be a part of.

Alright. Finally, let’s get on to the list of my top 20 anime of 2022!

20) Spy x Family

Found family is based. Veteran director Kazuhiro Furukawa (Hunter x Hunter 1999, Rurouni Kenshin, Dororo 2019, etc.) has returned with another high-tier anime production and an approach to adapting manga that I only grown in appreciation for over the years, being the willingness to insert anime original content. Whether that be adding small scenes that make the show flow more cohesively in the medium transition from manga to anime or a nearly entire episode in the case of ep 5, which was one of the most stunning animation showcases of the year and being a ton of fun as a side story that only strengthens our understanding of Loid’s growing attachment to his new family, I always enjoyed seeing the additions Furuhashi brought to make this anime a unique experience from the manga. It’s small things that make the adaptation shine as an anime specifically, in ways that don’t exist in the manga. It’s not about which version is superior in my mind, but rather just making a good use of whatever medium the story is portrayed in. Anyways, I’ll be glad if less action-centric, yet still distinct and endearing series like this are the direction Shounen Jump is heading in. The dodgeball episode was hilarious, the tennis episode was actually hype AF and also hilarious, the dog arc was overhyped I guess (maybe people just like dogs), please stop adding romantic rival characters (Fiona was a bit less annoying than Yuri at least), ep 12 of part 2 fully sold me on the emotional weight of Becky and Anya’s relationship, OPs and EDs are all good, and the last episode was a nice thematic bow on the show thus far. Cloverworks and Wit Studio are pulling a ton of ridiculous talent. It’s not always a sakugafest, but it pops off whenever it needs to. It’s at just the level of production and direction where it consistently feels nice to watch. There’s never a dip where it looks ugly, or super compromised. Nothing about it is particularly offensive. I just wish we got more focus on Yor, but she has more than nothing at least. I’m glad it’s popular, and I hope more found family manga get adapted that are this wholesome, but with a dark and sardonic edge (like a backdrop on the Cold War), and with actual adult characters. Buddy Daddies seems to be taking up that mantel this season, and I’ll be glad if the trend continues as Spy x Family keeps getting adapted.

19) Chikyuugai Shounen Shoujo

After 15 years, legendary animator Mitsuo Iso finally makes his directorial return and brings just as much sci-fi exploration from the protagonist viewpoint of child characters as his prior work Dennou Coil. This time a moon dwelling racist against all Earth dwellers has to save his ill sister by communicating with AI super Jesus. I’m disappointed I only found one interesting thematic analysis of this show on YouTube, because it’s one of those fascinatingly ambitious anime originals that has a lot of meat that pretentious essayists could easily dig into. Meanwhile I was instantly sold on this show when Touya gave the middle finger to the UN (or UN2) in ep 1. I’ll admit a lot of the show’s themes beyond humanity needing to leave its cradle sorta went over my head. It definitely needs a rewatch, and its 6-episode run is definitely extremely condensed compared to the 26-episode run of Dennou Coil. Though, I was enraptured enough by its big ambitions, breezy pacing, and fun aesthetics from Eureka Seven chara designer Kenichi Yoshida and the many animation contributions from veteran Toshiyuki Inoue to keep me engaged until the end. It also has a cool ED with a song by SkullGirls composer Vincent Diamante. The characters being a bunch of dumbass kids right out of a saturday morning cartoon is juxtaposed against intricate sci-fi machinations and government manipulation on the fucking moon. With the newly founded studio Production +h coming out the gates swinging, they have another big production cooking with the first adaptation of an Inio Asano manga in Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction, one of my personal favorites that also wrapped its serialization last year. I have high hopes to see more of the type of weird-ass ambitious anime that makes the medium interesting to me.

18) Ousama Ranking (2nd cour)

Ousama Ranking certainly got more divisive in its second half, but its high points were fantastic enough to still maintain my interest toward it. I wrote about my final thoughts after the show ended in a blog post last year, and basically I was never personally invested in it enough to feel too disappointed at its more questionable plot points like Miranjo’s backstory and arc resolution or at how deflated the tension became for a lot of the show once Bojji became overpowered. However, the final episode brought everything back to the relationship between Bojji and Kage which was what sold me on the show way back in ep 2. There were still a good number of colorful and lively personalities with just enough depth to give them pathos scattered throughout the show. There were other animation highlights scattered throughout, including the phenomenal ep 21 directed and storyboarded by ambitious animator Shouta Goshozono and featured a glorious animated spectacle making for one of the clear peaks of TV animation that year. Overall, it was a wildly ambitious debut for director Yousuke Hatta that has me excited for the future of this industry with him and the rest of the staff on this show moving into the spotlight.  

17) Sabikui Bisco

Takeshi Ueda’s (also known as AA=) hard rock contributions to the soundtrack made for one of the most memorable OSTs that I was head banging to in 2022, and complimented the absolute insanity of the narrative with beautifully badass chaos. In a series where gay archer boys ride a giant crab through the desert and shoot arrows that explode into mushrooms, the sheer personality of Sabikui Bisco was easy to ingrain into my memory even despite airing at the very start of the year. Like Ousama Ranking, I’ve written a more in–depth breakdown of the show in 2022, focused specifically on the themes of propaganda, communication, and government control in the series that most people seemingly overlooked under all the show’s style. That underlying substance and bizarre structure of the first episode have only made long-time writer of weird anime Sadayuki Murai more interesting to me. Though, I will reiterate that the style is fucking awesome, and a promising directorial debut from veteran character designer Atsushi Ikariya and the fresh-faced studio OZ, and if they could create easily the most interesting light novel adaptation of 2022, I’ll be interested in seeing what they’ll cook up in their future anime projects. 

16) Yojouhan Time Machine Blues

In a year full of fascinating debuts that burn bright carrying the potential of this medium, that’s not to say more seasoned directors weren’t still putting out some great works. Shingo Natsume’s built his name directing several of the most exciting projects at studio Madhouse in the past decade, including the sakugafest of One Punch Man s1 and last year’s most enigmatic TV anime in Sonny Boy. His pedigree is highly storied, intersecting with the careers of many industry big names like Shinichirou Watanabe, who he worked with co-directing on Space Dandy way back in 2014. Though, the most important relationship to this project is his connection to Masaaki Yuasa, having contributed storyboards to both the original Tatami Galaxy and the franchise’s 2017 movie Night is Short; Walk on Girl. As a successor to Yuasa on another eccentric entry in the Tatami Galaxy franchise, Shingo Natsume knocked it out of the park along with the delightfully eclectic staff at Science Saru. It’s frankly wild that so many of Tomihiko Morimi’s distinctive novels have been adapted into wildly idiosyncratic anime over the 2010s and now 2020s, and now that I’m actually in college, the more specifically adult-centric story and characters of Tatami Galaxy in particular are more resonant than ever, especially with its continued focus on making the most of your limited time in life and the spontaneous interactions that you’ll inevitably be faced with. While this is much more of an indulgently fun sci-fi side story than what I’ve heard about the main narrative, the style is so distinctive from most anime that I was delighted just to hop on the ride with another great Asian Kung-Fu Generation OP, a pretty memorable ED by Chloe Yhun and Phil Matthews, and more great OSTs from longtime favorite anime composer Michiru Oshima. Despite not even having seen the original Tatami Galaxy nor Night is Short, I felt right at home watching the irregularly released 6 eps of Time Machine Blues, like it’s the type of show that fits like a hand and glove in my life. Don’t freak out, I’ll absolutely get to the other Tatami Galaxy anime soon (probably).

15) Pokemon Journeys (episodes that aired in 2022) + Kami to Yobareshi Arceus special + Legends Arceus: Yuki Hodo Kishi Futaai

I love Pokemon. In the last few episodes at the end of Pokemon Journeys 3-year long run, I felt that sentiment more clearly than ever. One of my early posts on this blog was covering the first two episodes of this most recent Pokemon series, and while I’ve only kept up with bits and pieces of the main TV series in the years since, I came back for the series tradition Pokemon League out of curiosity seeing how the writers would handle Ash being in a tournament with the strongest trainers in the world. I truly wasn’t expecting what was coming next. November 11, 2022 is a day that I’ll always remember, for the day when Ash truly went all the way and made headlines as the very best like no one ever was. I was on Twitter, on YouTube, on Reddit, on Discords in the hours after watching it just to take in every bit of the world’s reaction that I possibly could. Journeys is by no means perfect, as many people who’ve seen it and any of the prior seasons can attest to, perhaps in lengthy detail. However, I always advocate for a series with high highs and low lows rather than a flatline meh experience. And when one of your highs is the climax and ending of your long-ass show and basically an ending to the 25 yrs of Pokemon anime that have chronicled Ash’s journey, I can’t help but applaud. The second big bang moment was when it was revealed that this would be the last series of the anime where Ash would be the main character, with the next series starring entirely new characters. It’s hard to summarize the amount of feelings I had on the day this was revealed and seeing the reactions of everyone who believed Ash and Pikachu’s journeys would never end either out of cynicism or resignation. I remember on the day he won the league, I left comments on various sites including the one I was watching it on that I thought this was the most perfect point they could have to give Ash in official sendoff. Admittedly, even I wasn’t expecting them to actually go through with it, but when they did, the most overwhelming feeling I had was joy. I wasn’t even born when his journey started and the first wave of the anime’s popularity sparked back in the 90s, but as a kid I did use Youtube to go back and watch all the seasons up through XY, which is the season I’m most personally nostalgic for (along with Diamond and Pearl and Best Wishes). In a recent (incomplete and very late) list of my favorite anime of the 2010s, Pokemon is probably the entry I spent the most time writing just because it was such a huge part of my childhood. Toward the end of my segment on the Pokemon anime in the 2010s, I wrote “I’ll definitely be tuning in for Pokemon Journey’s final arc with the Pokemon League just to see how they’d even handle such an plotline with how Ash already won an official league in the last series. Though, after all the running around the map to every region that they’ve done in this series, I’m honestly wondering what they plan on trying in the next one. After three series of increasingly challenging the status quo that people had been complaining about for years, going back to “normal” doesn’t feel feasible, and they can’t exactly pull the “winning the league” or “traveling across every region” stunt twice with the same impact. I feel like if the 2010s was the evolution and revolution of the franchise, the 2020s could be the true experimental period. Though, it awaits to be seen whether they’ll capitalize on that potential…” Now, more or less, I think they capitalized on their potential. Between Ash vs Leon having some of the best, most memorable animation in this year and in this franchise that got me as giddy as I was as a child (e.g. this, this, and this), several moments where I could feel the staff’s dedication to tying as many people and Pokemon that Ash have met across his journey into this last series (this scene was fucking perfect, Kami to Yobareshi Arceus was a fun side story with my favorite pals Dawn, Brock, and the legend Cynthia, and returning characters from every past season were scattered throughout all of Journeys), a solid sendoff for both Koharu and Goh laying the different paths where each of them will be going in their futures (calling back to the emotional core of prior sendoffs of temporary yet valuable serendipitous intersections of these kids lives and long-lasting influences those bonds will have on each of them), yet another more visually distinct side series in the Legends Arceus special directed by increasingly prolific key animator Ken Yamamoto at Wit Studio, and of course the big landmark moments I’ve already discussed, 2022 will easily go down as one of the biggest years in Pokemon anime history (I won’t go deep into the crucial year its been for the games, though 2022 is also the year I got back into the new mainline titles). 2023 is shaping up to be another landmark point for the anime, as the final batch of episodes Pokemon: Mezase Pokemon Master will bring us full circle with Misty and Brock joining Ash again to find out what it truly means for him to continue his journey to become a Pokemon master. Then, it’s all over, and a truly new journey will begin. I’m glad to say that I was fucking vindicated in my belief that the staff were building to a truly new age for this anime. Looking back on my prior writings, all the experiences I’ve had with this franchise from my childhood to now, and knowing that it’s about to change forever, it truly is the end of an era and very fitting for the point in my life that I’m at right now. At the end of it all, on the verge of tears, I’ll say, “Thank you.”

14) Do It Yourself 

Do It Yourself is one of several anime this year that gave me confidence in the future of kirara-kei (aka “cute girls doing cute things” or “shows in-line with the style of manga from Manga Time Kirara”). There were 4 kirara-kei anime in 2022, each with different strengths aesthetically and narratively. Do It Yua Serufu stands out for invoking the more rustic, angular designs and watercolor background art that are more reminiscent of a pre-2010 anime. That tactility in the aesthetics is synergetic with the show’s themes. With original creator “Imago” (aka Mitsuo Iso) likely drafting some of the odd sci-fi elements of its worldbuilding, there’s a focus on appreciating the tactility of DIY projects in a world where it’s practically rendered obsolete compared to technology, most closely reminding me of Manabi Straight. The proof is in the pudding of just how much I enjoyed watching their school club grow and the characters bond over working together with their different skills that contribute to making their DIY projects. My mileage varied as to how much I cared about the characters individually, but they all have just enough exploration to not bother me too much. Jobko, aka Juliet Queen Elizabeth the 8th, was easily my favorite. Her Engrish will probably be grating to most, but was constantly hilarious to me. That goofiness is juxtaposed with her genuine tech savviness and the front of absolute pride that barely conceals her own brand of care toward the other girls who gave her a sense of familial love and friendship that she’d lost early in her childhood. The ending is surprisingly bittersweet, especially with the aspects of her childhood that are revealed. It legit hit hard to center part of the finale’s pathos on the best character. Besides that, I liked seeing Purin and Serufu repairing their relationship over the course of the show, which was also capitalized on well in their scenes alone together in the finale. Serufu embodies the theme of the show in a person, with her rough around the edges, constantly bandaged body only being a symptom of her constantly trying to make personally sentimental art on her own after spending most of her elementary school years having Purin to rely on to make up for all her mistakes. Her creations are often cracked and somewhat messy, even as she makes genuine improvements, but they have personality that her friends acknowledge, even if they’re harder to sell to a general public once they start selling some of their creations to raise funds for their club. Serufu is basically why I enjoy 2000s anime, even the early digipaint and PS2-level CG, embodied in one character. They actively reject using their richer members’ massive credit card funds, just for the sake of making the activity a more personally fulfilling challenge. Part of the reason Jobko and Kouki even joined the DIY club was to get something they felt was missing from the luxuries of their usual lives. It’s that level of commitment on every level to an ethos I deeply resonate with which made the show such a delightful experience to just sink into. 

13) Dance Dance Danseur

In the decline of shoujo manga adaptations in the last 5-ish years, there has been a mostly untapped audience for the type of Dezaki-esque stylized visualizations of melodrama and romance of shoujo anime gone by. However, shoujo tropes have been disseminated through the trends of general anime, as can be seen in the prominence of bishounen archetypes both in design and personality across different subsections of anime beyond shoujo. The latest non-shoujo anime to utilize trademarks of traditional shoujo style is Dance Dance Danseur, a seinen ballet manga adaptation from original mangaka Asakura George, who’s other works mostly consist of shoujo and josei manga. While Munehisa Sakai has experience with directing shoujo anime in Suite Precure and Sailor Moon Crystal season 1 (even if both are pretty divisive), Dance Dance Danseur is probably his most effective channeling of shoujo-style directing flourishes to date (even if my favorite show from him overall is still Zombieland Saga), with him storyboarding several of the ballet scenes himself. Though, specific credit must go to studio Shaft regular Hajime Ootani’s episode directing and storyboarding on episode 5 containing some of the most striking imagery, color work, and shot composition of the year, crafting the most stylish visuals possible even when the animation is limited, which is what made Shaft one of my favorite studios in the 2010s. While the studio these days feels like their in-house style is more diluted than ever with some exceptions like Bishounen Tanteidan, also directed by Hajime Ootani and chief directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, the mass staff exodus in the late-2010s has led to several of their most interesting core staff members bringing their own variants of the studio’s aesthetic to other shows outside the studio they end up involved with. Ootani himself seems to have been one of the most trusted members of Danseur’s staff, having storyboarded and directed some of its ballet scenes himself as well as co-storyboarding and co-directing the final episode with Sakai and co-storyboarder Takeru Satou. All of this bolsters a legitimately compelling sports anime about passionate boys doing only the most badass of ballet routines (outside of the best ballet anime ever, Princess Tutu). Junpei feels like a shounen sports manga protag dropped into a shoujo scenario, which is a primary part of his arc early on. This manifests in his internalized strict sense of masculinity, partially reinforced by trying to take up the “man of the house” role after his father passed away, leading him to double down on committing to the judo he practiced with his dad. Though, the show expands out from there once he’s confronted with the reality that if he wants to go pro with ballet, he has to actually take the sport seriously and commit to it right now, or he’ll be physically unviable to reach the heights of his potential that his hardass but committed mentor Chizuru sees in him. If he doesn’t take it seriously, she doesn’t have time for his shit. By the end of the show, we’re getting into training for profession ballet, as Junpei continuously faces decisions for what he’s going to sacrifice to make it to the top and how much of his own personality he can retain in his dancing if it conflicts with the teaching methods of ballet instructors as well as what will ultimately make him improve as a dancer. All the way, Junpei retains a level of spunk and resolve that I love to see in a character when struggling against tough choices, personal hardships, and having to navigate the stern disapproval of the more experienced people around him. The show covers a satisfying  amount of narrative ground in 11 episodes, but it’s also clearly only the beginning of this  While this show went way under the radar compared MAPPA’s two other, huge anime adaptations that year, this show reminds me of the more sleeper hits from Madhouse’s era of 2006-2011 when they were producing around a dozen anime per year in TV, OVAs, and movies. This level of output is likely a symptom of MAPPA’s management mentality, while feeding into their strained working conditions (and then subsequently denying poor conditions). There still have been some improvements in 2022, and I’m at least glad they can hear the outcry against their working conditions and can respond to it, but I’m not going to pretend like MAPPA’s management is likely to be benevolent for any other reason than PR. Though, in terms of the actual shows they’ve created, I’ll at least give credit to whoever is managing the selection of what projects they choose to produce (whether that be original anime, sakugafest action anime, or adaptations of fairly niche or gritty source material). The most crucial thing is the staff who draw, voice, and score these shows instead of just the studio. My knowledge is still vastly overshadowed by what I don’t know about the industry, but I am fascinated and like learning about the careers of people who make shows like this that I love. This blog isn’t remotely professional or the most thoroughly researched place to get your info (which is why a lot of these links lead to better resources that you could dig into if you’re interested in deeper information). Anyways, despite Danseur being #13, this is the second to last show that I’m writing about partially because it took me awhile to spark my memories on the parts of this show in particular I found most interesting. I’m surprised I actually spent days writing this list. A part of what’s motivating me is probably the desire for this website to go out with a bang so I can feel satisfied even if I disappear for realsies this time, not really in creating this sort of highly refined masterpiece (not being sarcastic or high-minded here, that would just take more effort and commitment than I’m dedicating to this), but in just writing something that I can look back at years from now and see as a snapshot of where I was at this specific point in time. I can unravel layers and layers of the fourth wall so you can right through to my intentions, but you might still have some criticisms of writing something for a public audience in this manner. I guess none of this needed to be explained, because no matter how much you explain your thoughts to someone else, there’s still going to be stuff that goes unsaid that the other person is going to have to interpret themselves in order to fill in the blanks. There’s no way to know literally everything about someone after all. People are too complex for even experts in psychology to understand literally everything about. There’s also the possibility that the other person just wouldn’t like what they see, even after understanding it perfectly. Though, that’s all inherent in communication. We take our chances and put ourselves out there anyways. Alright, I’m done explaining. Intermission over. 

12) Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku 

Akebi-chan is strange. It’s about occasionally strange girls doing occasionally strange things with strangely impressive production values. The presence of fanservice is strange, fortunately without a panty shot in sight (edit: there actually were panty shots during the tennis scene, but they’re presented so nonchalantly that I guess I didn’t notice while writing this), yet still drawn with an occasionally ridiculous amount of glossiness reminiscent of those high detail close-ups in Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song to the point of certain stills basically being cheesecake shots (some more overt than others in how their framed). The absurdly magnetic central character is no less strange than the rest of the show around her. She simply casually embraces every fringe interest or other element of the characters that they either see in themselves as strange or others see as strange in them, and draws them into her inelegant magnetic orbit. Akebi runs on the type of headfirst eagerness where she takes notes on literally everyone’s names in class to remember them, always being one of the first people to arrive at school, and choosing to attend that school specifically to wear the school uniform her awesome short-haired mother wore when she was her age. It’s not that she’s totally self-confident, instead her anxieties or second-thoughts sometimes rise to the surface too late to stop her after she’s already done something absurd. All of this culminates in the most meme’d scene of the show at the end of ep 1 where the titular Akebi clumsily starts her first friendship by walking up to a girl she sees alone in a classroom smelling a toenail clipper and proceeds to smell her own foot out of curiosity. Erika’s not a particularly weird person on the whole, and her recurring appearances hanging out with Akebi show different hobbies and sides to her personality right up to the finale. Though, it’s Akebi’s greater, more overt displays of weirdness and her immediate enthusiasm toward her even after seeing the aspects of herself she wants to hide that makes Erika immediately comfortable around her. In my blog post at the end of Winter 2022, I delved into the strange resonance I had with this show, and how the show’s episodic structure and character writing partially reminded me of a western cartoon centered on a main character who has their name in the title and interacts with and delves into the lives of a bunch of other colorful personalities that populate their school and/or neighborhood, with sometimes surprising groundedness that characterizes the best of the kirara-kei genre. This is all on the backdrop of some absurdly beautiful depictions of rural Japan and the inside of a school in a modern TV anime, helmed by art directors Moriyasu Yasunao and Spy x Family art director Hisayo Usui. A rotating door of excellent creators brought individual episodes to life, with a few standouts being excellent animator Moaang’s debut as an episode director and storyboarder on Akebi ep 7 and former Shaft director Yuuki Yase storyboarding ep 5. Only being the second directorial role from A-1 and Cloverworks frequenter Miyuki Kuroki, the second character design role for Gainax and later Trigger/A-1/Cloverworks-frequenting key animator Megumi Kouno, the third anime soundtrack from Kana Utatane, and the series composition debut of Rino Yamazaki who wrote the script for every single episode, Akebi felt like a project meant to prop up staff into newly elevated positions, with them having proved themselves at least to me with excellent results. 

11) Attack On Titan Final Season Part 2

Yet another in a long line of sequels to shows featured on my top 50 anime of the 2010s list (one that I didn’t have time to write about before the hardline personal deadline I set for it), we have arrived at arguably the biggest anime of the year, at least in terms of permeating the mainstream for better and for worse. I have heard a vast ocean of discourse on all levels of reception, especially regarding the Final Season and manga ending, with part 1 airing in 2020 being when I finally bit the bullet and caught up on the franchise. For me, the final season has been the most interested I’ve ever been in AOT’s narrative. I thought the big perspective shift part 1 opened on broke open the world and themes in extremely enriching ways, and I’ve enjoyed the somewhat less action oriented setup portions of part 2 for how it allows the previously ideologically opposed characters to breathe and intimately sort out their conflicts toward one another and come to an agreement on how to build a better tomorrow for future generations in this nightmarish world of cyclical war. On top of that, it felt like the production values took a step up from part 1, with more legitimately impressive cuts of animation (e.g. this Q Kawa cut and this cut from Malcolm Wope), even if I’m not expecting it to ever reach the aesthetic heights of Tetsurou Araki and Wit Studio’s seasons. The directing even was pretty solid most of the way, with Hiroshi Hamasaki’s strange color work and storyboarding during episode 9 still sticking in my mind, even if it is for how jarringly off-kilter it was and how obsessed it was with the imagery of tree branches (which symbolically could apply to several things through this season, most obvious of which being the paths imagery and more abstractly representing the roots of the war between Eldians and Marlyans revealed this season sprouting into this ceaseless war and the branches as the intertwining ripple effects of war on all of the characters, broadly tying back into their discussion around the campfire in that episode). Great character beats and brutal dramatic moments scattered throughout, I was enjoying the hell out of this season. My stance on the use of allegorical imagery in the show is that they definitely should just not have used that historical imagery in the first place, because it only muddies the messaging when the show’s narrative outright doesn’t map cleanly onto what its allegorical imagery is implying. Regardless, the show’s most sympathetically portrayed characters have outright stated their opposition to this war, Hange outright says genocide is bad in ep 9, the nationalism displayed by any side of the conflict has only been indicted over time due to how they’ve exasperated the effects of said war, and the objective is basically to stop Eren at this point, so I still think its themes are overall still solid. I still have not been totally spoiled on what happens in the ending, so I’ll be interested in just seeing it for myself and drawing my on conclusions on where I stand. Regardless of what happens, I think AOT will go down as a deeply important series for anime this generation, being one of the most thematically ambitious action narratives to grace this medium in the past decade and hopefully inspiring further creators and anime producers to green light more ambitious productions like it in the future. 

10) Akiba Maid War

P.A. Works got fucking weird in 2022. With their first manga adaptation ever being a story about a Chinese warlord getting transported to modern Japan to help a girl become a popular club singer with his legendary strategies, and their other show being uhhh… okay if you haven’t seen Akiba Maid Wars, go watch that first episode right now before I spoil part of the fun of what the show really is. Akiba Maid Wars combines their trend of working women original anime and their trend of nonchalantly batshit weird elements in their shows like magical realism elements in 2021’s Shiroi Suna and everything Jun Maeda wrote at the studio, the bursts into musical sequences in the Shirobako movie, Tsutomu Mizushima’s farcical horror comedies Another and Mayoiga that baffled audiences by just never explicitly dropping the facade, and whatever the fuck Glasslip was. There’s always been something subtly off about P.A. Works, despite their shows often looking kinda generic on the surface. Their biggest eccentricity for a long time was only producing original anime and light novel adaptations, and again even when that changed, it was only to create something as wild as Kongming, which itself was a directorial debut for Shuu Honma. Akiba Maid War is an anime original written by Yoshihiro Hiki, a guy who has never written for a TV anime before, which probably only contributes to it being one of the delightfully bizarre anime experiences I’ve had all year. The show is a yakuza anime replaced with maids and played with totally serious comedy. The onscreen human body count might legitimately be comparable to Attack on Titan (at least the portion that aired in 2022, and Titans don’t count). The baseball episode is kino, the boxing episode is hype AF, Zoya is the cutest girl of the year, Ranko is the best girl of the year, I love women who can kick my ass, the panda is……………, and Nagomi is the revolutionary that the broken hierarchy needs. This show commits to the bit almost as hard as Mayoiga, except the bit it commits to is actually still a compelling narrative. I was legitimately emotionally invested in the sense of home the characters found in their shitty fucking maid cafe. I kneeled at the unparalleled hardassery of murderous women in maid outfits. I screamed on impulse at the end of episode 11, louder than I did at anything in Attack on Titan. That, my friends, is why Akiba Maid War is sitting in my top 10, while Attack on Titan is not. So yeah, PA Works fascinates me, and as long as they continue throwing their weight behind these oddball ideas (which I guess they will considering they have another original anime airing right now), I’ll be keeping my eager omnipresent eyes on whatever kooky new shows they cook up next.

9) Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

Ahhhh, 2D mechs are finally back, baby! From resident madman writer Ichirou Ookouchi comes the best mecha anime of the 2020s so far. Yuri marriage, crazy violent plot twists, encroaching political backdrops, classism, over the top dramatic characters, Utena references, I’m all in for another one of his wild rides! I don’t have much experience with Gundam, despite being a fan of a lot of mecha anime from the 00s and even from the decline of the 10s and 20s. Though, when I saw that first episode and saw that Ookouchi had written the Utena light novels, I was cautiously optimistic that there was something special on our hands. I think overall it delivered on a lot of its promise. Even with all the Utena parallels, I didn’t fully buy that it was anything more than a coincidence until a girl with big puffy twintails showed up named Chuchu and I realized whoever made that decision knew exactly what they were doing and was an absolute genius. Said Chuchu also delivers the most satisfying and meme-able anime punch of this decade, which was legitimately the moment that sold me on her character, because punching racists (or classists) in the face for insulting her clumsy yet earnest friend is fucking hilarious and awesome. Ookouchi’s other tendency for goofy tonal whiplash returns from shows like Sk8 the Infinity, Code Geass, and his work with the original Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino on Overman King Gainer. Suletta’s “forgetta” and her dumbass advertisement dance are the type of bizarre juxtaposition to political machinations and mecha business maneuvering that I can rarely get anywhere else nowadays. Suletta bringing her own checklist of things she wanted to do in high school, which is continually filled out through the series, is such a sincerely wholesome detail that’s exactly why she’s the show’s beating heart. Suletta’s the grounding rod that drags out the pathos from the other characters who almost all have a chip on their shoulder. Miorine is a spoiled brat, but one who’s easier to stomach once she gets called out by Suletta’s mom basically for still ultimately being a privileged princess of the upper class, even if she resents her father’s control over her life. She decides against running away to earth illegally and instead confronts her controlling father to liberate herself from her father’s influence. After their first big fallout in ep 11, I finally got fully invested in their relationship, with Suletta exuding the unabashed emotional honesty that Miorine never experienced and Miorine bringing the adamant confidence in Suletta’s strengths that the anxious girl didn’t have in herself outside her mech. Despite her severe anxiety, there’s some legitimate magnetism to her magical girl-esque impulse to sincerely reach out to the neglected sons and daughters of rich assholes and sometimes spark their personal revelations or at least endearment to her through her earnest, uncynical principles and kicking their ass in a mech battle (set to the glorious grandeur of Takashi Oomama’s soundtrack). Shoutout to my boy, Bob. It was honestly wholesome seeing him making honest human connections working among the common man as a construction worker until… I guess we’ll find out where his arc goes in part 2! We still don’t know the totality of the connections between the girl in and events of the prologue and the Suletta of the TV series, so Ookouchi is also holding that card up his sleeve. The biggest thing keeping it from being any higher on this list is the still nagging fear that this could fly waaay off the rails at any time. Ookouchi’s track record of shows is extremely hit or miss, but many of them are notably ambitious, either on a plot level or thematic level. More than that, the last scene of this season has me worried about how Miorine and Suletta’s relationship will be handled in the second half. There’s a surprising amount of explicitly yuri manga/light novels getting adapted in 2023 (as I was writing this, an adaptation of one of my favorite yuri manga Whisper Me a Love Song got announced, holy shit), but let’s be frank that’s still only like 4 total (potentially 5, including G-Witch) compared to the vast amount of hetero romances and harems released each year. In anime, wlw relationships that are explicit and handled with tact are still pretty rare, despite the number of yuri manga ramping up significantly in the past decade. If they actually pull it off, in modern 2D mechs no less, in a massive IP like Gundam no less, it’d feel like kicking down the gates for the potential of yuri anime. As engaging of a final moment as it is and as fun as the memes surrounding it are, I am worried for where the show will go for here now that we’ve reached the point of no return, “shit hits the fan” stage of this story. There are a lot of mecha shows that have started out strong with big ambitions and completely imploding by the end. Out of everything last year, G-Witch gave me those Wonder Egg-type anime-original vibes the most. However this show goes down, I’m at least confident that it’ll be interesting, and I’ll always respect it for that if nothing else. Also, Happy Birthday.

8) Made in Abyss (season 2)

The deeper into the Abyss we go, the deeper we go into the depths of human depravity. Welcome back to hell! With two seasons and a movie having practically caught up to the manga, I’m impressed that a show with this level of disturbing imagery even got this many installments in this current anime climate, executed with phenomenal background art overlooked by art directors Osamu Masuyama and Teru Sekiguchi at Studio Inspired and still impressive production values throughout the whole series (despite not being a fan of the CG used for the bigger monsters). Big props to series director Masayuki Kojima for directing 10 out of 12 episodes himself. A little while after the finale, I listened to the entirety of Kevin Penkin’s grandiose electronic soundtrack just like for prior installments, which continues to absolutely complete the atmosphere of the Abyss (though it admittedly felt less noticeable this time around with how it was used in scenes compared to the first season). This season we settle into a village of what I’ve heard viewers describe as “phallic symbols” inhabiting what vaguely looks like the insides of a giant stomach. This season is all about desire and value, in a primitive form of a market-based economy that the villagers created, except violating it gets your body ripped apart by the balancing system. At its core is probably the most intimate character drama in Made in Abyss to date, as more gets revealed about how the village and its inhabitants came to be, and the relationship between Vueko and Irmyuui that is the memory pushing Vueko onward. There’s a beating heart in the darkness that pulses through the entire journey of Made in Abyss. Homesickness, hunger, loneliness, self-worth, desperation, there are so many permutations of pain that fester beyond merely the physical toll it takes on the people who enter. Yet, there’s always something driving them forward. By the end, Faputa reckons with what she values, born into the Abyss, dedicated to what she considered her one purpose until things proved to be more complex. Even before she understood it, she had found her own warmth in the Abyss. I don’t know where she’s going, but it looks like she’ll find her own answers out there now that she wanders without a mission. No matter how much is taken away from these characters, they pick up the pieces and cherish the few things they can hold onto, even if it’s not physical. I love how viscerally squeamish its body horror gets and seeing everyone’s reactions to the endless horrors of this show as it aired. It’ll probably be awhile before we see Made in Abyss return in an animated form, since even the manga’s release schedule is pretty erratic. Even if the lightning never strikes again, the creators and characters have given me an adventure truly like no other that I’m so glad to have been able to join them on.

7) Mob Psycho 100 (season 3)

Mob Psycho 100 has drawn to a close, rounding out a full adaptation and cementing it as one of the best battle shounen adaptations ever made. Reigen for best sexyman. Mob, don’t become a chad, man. Aliens… uh, was that the episode with 20,000 frames of animation? Probably not, because that was a myth started by a leaks account who is currently suspended on Twitter. Regardless, I’ll be keeping my eye on Hakuyu Go from now on, considering he’s directed episodes that are standouts even in a show that’s at a baseline one of the most visually expressive and explosive TV anime ever made. I had heard sakuga fans speculating that Hakuyu Go would be returning for this season and later specifically for episode 8, but I wasn’t expecting the episode to be about fucking aliens. Thematically appreciating the small, temporary moments you have with a group of people, the purpose behind these childish, memorable experiences is a nice excursion before the show enters its final arc. Then, the last couple minutes of the episode happen, and I… I… I…. Regardless, the best part of the season was easily the last arc. While the whole season felt like a means to tie up loose ends left open from previous seasons, it absolutely felt earned by giving everyone an opportunity to show what they learned throughout the show and tie a bow on all of their arcs. I was surprised that they actually made Tsubomi feel like a substantial character and Mob’s affection to her actually carry some weight as she was the first person who actually he formed a genuine connection with even after showing his powers, with everyone else either rejecting, fearing, or wanting to take advantage of him for having them. In the final part of the show, he had to resolve his own suppressed emotions and internalized fears of his power after his emotional outburst to protect his brother Ritsu actually hurt him when those powers went out of control. It’s why he vowed not to use his powers to hurt people all throughout the show and why he was so disappointed with himself when he did impulsively, because it showed that he still couldn’t control them any better than he did back then. Most importantly, he had to learn to accept himself, his powers, and his emotions, as rejecting them only provides the illusion of control, while in reality he bottles them until they literally explode. The alternate Shigeo manifested out his powers is just everything he rejects about himself that fears losing control of and fears being rejected by others. The linchpin of the finale is that he can’t defeat it and is locked inside struggling against it, until he accepts all of it as a part of him. Several of the psychics he’s helped grow through the show come to help him even if they fail, displaying everything they’ve learned from him, and on a pure cathartic level is impactful just for them to try to repay the favor out of sincere appreciation. One of the scenes that stuck in my head the most was one shot of Suzuki remembering how he left his family behind, with a door between them, but in the present turning back toward his son Shou. Instead of sacrificing his life in attempts to absorb all of Mob’s power on his own, he walks away and tells Shou, “Let’s flee,” because losing his life would just be leaving his family behind again. Look, I don’t consider Mob a deconstruction of battle shounen (the word “deconstruction” was so butchered in 2010s anime discussion that the word had to be taken out back years ago until most people finally stop using it), but I was pleasantly surprised for self-sacrifice as villain redemption trope to be rejected, specifically because he would just be leaving behind those who cared about him again without doing anything to actually repair what he broke, their family. It’s one of those details that grounds Mob Psycho thematically down from lofty ideals to just stuff this average, yet compassionate and earnest kid is learning from experience. When Mob gets back from Tsubomi kindly rejecting his confession and just lets all his tears out, it’s painful but kinda beautiful that he can finally let those vulnerable feelings flow out without suppressing them. From the start of the arc, I was pleading that they wouldn’t have Tsubomi actually accept Mob’s confession. Earlier this season, her trying to cover for her snot riddled sneeze after panicking in a more sketchy, cartoony art style over how fast the news would spread if the girls even glimpsed their school’s idolized pretty girl with boogers immediately humanized her more than anything else in the show. Like, I got a full sense for how aware she was of her social standing at school, and she’s a nice person, but she’s not an overwhelming beacon of pure kindness or perfection. She’s pretty apathetic to the swarm of guys asking her out after it’s revealed to the school that she’s moving, not out of meanness, but because she barely knows most of them. So with all that said, I was happy she told Mob she just doesn’t see him like that. They were only actual friends in what seems like elementary school in the flashbacks at that point. If anything, reaching a basis where Tsubomi and Mob can talk casually on the phone seemingly after she moved is still a positive outcome. He repaired a friendship by reaching out to her after all this time instead of hiding in fear of rejection. For all of Mob Psycho’s run, I’ve heard it discussed as the hero we need. Physical and emotional self-improvement over egotism, self-acceptance over stoicism, and an appreciation for all the people who’ve made him who he is. The show feels like the Reigen for the many Mobs who’ll have grown up with this show, except not a con man. It’s not necessarily that its messages are all groundbreakingly philosophical or that Mob himself is some paragon of righteousness, but its messages feel like life advice a kid would get from one of their aunts or uncles, at least with some of the broader takeaways. There are some a lot of other takeaways that can be gleamed from the several of the calmer episodes where Mob, Reigen, and now Serizawa have to help deluded adults who get wrapped up with cults, hole up in their homes blaming their personal issues on spirits, or just generally shrug off any personal development or sense of responsibility and instead go on believing they’re entitled to a happier life. On a larger scale, the final antagonists of seasons 1-2 were just those people with superpowers who bought into that entitlement and followed Suzuki because he fed their ego without the need for self-reflection, and they had no one else who’d gladly affirm their self-aggrandizing delusions. There are many people, likely on the Internet, that you probably think I’m making thinly veiled jabs at, but I’ll let you fill in the blank with whoever you think fits the bill. Maybe the show is more prescient than I gave it credit for. Though, we see of the antagonists from season 2 who were working under Suzuki now working at a plant shop, pursuing their true interests through a job that personally fulfills them and allows them to interact with other people and doing a small part to fulfill the lives of others. Toshiki Minegishi, the plant esper from season 2’s climax, hands Mob a free set of flowers when the kid stops by the florist shop he’s now working at. That set of flowers becomes what the out-of-control Mob is deadset on protecting, so he can give them to Tsubomi during his confession, the first person outside his family who ever made him feel accepted for his powers. Toshiki’s small act of kindness enriched the life of the person who helped change his life. It’s not as glamorous as worldwide recognition of how special they are (it’s not even explicitly brought up in dialogue), but that doesn’t quite fill the void the way personal fulfillment and interpersonal connections do. It’s not like people who feel lost and need something to grasp on are lost causes, because at the end of the day, we’re all average joes to some degree at our core. I was that kid who grew up with Mob (and least a few years ago), and I’m glad to have seen so many people taking their own personal value from it, with my own takeaways from the show not even fitting into this entry. For as long as this show resonates so strongly throughout the anime community, I’ll be certain Mob Psycho 100 will be remembered as one of the medium’s classics.

6) Pop Team Epic (season 2)

The shittiest anime ever returns again to shatter this earth with its industry-thwarting madness. Daddy King Recorder is the greatest villain of this generation. Pop Team Epic is the actual best mecha anime of the decade. Biggus McHugeGuy Combination… Great Bari Bari Team Epic! Bob Team Epic is the best segment of the show. Hellshake Yano is fucking kino. More anime should appreciate the comedic genius of glitched out, broken CG. Pop Team Epic is the best tokusatsu show of the decade. Cut that farmer’s balls off! Unfortunately the staff shakeup lost some of the eccentric staff from season 1, but I couldn’t be happier to see it, of all anime, fulfill its promise of a return for a second season. ENDLESS LOOOOOOOOOVE!

5) Chainsaw Man

Obviously, it did not and almost certainly never would live up to the hype. For as much heated discussion there’s been around the dedication to realism being a cynical, sterilized disgrace to the style and perhaps entire ethos of the manga, I honestly barely minded. As someone who watches at least a little bit of every anime that airs each year (that I can find online), this just ain’t sterile. Web gen key animator Ryuu Nakayama has been surrounded by a ton of ambitious creators and rounded them up with a very specific cinematic vision. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen hundreds of way more directorially sterile anime, including most of the even bigger shounen adaptations, but I appreciate a director who at least adamantly commits to a cinematic vision. First person perspective, diving into the infinity devil, upside down camera work in ep 1, the leech devil zooming out through Aki’s hand when he says “kon,” shots focused solely on reflections, all of Goshozono’s ep 8, and most of the action scenes show a clear pulse in this adaptation’s directing. One of the biggest stars of the show was Kensuke Ushio’s ambient soundtrack, which can delve into a unique electronic delicate tone that made certain emotional scenes stick in my mind in ways now cannot divorce from my memories of moments that flew by in the manga. Even the dulled color design which are probably my least favorite part of the anime aesthetically at least feeds back into the urban aesthetic of the setting. Then, there’s my actual favorite part of the adaptation (beyond the creativity smorgasbord of the OP and EDs) and that’s the focus on the intimate, quieter moments in between the action. Like many of my favorite anime adaptations, one of the parts that intrigued me the most is an anime-original addition, this time being Aki’s morning routine in ep 4. The calm before the storm when Power busts through the door, interrupting his silent, lonesome usual life, and the show lets it all sink in by slowing the pace down significantly as you feel, hear, and see the world through his eyes. From a teenage boy with no concept of or standard for what sincere, caring relationships between humans are like to a bratty, impulsive asshole fresh off the heels of finally finding some semblance of a warmth in taking care of a cat, Aki’s home is now rowdy with dumbass roommates who gather around the table with him and eat whatever he cooks (unless it’s veggies, which would probably have to be brutally force-fed to Power). I’ll just say it, Himeno left much more of an impression in the anime than the manga, especially with some crucial scenes elevated by some of the show’s best directing, use of OST, and sound design. Some scenes like Makima sensually feeling up Denji’s hands, building his first taste of that level of physical intimacy which are crucial to why he is so attached to his idea of her, make full use of animation in a way that makes it a totally different experience from the manga. As much as I love the bombastic action scenes with a ultra-violent edge you rarely see in anime these days, the casual crass irreverance of its sense of humor that’s a lot more charismatic and endearing than the vast majority of dedicated comedy anime, and how a lot of the central characters are so fucking humanely weird, goofy, and fractured humans, even a fiend like Power, you all probably know that from reading the manga (which I would still absolutely recommend alongside the anime, again both very different but great ways of experiencing this story). One of the things that excites me the most is that something as flagrantly crude, strange, and fascinating as Chainsaw Man is actually being brought into the anime medium, mainly because, I want this to be a trendsetter. It’s undeniably popular (building probably the most pre-release hype for a manga adaptation that’s ever existed, at least in the west) in existence before it final), but I want to be on a world stage. I want something with this much personality and ambition behind it to be what producers look at and realize, “hey, we need more shows like this.” Even if it resulted it some crappy Chainsaw Man knock-offs, that could still produce interesting results. And we already know what Chainsaw Man’s influence could mean in a good way, because Dandadan carries that spirit and was created by one of CSM mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto’s former assistants Yukinobu Tatsu. I want more works taking influence from this, even if it’s only a fraction of what made CSM good. Since the show operates without a production committee to give studio MAPPA’s staff more creative control over the adaptation, they’re seemingly committed to putting their eggs in this basket. With that, I am just hoping they’ll be dedicated to keeping up the quality to adapt the story at least to the end of part 1 (it’d be a miracle if they went all the way). This first season has proven, at least to me, that CSM is the type of show the modern anime landscape needs.

4) Waccha Primagi

Since probably a miniscule number of you readers were here when I released this post, I’m assuming you have no idea what this show even is. It’s been a hot minute since I declared this 51-episode long spinoff magical girl show in the extensive, yet extremely niche Pretty Series (at least in the west) my favorite anime of Fall 2021. And I’m frankly still at least a fraction as shocked as you are that I’m talking about it here. No, veteran magical girl and iyashikei director Junichi Satou and writer Tsubota Fumi hit out of the park yet again for me as they did with Hugtto Precure in 2018, this time with co-directors Park Chi-Man and Kousuke Kobayashi on board with their own storied experiences working on earlier Pretty Series anime. I still don’t have that much experience with the franchise myself, though I’m now more interested in the entries I’ve heard the most positive buzz about (Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live was also co-written by Fumi and I have friends who’ve vouched for Pripara being fun). The long and short of it is that the character writing has remained as endearing and surprisingly fleshed out as I outlined in that post. The show’s presentation is still as gaudy as ever for the most part, but there’s an undying earnestness that it holds at its core, juxtaposed with exploring the cynicism that underlies its in-universe entertainment industry. On top of that, the show’s just a fun time, often willing to lean into goofiness somewhat inherent to its absurd worldbuilding (Hina performing an Inazuma Kick to knock out a giant plant still sticks in my mind). The show’s also surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly given this is a magical girl anime) gay, with Amane and Midoriko pretty explicitly stating their love for each other on several occasions throughout the show with the explicitly romantic “aishiteru” instead of “suki”, and mending their fractured relationship becoming an increasingly important part of Amane’s growth later on to sorting out her feelings after Midoriko left for traveling, the expectations she’s internalized, and finding what she truly wants to with her life after she questions what she even personally gets out of her performances anymore. Also, the two are a blatant homage to Oscar and Antoinette in Rose of Versailles, both in designs, elements of their personalities, and the Dezaki-esque shoujo imagery the show takes on when they’re onscreen. Hina’s growth somewhat parallels Amane as her rivalry with Jennifer crumbling more and more over the course of the show, when she’s so dedicated to reaching her level as to have suffered physical injuries in her attempts. Though, Miruki continued being an endearing little shit, who starts out as the most overtly cynical out of anyone in this show and doesn’t completely drop that cynicism but balances out with an appreciation of the people she’s bonded with and the ability to embrace a part of identity for herself through her performances. Auru was an endearing addition to the cast, and I like the show’s whole handling of technology’s growing influence on Primagi performance industry with more of a balanced take that while it can be abused for cynically churning out soulless, overly calculated art, there is a balance that can be struck that maintains the tactility and humanity of the performance while still incorporating technology in certain areas. This balance is shown on a smaller scale in ep 26 when Matsuri’s parents basically adopt Auru (similar to Hana’s parents with Ruru in the aforementioned Hugtto Precure), and she’s helping her dad in their bakery. When she brings up the pointlessness in having these exchanges in person when it’d be more efficient to do them through an online shop, he talks to her about wanting to maintain the fulfillment he gets out of seeing his customers face to face and getting to interact with them and seeing them smile but still open to Auru’s idea of setting up an online shop for them as an option with its own benefits for customers who want to use it. I wouldn’t say it was completely solid throughout, with some episodes that completely broke logic or just weren’t as interesting character-wise, particularly in the late 10s early 20s, and the episodes at the height of the big dramatic climax toward the end of the show felt like it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the rest of the show, and just felt like going through the motions without much tension for all its wild, yet janky visual spectacle. If anything, that makes it more potent when ep 50 was such a quiet, intimate epilogue that scales the focus back down to the show’s core relationship between Myamu and Matsuri who still bounce off each other as well as ever, with understanding of each only having grown through sharing their personal and performance-related tribulations across the show and the people they’ve met and influenced throughout the show. It’s a very Junichi Satou way of ending a show (which makes sense considering he storyboarded that particular episode), and it’s always nice to see a show take its time with a couple episodes for a more extensive resolution for all the characters and what they’ll be doing in the future. Overall, it’s been a wild, endearing, hilarious fun ride, and it’s full to the brim with a level of sincerity that’s specific to the magical girl genre, and it’s one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve ever had watching seasonal anime.

3) Yama no Susume (season 4)

Alright, this is the last sequel, I swear. After season 3 reached the peak of one of my favorite anime of last decade, it had been 4 years since that last season aired, long enough that I was wondering if the show still held up after this time. Finishing what feels like it could be the final season of the show, I was glad to see that this was one of those shows that I’ve only appreciated in different ways as I got older. Surprisingly enough, the worldview of the show is what connected with me most this time around. The show considers  climbing mountains both as a symbol of a quiet appreciation for the roughness and challenges inherent to life as much as a hobby explored in loving detail, from the little things like what type of backpack to use that’ll be the most useful while being the least cumbersome to the experience of reaching the peak and seeing the sunrise with a bunch of other climbers on the same trail. It’s not as consistently compelling as season 3, without as explicit of an overarching internal conflict as Hina grappling with Aoi changing as a person and not having as much time for her until the last few episodes where they pay off a part of Aoi’s arc that had been building since season 2. I’ve also grown to appreciate the show more aesthetically, with the art director Ayumi Miyakoshi’s beautiful depictions of nature in the mountains serving as great visual payoffs whenever we get to see the views from the heights. Then, there’s the looseness of the character art under character design and chief animation director Yuusuke Matsuo and Welcome to the NHK and early Keroro Gunsou director Yuusuke Yamamoto, with many scenes embracing the unabashed expressiveness of whatever key animator takes the reigns of a scene. With the hundreds of modern anime I could barely make through an episode of with totally flat, airbrushed character art that’s so lifeless that it makes me wanna vomit, I’ve become a fervent fan of unclean animation as a vehicle for expression over all else. If it’s rough, if it’s ugly, all the better, as long as it has a fucking personality. I love Adult Swim’s crackpot adult animation, not just your obviously cool Moral Orel stopmotion, but also your fucking 12 Oz Mouse aesthetics. That said, I love how Yama no Susume looks, even if it’s not as cracked as say an Adult Swim show or Pop Team Epic s2 (which hopefully also airs on Toonami like s1). It’s still one of my favorite kirara-kei anime, and if the anime adaptation really ends here, it went out on a great finale.

2) Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Imaishi and Trigger have done it again. Probably the 2022 anime I watched the largest number of YouTube video essays about (almost all of which drilled “I really want to stay at your house” deeper into my skull), this show rightfully left its mark on the anime community. As someone who had one of their first anime be Kill La Kill and having previously been a massive fan of western cartoons which were closer to many Trigger anime’s zany, expressive art style than most anime, it was easy to become endeared to Trigger’s works. After going through all of Gainax’s anime during high school (and writing blurbs about them here, here, and here), I was able to appreciate the long legacy and creative roots of the many madcap veterans that now make up Trigger. It also became clear that while Gainax and Trigger were known for their unrelenting dynamism, they often had a level of pathos and thematic ideas underlying their shows that made them stick with those they resonated with. Some examples are more overt or more dense than others (and it’s debatable which ones actually handle their themes well), but as a huge proponent of the idea that style is substance, I have always been prone to try and hear out what every new Trigger work can say. I think what made the message sink in a lot is how they changed up the scriptwriting from their usual fare. While Edgerunners is as fun, crude, loud, and bombastic as any other Trigger work with a bangin’ soundtrack (and an iconic OP that’s a stylized microcosm of the show in both the imagery and what specific lyrics they chose to keep in from the original Franz Ferdinand song), that only makes the contrast stronger when the protagonists are sent careening back down to reality. Kai Ikarashi’s storyboarding and animation direction in episode 6 marks the overt tipping point with jagged line work and surreal editing and color usage. Though, from the start, Edgerunner’s reality is a desensitizing overstimulus dystopia, where everyone on the ground-level is looking for a quick fix to ease the pain of impoverished living, labor exploitation, and the ensuing desperation on the bottom rung of their corporation-dominated grimmering hellscape. There’s a nihilism that’s easy to fall into, in a world where people who can’t rise to the top are regarded as lowlifes who’ll never amount to anything by the corporate suits above them who treat them with the agency and dignity of a cash cow. And the linchpin of it all is, in practice, they may as well be right. Where Edgerunners diverges from all other Trigger shows is that the system is not overcome or reformed by a ragtag group of misfits who gradually build up enough alliances with people they can rally to their cause to smash the corrupt oppressive hierarchies with the solidarity of the human spirit. The world in Edgerunners is too overwhelmingly rooted in systemic corruption for them to do that in one fell swoop. Saying even that is kinda underselling how grim it is, because there’s not even much of an implication that the protagonists’ actions even leave a dent in the system. For all their rebelliousness, their actions may at best inspire another group of people who have just as miniscule a chance of leaving a dent in the system as they did. The protagonist here, in the grand scheme of things, is not special. None of them are… And yet, the protagonists had fun times, embraced their rowdy, bold senses of self, formed human warmth in a world that monetizes simulated sensation, and made at least one of their loved ones’ dreams come true. Like much good cyberpunk, it holds a corporatized mirror to our world to show where we’re headed if we’re not essentially already there, and shows us the story of the average joes who screamed against it all and asserted their essence for the sake of themselves. In an existence where I may not personally be here to see the fruition of a significantly more just world, there’s a resonance to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Unlike Chainsaw Man, I don’t know if this show will have any significant rippling effects on the anime industry, but if there’s anything I want to see replicated from this show, it’d be how it ends. Bittersweet endings often tend to stick longer with viewers because, for the average person, living is a perpetual balancing act of bittersweetness. There’ll never be a happily ever after, because living is suffering, and you have to spend every waking minute trying to build whatever fulfilling happiness you can. Storyboarded by the collective efforts of Hiroyuki Imaishi, Sushio, and You Yoshinari, the finale is what truly sealed the deal on this anime being remembered for years to come in this community. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the second great cyberpunk anime of this decade after Akudama Drive in 2020, the second greatest anime Trigger has ever made, and my second favorite anime of 2022. However, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’re probably expecting what took the top spot.

1) Bocchi the Rock

Punny *coughs up blood*. I am delighted to have ended last year with the most affirmingly on-brand, instant AOTY I could’ve possibly imagined. A kirara-kei adaptation that expands significantly on its source material published in Manga Time Kirara starring high school girls bonding through their pursuit of creating awesome j-rock music and is helmed by a first-time, ambitious series director (Keiichirou Saitou this time, hot off animating and storyboarding episodes on several of Shingo Natsume’s shows). Wait, it couldn’t be. The new K-ON!– no. Like, as a fan of both (having written about my relationship to K-On! here and here in the early days of this blog), I’ve got increasingly exasperated with this dumbass take that I initially thought was more ironic than sincere. Their approaches are so different that I wouldn’t even inherently recommend one to a person who liked the other. I do understand the sentiment that Bocchi is what people actually wanted out of a show like K-On!, since Bocchi strikes me moreso as the future I want kirara-kei anime to be striving toward. If the kirara-kei style is going to stick around in popularity for the next decade, above all I want it to embrace allowing their characters to be truly, humanly ugly. When I think back to Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu from 2019, comparing exclusively their portrayals of anxiety, the main character always felt too saccharine for me to fully connect with her. Bocchi is still moe-fied in Kerorira’s chara design debut of a somewhat simplistic yet malleable adaptation of the manga designs, which is take it or leave it (though I think the designs, color work, and fashion in this show might be some of the best in the kirara-kei genre, beyond Bocchi’s hikikomori-esque tracksuit fit which is kinda iconic in its own right for her character), the surprisingly relatively less storied VA Yoshino Aoyama (who prior to this didn’t have many particularly popular character roles on any standout shows to her name) imbued Bocchi with life through a much more varied and sometimes outright unhinged performance than the typical squeaky clean perpetual cutesiness of many performances in kirara-kei anime. On the visual side, there’s a cartoonish saturation and simplicity that is bent to their absolute limits in the shows imaginatively boundless comedic art style shifts and then flying way beyond those limits for good measure. Many of those art style shifts serve to visualize Bocchi’s manic internal thoughts, truly making me feel every bit of how much of a mess she is on the inside, truly earning the phrase “this is what the inside of my mind looks like.” Though, it’s not flying off the handle all the time, because what actually sold me on its portrayal of anxiety from episode 1 was all the little offhand comments and actions from Bocchi and to a lesser extent her friends on how her anxiety manifests. Mistakenly projecting a shared loneliness onto strangers who she just happens to stumble upon while their alone, waiting outside a door too scared to walk in and be forced into a social scenario, quickly looking away just enough so hopefully they didn’t notice when you looked at them when they turn toward you, indulging in solace from the positive online attention you get uploading onto YouTube, that’s… real (and all things I’ve at least somewhat overcome in the years since high school… yeah). Erika Yoshida doesn’t have that many series comp credits to her name (though the utterly strange original anime Artiswitch, her heavy involvement with the Tiger & Bunny franchise, and one of my favorite anime of 2020 Omoi, Omoware, Furi, Furare collectively piqued my interest), but knowing that the adaptation expands on the source material with my beloved anime-original content, I’m very excited to follow her career. On the backdrop is the first Tomoki Kikuya soundtrack I’ve enjoyed since Hidamari Sketch and the photorealistic urban backgrounds helmed by one of Akebi-chan’s art directors Moriyasu Yasunao. While the realistic elements at the core hooked me on the show from day 1, my worries lied with whether or not its other characters would be nearly as engaging. Turns out by the end of the season, Kita would be head and shoulders above the rest as my favorite character in the show. Her Akebi-esque genki magnetism (scientifically referred to as Kita-aura) rounded out by manic anxieties of her own and a genuine thoughtfulness toward her friends who she’s just doing her best to get closer to without letting them down defied my preconceptions of her as merely an airhead character. Also, she’s just outright gay. They just drop the line that she has an explicit crush on Ryo and that’s why she first joined the band. Having a longtime emotional relationship with yuri animanga and having a long list of anime that leave it at mere implications, no she just says it and the show runs with it and I am very happy. If Bocchi strikes the whirlwind disaster side of my brain, Kita strikes the part of my brain that is absolutely drawn in by the type of headstrong rays of sunshine that are still flawed humans but are no less admirable for it. Ryo is also the best, because she’s a fucking asshole, but the type we all tend to have at least one of in our friend groups. If there’s one comparison with this show I can map onto K-On!, it’s Ritsu fulfilling a similar scheming gremlin position in that friend group group that Ryou does here, except Ryou’s a fucking pretentious starving artist and much more of the quiet, gleefully sarcastic asshole type. She’s great. Nijika is the least memorable of the four just personality-wise, but gets some nice fleshing out in terms of her relationship to Bocchi and Ryo as well as her position practically the group’s leader with the most direct motivation to make this band work out due to her surprisingly kinda sad relationship with her parents and how her sister taking her to revues after her incessant begging is what inspired her to make her own band. Niji’s sister Seika is that perfect blend of jaded adult but genuinely caring towards her doofy-ass friends and her little sister’s doofier-ass band mates. PA-san is PA-san, her design is cool and she gives off weird girl vibes, so it’s fun to see her brief moments bouncing off Seika. Futari is the actual gremlin child of this show, and that’s delightful. Bocchi’s parents are nonchalantly hyperaware of their daughter’s disaster personality but as proud as I am to see her grow out of it step by miniscule step. Kikuri’s a hilarious alcoholic who’s nonetheless occasionally based and badass, and I love every second with her onscreen. Kessoku Band’s performance sequences are more grounded than the manic comedy art style shifts or the psychedelic visuals used to represent a more experienced band like Sick Hack, instead leaning into raw character animation and music video-like camera work to sell the weight of these hype AF performances. Frankly, as a Day 1’er, I’ve been glad to see this show get the widespread appreciation it deserves from seemingly all sectors of the anime community. Discords, Twitter, Youtube, Pixiv, it felt like the show became increasingly inescapable over the course of its run. I’m hoping its popularity can keep the adaptation going until reaching an actual conclusion where it’ll truly have a shot of taking up the K-On! mantel as the ultimate all-timer kirara-kei anime of their generations, less so because of their similarities, but because of their differences. It’s a new frontier for the potential of kirara-kei adaptations and narratives, and it better get AT LEAST a 26-episode second season and a movie and a bunch of OVAs so these awesome creators can light the fucking anime world on fire, setting it ablaze with the eccentric, eclectic, hot-blooded passion that lights a shining future for the POWER OF ANIME.

Afterword:

Ever since finishing a new favorite anime after months of marathoning the series, a series I legitimately don’t know if any other show in existence could replace in terms of its emotional impact on me, I honestly felt lost in terms of what anime I wanted to watch. I tried watching some of the seasonals coming out this winter, but while there are a few somewhat personally appealing shows I’ll probably keep up with, none of it so far has excited me on the level of most of what I was watching last season. In its place, I watched a ton of non-anime media. I mean, a part of that was probably started by watching a bunch of live-action TV shows, movies, and non-anime animation in the last few days of 2022 on vacation while stalling for time to reach a certain anime milestone. I had a perception for awhile that delving into other mediums would ruin anime for me, putting into perspective just how sterile even the shows I liked are compared to the more commonly high level of quality I could find in literally any other medium. Yet, that anime I watched as a milestone is still easily my favorite piece of media I watched in 2022. If any media from any medium tops it in 2023, then I’ll know I had a damn good year as a database-minded art otaku. In 2023, I want to legitimately shatter the shell of anime I’ve felt trapped in, and develop an attachment to other mediums, art as a whole. I may have written about this last year before I intended to leave this blog behind forever, but I felt too personally and emotionally invested in this single medium, to the point where it still stings when I hear someone rejecting or looking down on the whole medium. Though, I’ll be honest, when Trixie the Golden Witch formerly known as Digi left YouTube forever after basically denouncing anime as degenerate with only 1 in 1000 actually resonating or having the level of writing on par with a high water mark live-action TV show, the wind was taken out of my sails. It finally felt like the camel’s back had broken, and maybe it never should’ve walked at all. Trixie was the biggest influence on how I engaged with this medium, to the point where her discussion of her roots as a blogger was what inspired me to try creating my own (basically, the reason you’re reading this right now). Out of any YouTuber I’ve enjoyed over the years, she is still easily the one with the most impact on how I think, for a lot of reasons (in part because she was willing to put as many in-depth personal thoughts out there as she could make into content). When I watched her walk off into the distance, away from the camera, having declared that it’s just not worth it, and it hasn’t really been worth it for awhile, I sat on the train I was taking, still a teenager full of uncertainty over where I was going, and I just felt lost. I tried my hardest to push forward, push past that feeling, push myself into the new frontier I was entering, push myself to become a better person, aaaaand I think I succeeded. High grades at the end of last semester, at least one friendship I can feel confident in that I made on my own along the way, and getting closer to reaching the goalpost that’s basically been the ultimate target I’d been striving toward for the past year. I am more confident than ever before that I’m moving forward in who I am and my bigger goals in life. I’ll admit that a small but persistent motivator that I used to push to this point is that I didn’t want my engagement with anime to be degenerate, to degenerate me as a person; that’s the opposite of what I think anyone should get out of art. I wanted to prove that anime didn’t have to be degenerate (not saying that Trixie meant it was inherently degenerate, that’s just how I felt). September-December 2022 was a deeply critical period for whether or not I would even accept a relationship with this medium, or if it was just a parasitic relationship where I would only receive self-hatred when others rightfully saw this medium for what it was, degenerate. More than anything, I want anime in this decade to evolve. I want more international creators involved with the medium. I want more kooky animators to leave their mark on this medium. I want more of those kooky animators to actually rise up the ranks, gain connections in the industry and become directors of their own explosive series. In 2022, I didn’t feel like the good parts of anime were solely reminders of what I miss so much about the 2000s (though those are certainly appreciated when they did pop up). It truly feels like a new age, like this decade is going to have a very distinct, modern, bold identity at least in its best shows, and that identity might actually be pretty cool. As long as anime keeps pushing its own bounds, bringing in more influences, and keeping that flame of excitement for animation burning brightly, I’ll hold it as one of many things dear to me and be there to see it grow, hopefully alongside me. If not, welp I’ll keep on growing and pursuing my own creative work. To be honest, I’m not sure if anime (at least modern anime) can give me what I want out of art anymore, and it all began feeling kinda pointless to scour unless I made something of my own out of it, which is why I’ve been pursuing my own creative hobbies and getting deeper into movies from other mediums after passing a certain milestone: my 1000th completed anime. This is all purely sentimental, but I made that 1000th the last anime I knew had a shot at becoming an all-time favorite piece of media (which it was). At least, I wanted to make the 1000th a marker of my relationship with anime changing forever. Obviously, I’ve found a lot of things I love in the medium and even in the community surrounding it, some of which have and will continue to influence me as a person.  Even some of the creative endeavors I’m chasing are influenced by my experience with anime. Though, sincerely, I resent most of this medium and most of its culture. That’s not exactly unique, but I just wasn’t happy there. I wasn’t quite personally fulfilled in the relationship with anime that I had. Like, a good chunk of posts on this blog are just me venting. I want to keep it there to look back at, but I also want to move on to find that personal fulfillment. As it stands, furthermore, from the past, to the present, to the everyday. I see so much, I’ve seen so much around me I want to chase on the horizon. It all passes on with or without me, as the everyday keeps moving. Fall or fly, I’d rather take it all in day by day. It’s suffocating to float, so as the ground crumbles beneath my feet, there’s something I had wanted to say. My relationship with anime is over. Nothing else that I’ll explain. 1000 marks the edge. Whatever lies beyond these lines, I want to make it special. Afterword over, from the end of the spiral.

A lot of the staff from the OG Sailor Moon anime went on to lead interesting careers. The director of season 1, Junichi Satou, would go on to direct other magical girl anime like Princess Tutu, Hugtto Precure, Mahoutsukai Tai, Pretear, and more. His career has been ludicrously extensive, but one of his most important aspects is how he mentored future Sailor Moon directors Kunihiko Ikuhara and Takuya Igarashi, both of whom worked under him as episode directors/storyboarders/assistants on his earlier shows like Goldfish Warning, Kimama ni Idol, Mouretsu Atarou (1990), Akuma-kun, and Maple Town Monogatari. Kunihiko ikuhara (director of seasons 2-4) would go direct Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is the most directly comparable to Sailor Moon in intent, though his later shows Mawaru Penguindrum, Yuri Kuma Arashi, and Sarazanmai still carry over some level of influence from magical girl tropes. Takuya Igarashi (director of Sailor Moon season 5) would go on to direct Ojamajo Doremi, after which he would direct shoujo anime Ashita no Nadja and Ouran Highschool Host Club. Once he arrived at studio Bones when he directed the latter series, he mostly stayed there, directing shounen/seinen series like Soul Eater and Bungou Stray Dogs and mecha series like Star Driver and Captain Earth (though he would return to Toei as a storyboarder on Ojamajo Doremi’s 20th anniversary, Majo Minarai wo Sagashite). Speaking of which, the series composition writer of Ouran, Bungou Stray Dogs, Star Driver, and Captain Earth, Youji Enokido, also handled series composition for season 4 of Sailor Moon and later on Ikuhara’s Revolutionary Girl Utena. Character designer for Sailor Moon season 5, Katsumi Tamegai, would go on to mostly work as a key animator and animation director on Precure since the franchise’s inception, becoming a character designer on several Precure movies over the years. The series composition writer for Sailor Moon season 5, Ryouta Yamaguchi, would go on to write a lot of anime over the years, though the most notable in the context of Sailor Moon might be his later magical girl titles Cutie Honey Flash and Dokidoki Precure. Kazuko Tadano, character designer for seasons 1-2, would design for later magical girl anime Wedding Peach and Petite Princess Yucie. She’d even return to design for the recent Sailor Moon Eternal movies and the upcoming Sailor Moon Cosmos movies. Character designer/chief animation director for seasons 3-4, Ikuko Itou would join Junichi Satou on Princess Tutu and Mahoutsukai Tai as the character designer for both shows. On a more obscure note, the background art designer for seasons 2-4 and eps 27 onward of season 1 Takamura Mukuo would work with Junichi Satou on Goldfish Warning, Mouretsu Atarou (1990), and Akuma-kun. Moving from visuals to music, Sailor Moon’s composer Takanori Arisawa had worked on Junichi Satou shows several times in the past with Goldfish Warning and Crayon Kingdom of Dreams, concluding his career mostly composing for the first 4 seasons of the Digimon anime. That’s a brief rundown of a handful of the core staff from OG Sailor Moon and some interesting points in their careers before and after working on the show. A lot of the credits for all these creators are on AniDb if you want to see a longer list of what anime each of them have worked on.

1. Puella Magi Madoka Magica

In my still ongoing search for a true favorite anime, this sits as one of the front runners and will always remain a special part of this period of my life and likely forever a personal favorite. Whether it lands in that position or not will likely be decided by the final movie. While I’d love to say this list was definitive, in truth each of my top three are all incomplete stories as of writing this, and their sequels (if they’re announced already) would likely sway their positions on this list if I held this off for 1 or 2 more years. That’s not to mention how I’ve only seen a fraction of the anime to come out this decade, even taking into account how I sampled nearly every single anime listed on MAL to air in 2018 and 2019. As I’m approaching the birthday that marks the definitive end of childhood and beginning of adulthood, I wanted to create this as a lasting snapshot of my childhood anime experience and this blog before this period of my life is gone for good. You never cherish what you got until it’s gone, they say, or in this case until you know you’re losing it. Having finished all the Aria series in preparation to watch the final movie Aria the Benedizione when that’s subbed, I’ve been thinking about the words “thank you, and goodbye” a lot. It’s funny, had I not watched that show, I feel like I’d be even more scared to write what sound like parting words as I’m just babbling on about my favorite shows. I’ve hesitated, wondering if this would eat up too much of my remaining time, to put hours into this lengthy post. I can only care about so many things in this world. I won’t have time to put into everything I want to do when I want to do it. Though, anime is something special to me, even now as I’ve entered the seemingly inevitable jaded phase where I wonder if this medium is worth all the investment. Listening to every anime opening 2000-2011, listening to hours of anime YouTube content, sampling every anime across 5 select years, reading and cataloging tons of anime-related informative articles, and having no one I openly shared it all with. That last point in particular seems so counterproductive. Many stories on this list, many of my favorite stories in anime period, many stories I’ve loved even outside of anime, they all championed the value of interpersonal relationships in so many ways both subtle and blatant, yet I still somehow never could find someone I could feel comfortable being myself around. It could’ve been many things, chief among them a defense mechanism to avoid getting hurt by the feeling of rejection. There were many times where I threw caution to the wind when push came to shove because I was pushed into a new environment and already felt the need to be more flexible. Though, within the comfort of my own home in the summer where most things are under my control, just existing can feel so sad and lonely because I’m not pushed to strive for something more. That’s why I cherish those meetings as miracles. The random chaos of the world beyond your control is often punishing, but that’s why any scraps of positivity we can get must be cherished as we fight for more. Every person I’ve had fun with even if I couldn’t connect to them as much as I want is a blessing, and I want to create more bigger miracles in these meetings, to take them further to feel truly fulfilled, because human connection is the basis for fulfillment in this life. There are tons of dreams to chase, but relationships are the support system that will be part of the grounding when the winds of the world inevitably turn rough. The other part of the grounding is the individual or me. I need to be able to keep myself standing on my own two feet, and keep pressing onward to make those miracles, even when it feels like I’m alone. Though, I’m not alone. I have a loving family, and I have at least a few people I can talk to. There are deeper connections to be made, or at least things to learn from whatever comes of our interactions. It’s not going to be clear cut because relationships are nebulous and complicated, but they’re still worth it, maybe even some of the most basic worthwhile things in this world. If there’s any commonality between the types and genres of shows I’ve been led to over the years, even more so as I’ve gotten older, it’s the ones that value the little and big miracles that spur from interpersonal relationships and the biggest miracle of all: emotional fulfillment. Found families, “cute girls doing cute things,” Kyoto Animation series, and magical girl anime have all been shows I’ve gravitated toward in part because they tend to center the fulfillment of these interpersonal relationships and the trials and rewards of maintaining and maturing them over time. 

2. Bloom Into You

Very few shows resonate with me quite on the level that Bloom Into You does. From a base level, the yuri romance is already inherently interesting to me, as you may have seen. Though, on the emotional level, I don’t think there’s another anime that hits me harder. The themes of perception in relation to a person’s identity and there is no singular, true, static identity, but one made of all of their actions and a blender of all of those perceptions. The characters all felt like they reflected various aspects of myself at the time I watch it. If there’s one show that could be credited for fully igniting my identity questioning and relationship to yuri anime, it would be this one, as there’s no other romance anime I’ve connected more with. In 2019, I wrote loads about the series and would go on to read the source material as my very first experience completing a manga. I’m still hoping for a 2nd season to complete the adaptation, hopefully from the same team, because the show directed excellently and punctuated with Michiru Ooshima’s beautiful, sweeping soundtrack. Images in my memory are drenched in an orange sunset afterglow and the characters drowning in water, fading to monochrome, or stopped in time. I don’t think it had fully sank in how valuable the show’s representation was in a year with Kase-san, Comic Girls, Anima Yell’s coming out scene, Zombieland Saga’s Lily Hoshino, Hugtto’s “Precure of Love” in Ruru and Emiru, and even the several messier takes like Citrus and Happy Sugar Life. I still haven’t seen explicitly asexual anime character as well-handled and lovable as Seiji Maki. Though, in the past 2 years where explicit LGBTQ+ representation has been lacking either in quality or in quantity, I can’t help but look back at 2018-2019 with fondness for a time when these shows were a bit more common and with better storytelling and hope we could get back to that point someday. That’s not to say that nothing’s been coming out, as Wonder Egg Priority, Adachi and Shimamura Sasaki and Miyano, Shokei Shoujo, and the continuing stream of Given anime has been giving me hope, but the only one of these shows that I’d enjoyed as much as any of the show’s on this top list also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever seen. Though, that’s in part down to preference, and I still see hope in how a show like Wonder Egg even got produced at all. Aside from the rep, Bloom Into You has another one of my favorite casts of the decade, with core five members of the student council having a great dynamic, and side characters like Yuu’s older sister, her teacher, and her aspiring novelist friend rounding out the cast nicely, culminating in one of the best school play arcs I’ve seen in anime, symbolically embodying the emotions of the characters involved, Touko especially. It’s a show which came at the right time, back when I still regularly watched dubs regularly (of which this one is actually relatively solid) and right as I was starting high school and would go on to deconstruct who I perceived as myself, in a similar way to how Yuu would have to over the course the show and manga after starting in a similarly ambivalent lethargy to Kumiko Oumae before her. In general, Yuu, Touko, and Saeki are a trio of my favorite characters in any anime, and their evolving relationship with each other throughout the series was riveting and dynamic from beginning to end as they try to figure themselves out. I still feel like I’ve yet to do justice to how much I love this series, even as I have impassioned writing about this show scattered in all sorts of places, including on this blog. Though, there’s one series that I’ve thought about more over the years that I need to talk about.

3. Hibike! Euphonium

Sound! Euphonium is the latest entry in my favorites of all time list for just being one of the most perfectly crafted shows I’ve ever seen, at least in season 1. The visuals of this show surpass that of almost any other TV anime I’ve seen in terms of consistently high quality visual presentation, courtesy of Kyoto Animation. On the more base level, the aesthetic isn’t exactly the most appealing or distinctive, but the character designs are not only more realistic in proportion than almost any other anime outside of others made by KyoAni, but they still manage to be some of the hottest character designs I have ever seen. I could stare at some frames of these characters for hours, because the balance the line between moe and realistic sex appeal even more perfectly than Horiguchi’s cute girl designs in K-On!. It’s a weird, highly specific fetish that this show serves for me, especially in the original series. Though, on the emotional level, the directing and character acting are an omnipresent vehicle of characterization and sell the emotions of every single character in every scene they are apart of. Like all of my favorite slice-of-life shows, I often feel like I’m inside the minds of certain characters whenever they’re onscreen, despite many of their attempts to hide their true intentions and emotions behind a facade that they display to the other characters. Another noteworthy facet of the show is the layers of distance which are held in the dynamics between each character. The extent to which characters reveal their emotions to specific other characters is a highly engaging aspect of the show to me, as those frontiers are challenged and gradually broken down throughout the series. This feeds into the overall phenomenal character writing in this show, swiftly gliding between arcs of tens of nuanced, believable people who all spring to life to the stellar voice performances and the aforementioned character acting. These characters and their dynamics are constantly evolving, to the point where almost every scene holds some sort of emotional weight. What truly makes the show fantastic is how rapidly characterization is doled out and development transpires, keeping me constantly engaged. While I love every single character in the show, the trio of Kumiko, Reina, and Asuka are some of my favorite characters in all of anime. Kumiko in particular is one of the few characters who I would consider a spirit waifu, who represents basically everything I personally like and relate to in characters. Though, Asuka was the most compelling character in the series for me, due to her being a palpable dominating force in whatever scene she’s in, until she finally lets unfurls a bit in season 2 to let some of her friends help her. And even then, she still maintains nearly unflappable control over how much she allows herself to unravel in front of the few people who are close enough to her. Though, there is never an instance where she feels inhuman or like a megalomaniacal villain. She has her own multi-faceted motives for stirring the cast of the show when she takes action. While I had a few gripes with her development in season 2, some of those were more personal annoyances than actual issues with the writing. I’ll just say the reveal of why she plays as hard as she does felt a bit generic and thematically disjointed from the rest of her characterization. Fortunately, the second recap film actually expands upon Asuka’s development in that season so much to the point where I was actually satisfied with that version of the story. I had a lot of gripes with the character writing in season 2 (particularly how it treats Asuka and Reina), but I overall still thought it was really good. Accepting the added characterization from the second movie as a part of season 2 may even make that season great in my books. Either way, I’m satisfied with the franchise as it stands. Just like K-On!, I binged the entire Hibike Euphonium anime franchise (at least what was streamed online), so my thoughts don’t just end at the show. My general opinions of the franchise are as follows. Season 1 is a borderline masterpiece. Season 2 is kind of great. The 1st recap movie is a truncated version of the first season. The 2nd recap movie is an expansion pack on the Asuka arc of the second season which is absolutely necessary viewing. It truncates anything not relating to Asuka, but it’s still definitely worth the watch. And the specials kind of suck. I haven’t finished the third movie yet, because I was interrupted by real-life stuff. What I’ve seen so far is pretty good. Though, Liz and the Blue Bird is fantastic and the highest point in this franchise after the first season. The most captivating aspect of it is just how tangible every feeling in the movie is. Naoko Yamada returns again with the emotive character acting and camerawork that gets me into the head spaces of these characters. Every sound, every image, every movement is filled with transient emotions which are conveyed to my soul with subtle grace. I really can’t express the merit of this film as much more than that, because it is simply the purest, yet most subtle expression of the emotions it conveys. Mizore is almost another one of spirit waifus for just how extensively her feelings are explored in both this movie and the second season of the show and how much correlation there is between her and my personalities, despite her being a fair bit less explosive and less self-conscious than I am. With the series still announcing more continuations to come in this new decade, at this point it’s just become enjoyable to follow these lovable, motivated, ever-evolving characters through their journeys of personal growth and practice of their instruments.

4. Precure (in the 2010s)

Hugtto Precure probably had a leg up on its competition just for being 49 episodes long and providing hours upon hours of consistently amusing and enthralling entertainment. Though, it’s also bolstered by the fact that it just exemplifies almost everything I want in a magical girl series and makes me optimistic to be alive whenever I watch it. Being the first traditional magical girl series I’d watched to completion, it marked one latest big turning points in my taste in media, as it inspired me to search for the best of the genre for the next three years, since anything I loved more than this show might’ve been my all-time favorite anime. While I haven’t found that series yet, I’ve greatly enjoyed what I’ve seen of Kirakira Precure a la Mode and Heartcatch Precure, which are the closest contenders I can see topping Hugtto as my favorite Precure season once I finish them. While I haven’t kept up with the infinitely running franchise across nearly as much of the decade as I have with Pokemon, the enjoyment of these shows has such a refreshment since the fewer and fewer traditional magical girl anime had been airing during the late 2010s due to the influence of one particular show that changed the genre’s trajectory at the start of the decade. Despite the best of the post-meguca edgelord magical genre Yuuki Yuuna still carrying some of the fundamental themes of the genre while having its tragedy actually be meaningful and thematically interesting, even that doesn’t hold a candle to a classic long running magical girl series that used its lengthy episode count to its fullest to substantially flesh out each of its lovable main characters as well as each of the villains who provide different perspectives on the theme of temporality that runs as Hugtto Precure’s thematic core. Hana, Homura, Emiru, and Lulu are some of the most imminently endearing characters I had the pleasure to follow all decade, evoking no shortage of smiles from just watching them grow and interact over the course of the show. The series is peppered with bits of excellent sakuga and standout episodes from incredible episode directors, all helmed by an  all-time great anime director Junichi Satou and Fresh Precure’s Zako Arifumi. Long live Precure and traditional magical girls.

K-On! (season 2 + OVAs + movie)

K-On felt like an anomaly when I finally finished it. Starting the show after seeing videos from Under the Scope and Trixie of Ygg Studio’s “K-On! A Loving Thesis” video, I initially found the first season too cloying even for me (probably as a result of watching at least some parts of the show dubbed, and English just cannot make moe voices work), who became a fan of Lucky Star a few years prior. Yet, around a year later, I could be crying throughout episode 20, and the last 7 episodes of season 2 became cemented as one of my favorite finale arcs in all of fiction, with the K-On movie only building on the emotion weight of that finale by showing the process that into creating the song the girls sing to Azusa in one of the last episodes. It honestly started with the Live House OVA and the first episode of season 2, which were both some of the high points of the franchise for me, and some of the first times I fully registered the level of craft that actually went into this series, as they both feel like clear steps up from season 1 in terms of subject matter and cinematic directing respectively. Rewatching season 1, I realized that the strong, casual fleshing out of characterization was present even back then, and the characters’ personalities permeated their dialogue and character acting so naturally that they felt astonishingly human once I had fully sunk into their mannerisms, thought processes, and dynamic when interacting. The show strips back any pretenses of structured, heavy drama until the very end, because this group of characters is all about finding their happiness in the goofy, superficially inconsequential banter and whims that they get to indulge in during their last years of childhood where they get to just hang out. “Fun things are fun” is simultaneously the ultimate maxim of Yui and the show while also being as simplistic as Yui’s approach to life generally is. Only she could be the main character of this fuwa fuwa time they spend in the Keion-bu, because its her airy, go-with-the-flow, laidback attitude that draws her to the light music club in the first place, and later draws all the girls into her absolutely lax rhythm. While Mio and Azusa initially have the ambition of practicing hard and honing their skills to become a great band, they ultimately find value in the Light Music Club as a place for them to just hang out with their dopey friends and enjoy these days just by chilling out with each other and pursuing whatever they find fun in the moment. While their practices may be scattershot, they ultimately can pull themselves together to practice because ultimately performing is also fun to them, but they just approach practices their own way. That approach to the club was what ultimately created the unique sound that drew Azusa’s curiosity about them during their performance. In the words of my writing about the show from nearly 3 years ago, “Playing music is not the point, not the whole point, the point is playing music with this specific group of people who have fun doing so together.” The essence of the show is how this group of friends affects each other over the course of high school as they gradually form their own dynamic and adapt to each other’s personalities. I’ve thought back to this show several times when thinking on the end of high school and what the types of friendships I thought were worth cherishing. It’s similar to a show like Aria in finding the beauty and enjoyment in these more mundane aspects of life and seeing people flow at their own pace. To this day, it remains my favorite CGDCT anime, and I’d love to return to the second season in particular to see how my perspective changes rewatching that part of the show for the second time.

5. March Comes in Like a Lion

Shaft’s last true masterpiece before the big staff exodus around 2018, Sangatsu is one of the premium visual tour de forces in anime of the decade. Full of different visual ideas that lean into every turn, the series is constantly sinking into a warm, homely atmosphere to battle against the cold depression of Rei’s initially isolated life. The journey of a singularly talented, yet miserable boy as he is swept up into the first truly positive bonds he’s encountered since losing his parents at an early age was one of the most beautiful experiences the medium has to offer. Ever balancing between the light and darkness of human relationships and the lack thereof experienced by characters of all different ages, the show weaves together several different tones that allows it to explore a vast emotional range, punctuated by Shaft’s visuals pushing every emotion to its maximum visual impact. It’s a level of breadth rarely covered so well by anime in this decade, all in a grounded setting with one of the best casts of characters in the decade.

6. Kill La Kill

Imagine a 11-year old boy with tons of repressed emotions that he hides from the world and is still trying to wrap his head around himself. This boy has a lot of interests which he thinks everyone around him would find weird if they were to discover. He is really into animation, to the point where he outright avoids most live action movies, unless someone else is taking him to see one. At first, his interest drifts more exclusively towards cartoons, and he finds a community of fans of cartoons on YouTube. As he becomes increasingly obsessed with YouTube over the next year or so, he dives deep into this online community, being enamored with several cartoon analyst YouTube channels. Though, since these YouTubers are more “animation fans” than just “cartoon fans”, they occasionally make reference to anime, mainly the ones that were popular on the channel block Toonami when they were teenagers. Inevitably, the boy becomes curious about anime as well, and he’s seen some kids anime before. Pokemon and Sonic X were the two he was most acquainted with. Though, eventually, at 12 years old, he would wander outside his cartoon bubble to give a cursory exploration of anime culture. The first few channels he saw discussing anime were Anime America and Watchmojo, both of whom would mostly make top 10 lists, serving as the perfect initiation into the medium for the boy, who was deeply fascinated with numbers and rankings of all kinds. Eventually, he reaches a top 10 hottest girls in anime list from Watchmojo, and having had previous forays into the world of online pornography (well, mostly twerking, boobs, and revealing swimsuits, no total nudity at that point), he clicks on the thumbnail. After seeing one of the shows with a girl from that list also featured on their top 10 anime to binge, he seeks out the show, called Kill La Kill. After some failed attempts at searching for full episodes on YouTube which led him to episodes of Akami ga Kill (which is shit), he located the series on a pirate site, and watched the whole series in the span of a few days after school. On my original viewing of Kill La Kill, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the scope and gravity of its narrative, with it eventually grabbing me at my core to shake me senseless in its final few episodes. This made the comparatively lax, character-driven atmosphere of the last double-length episode a relieving and welcome change of pace to wrap all the remaining loose ends in an incredibly satisfying manner. Above all, the weight and energy of Kill La Kill’s storytelling is what ingrained itself in my mind, like one of those Gainax shows you watch as a kid that you never forget for the rest of your life. Except this is a Trigger show, coming from a studio that I would later submit myself as a fan of and endeavor to watch every single one of their other works, which led me to other of my favorites of the decade like Gridman and Luluco. The manic chaos of its narrative and its constant escalating scale was simply something that I had never experienced before. As surface-level as that appeal may be, the reason I’m leaving it this high on my list is because digging into analysis of the show has revealed a whole other layer of appeal that has fascinated me, to the point where a rewatch has become absolutely necessary. I liked the characters and all, especially Kiryuin Satsuki and Ryuko, with their development being the human core I latched onto throughout the series, but as a kid who had only been versed in cartoon media targeted towards kids, the scale of its narrative and the graphic sex and violence of its imagery are what immensely captivated me. Though, just looking at the show now, and listening to its soundtrack, it’s obvious that there was a whole lot of success in the audio-visual spectacle of the series which I think can be noted as a legitimate strength of the series. That said, much of Kill La Kill’s merits and intentions were not fully comprehended by me by the end of the decade. I only actually watched the show in that initial viewing, only later looking into analysis of the series that revealed it to have more depth to its theming than I ever could have imagined, to the point where a person could write an entire book detailing the meaning behind the symbols and plot events that represent various aspects of Japanese history. I rewatched the first episode a few days before writing this, and I mostly took note of the frequent allusions to class structures, the divide between the poor and the rich, and the effects of that divide. Then, there were the blatant references to the development of Nazi Germany right in the dialogue and Ryuko’s position as an outsider force confronting the system that everyone else has become subservient to. However, I can’t quite place my finger on its use/abuse of shonen tropes right at the moment, though I do acknowledge that there’s analysis of that aspect of the show as well. Generally, if you want a more complete analytical overview of Kill La Kill’s references and their meanings in regards to the show’s themes, then this article I read several months ago should give you at least some added historical context in which to view Kill La Kill for yourself. As for me, I plan to rewatch the series in full sooner rather than later in order to reevaluate it. So far, I’m enjoying what I’ve seen, even on a base level, since Kill La Kill is still as exhilarating and full of energy as when I originally watched it. I’m immensely glad that my experience with an anime like this can evolve so radically yet in a still positive way. It’s one of those truly magical experiences in the medium for me.

7. Yama no Susume (seasons 1-3)

Binging this semi-obscure slice-of-life series on a whim, its short episode length, excellent background art, swiftly paced yet substantial character progression, and naturalistic atmosphere hooked me from season 1 on what would evolve into one of my favorite CGDCT anime. In a sense, it represents the peak payoff of studio 8bit’s potential, with the studio having been noteworthy as an offspring from studio Satellight that was packed with webgen animators, seemingly migrating from one of first hallmarks of webgen animation talent in the elder studio’s Noein. With director Yuusuke Yamamoto of Welcome to the NHK fame having brought all the webgen talent from . With YamaSusu continuing in just a few months, this series still has more in store for me, and I’ll be excited to place it in the running for the next decade’s slice-of-life classics.

8. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

After watching Under the Scope’s general KyoAni video’s segment on this movie, I knew I had to watch it for myself and binged all the Haruhi franchise that I hadn’t finished already in order to watch it. One of the first KyoAni anime that I could consider a true favorite, the studio blasted open the decade with a lengthy, cinematic, visual tour de force. Absolutely submerged in an unforgettable winter town aesthetic, it’s one of the first works that come to mind when I think of Christmas anime. Its reframing of the infamous Endless Eight and really all of Nagato’s behavior is genuinely brilliant, emotional, and one of the most unique character writing tricks I’ve ever seen. God-tier directors Tatsuya Ishihara and the late Yasuhiro Takemoto (may he rest in peace) put their all into this film and built one of the most palpable tone pieces to ever come out of a light novel adaptation. While it may have overshadowed the TV series in quality to many fans, I really think it’s only a full package because of the TV show’s existence and it ultimately reaffirms many of the thematic ideas the show had already put forth, just maybe in a way that was more palatable to people who hadn’t vibed with the show. Disappearance is an excellent capstone to one of my favorite anime series, and another monumental testament to all the talented staff at KyoAni who brought it to life.

9. Mawaru Penguindrum

Ikuhara’s magnum opus and one of the most insane TV anime of the decade, Mawaru Penguindrum carries all the heart, all the humor, all the empathy, and all the darkness of his previous works, packed in a ball of social commentary that this time explores the ripple effects of capitalism from the focal point of our young, financially strained protagonists in the aftermath of their parents’ disappearance after being implicated by the police. The two older brothers are forced to work whatever jobs they can take in order to afford medicine for their sickly sister Himari. The plot from there is winding and full of memorable, eccentric characters in various positions of power all influenced by the roles that capitalism forces them into or encourages them to take. The imagery in this show gets so overwhelming at times that the last third becomes a legitimate acid trip-level experience, even as the last two episodes stick the landing with an extremely heartfelt, if bittersweet ending. As the second Ikuhara anime I finished after Sarazanmai intrigued me to Ikuhara’s style and Zeria’s big Ikuhara video revealed the depths underlying all of his works. Here’s to more years of Ikuhara’s mind being splattered across the medium of anime and keeping the medium truly weird and awesome.

10. Tamako Market (and Love Story)
11. Pokemon (everything that aired in the 2010s)

Welp, now we’ve truly reached the upper-echelon, the shows that I will likely return to for years to come and could talk about for ages. Pokémon is easily the anime I have watched the most episodes of over the years, and the franchise I have the most investment in by a wide margin. The fact that I watched every single series (aside from Sun and Moon which I NEED to finish, because a lot of interesting things happen in that season) and the majority of related OVAs, ONAs, movies, etc. several times over back in the middle of the 2010s should clue you in to how invested I am in this franchise. I think many can agree that this was easily the best decade the Pokémon anime has ever experienced. It’s very likely that your favorite season aired this decade, whether that be XY, Sun and Moon, or even Diamond and Pearl, which finished its run at the turn of the decade. And while Diamond and Pearl exemplifies some of the biggest issues of the more stagnant era of the Pokémon anime, it still stands as my favorite series so far with it having the outright best character arcs in the franchise in my eyes. Some of DP’s most legendary moments aired in this decade in particular, like the titanic clash between Ash and Paul at the Sinnoh league which probably carries the most thematic and narrative weight of any battle in the entire anime franchise. It was not only the ultimate culmination of Ash, Paul, and Infernape’s winding character arcs across the past 150+ episodes, but also the demonstration of the potential heights that Ash and Paul’s training ideologies could take them to. Though, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this conclusion to their rivalry is that it ends with a mutual respect for each other and their ideals, despite neither of them changing their core philosophy. If anything, they both only refined their Pokémon training philosophy through being challenged by each other and many other obstacles in their journeys, ironing out the most glaring weaknesses in their methods. Ash and Paul’s rivalry has been talked up by fans of DP for much of the latter half of the decade, rightfully so for how it is the unrivaled high water mark for this franchise in terms of nuanced, thorough narrative arcs. The show is arguably more interesting than ever before, with the formula being shaken-up in increasingly experimental ways across the decade and art styles shifting with each installment following Diamond and Pearl. The bar for animation has gone way up for every series starting from XY (or arguably Best Wishes), to the point where almost every episode features some new cool sakuga. Ash even won the Pokémon league last year, one thing people wouldn’t shut up about even if whether he wins or not is barely consequential to the narrative, and… look, I have a bone to pick with people to boil down the anime to just being its plot structure. Though, it does seem that the creators have been taking heed and started to steer the show in completely new directions, especially with the currently airing series, which I’ll be covering every episode of. And while all of that is great and noteworthy in their own right, my experience with this franchise has been quite storied, especially in regards to the series which aired in the 2010s. Pokémon Best Wishes was the first Pokémon anime I watched, all the way back when the English dub that aired on Cartoon Network was reaching the series finale back in 2013. I had enjoyed what I’d seen of the show back then, and it became one of those childhood cartoons which I religiously kept up with just because I was a fan. Despite it being the most hated series in the franchise, I was quite fond of the characters, the bright art style, and the episodic stories. Even on my latest rewatch a few years ago, I still had this unshakable fondness for the series, for both nostalgic reasons and for it just having many fun episodic narratives in my experience. The episodic stories, or “filler” episodes, in some of the Pokémon series are notoriously dull and a slog to sit through, with the Advanced Generation and Diamond and Pearl being easily the biggest offenders for me. Though, I never looked back on the episodic stories in BW and remembered them as generally unentertaining. This is likely because AG and DP were the longest series in the franchise, each almost having 200 episodes (I‘m counting the original series as a separate saga for each region), but I generally had more fun with the “filler” in BW than in most other seasons. I still remember the Beheeyem episode where everyone had a Beheeyem face. I still remember the episode where Iris forced Ash and Cilan to crossdress so they could battle some snobby rich girls who trash-talked her Axew. I still remember the Butterfree episode with all the callbacks to the classic “Bye Bye Butterfree” from the original series, which I only fully understood on subsequent viewings when I had seen the entire series in order. Dawn’s entire arc where she returned to visit the cast in Unova was pretty fun. The show had a fairly interesting take on its series finale, where it basically had Ash alone back at Pallet Town reflecting on all his past adventures from all the previous generations, before figuring out where he wanted to go next. It was a meditative and nostalgic way to cap off Best Wishes, only to lead into what would be probably the franchise’s big resurgence of the anime in XY. Looking back, the series seemed like an anomaly. The production values ramped up significantly, the designs and art style were sleeker than ever before, the 3D camera movement in the backgrounds as well as an emphasis on zooms and kinetic timing made the battles a spectacle to watch, the story went to some of its most emotional and intense moments in the franchise, Ash finally acting more like the veteran badass trainer that people believed he logically should’ve been for years now, THE FEMALE COMPANION SHIP IS ACTUALLY CANON, its characters were all fleshed out with their own arcs often spanning significant portions of the series, and it had all the hype climactic moments of a traditional long-running shounen battle anime. I assume these big moments are what drew people to this particular series after so long of being shunned as just a formulaic children’s show after gen 1 (or whatever point in the franchise they were most nostalgic about). Seeing the stakes and the narrative firmly put on the gas for most of the XYZ saga (spanning the last 47 episodes of XY), it was astonishing to see a decent community gradually form around it as it was airing, with people covering it week to week during XYZ’s run. My long journey with this franchise started in earnest right when the series began airing on Cartoon Network, as I kept up with every new episode every week that I could catch them as they aired. When I got my own computer and phone for the first time, I truly began entering the online fandom with Pokemon XYZ and the YouTubers who were covering it during its run, making AMVs of the characters and often the ships, and making of course memes along the way. That’s when I got into the broader PokeTube sphere and started playing the mainline games on the 3DS. I was there for what I still consider to be some of the hypest experiences I’ve had watching anime as it aired, and even as it’s known for the more serious tone and more shounen battle elements (since we all know shounen reigns supreme in popularity in this fandom), it always retained the wondrous adventure, the optimism, and the heart that made this franchise so compelling to me to begin with. That’s why, despite their vast range in quality, I’ve always appreciated their “filler” episodes because the episodic stories explore the finer details of what everyday life looks like in a world with all these different species of magical animals wandering around and the characters get a lot of downtime to just let their personalities shine. That doesn’t make every episodic story equally enjoyable, but in the downtime between major story beats or character growth, the show still retained that comfy, Saturday morning cartoon adventure through a vast breathing world vibe that the entire series contained, with episode concepts like entering an alternate universe through a mirror and an Espere creating a sort of haunted house with its psychic powers after its owners died still stick in my memory (even I’ll admit the original Pokemon series had the more of the memorably bizarre episode concepts. Outside of the episodic stories, XY is just the near-ultimate crowd-pleaser Pokemon anime possible, filled with some of the most iconic moments in the franchise for those who experienced them. Serena’s kiss in the last episode of the show was the ultimate power move on the part of the writers to actually pay off romantic development and please the shippers in an anime franchise that denied it for nearly two decades by that point, and the amourshippers (the name for the Ash x Serena shippers back in the day btw) lost their fucking minds, and it was legitimately a long awaited, excellently served payoff, and the character acting as she turned back and ran up the elevator to do it just adding one last bow to her arc of self-confidence and growing to the point of being able to directly confront her feelings for Ash. Shipping fuel and character beats was laid out, scattered in bits throughout the entire run, the AMVs were bottomless, ohmygod. The hype train of the XYZ series going into the Pokemon league tournament is something I’ll never forget, even if the reaction to Ash (spoilers for the Sun and Moon and XY series from here on out, if you care or plan to watch them) loses the league to Alain was certainly dramatic after it being the first time Ash made it to the finals and seemingly with his strongest team and most maturity even to this day. While the next series Sun and Moon rubbed salt in the wound a bit by having him win that league instead despite Ash being much more laidback that season and the grandeur and production values feeling much more subdued, I appreciate how long its taken for him to win up to that point as a sign of just how high the level is and how there’s always a greater mountain to climb. While I could talk about the powerscaling between Ash’s Greninja and Alain’s Charizard actually feels fairly consistent with how they both held their own against a champion’s main Pokemon before, and Alain’s gone up against and defeated various Elite Four members…, that’s besides the point. While I wish Ash showed a bit more lament before looking like he shook off his loss after coming so close to victory, it is telling that he can take it on the chin at this point in the matter of a minute since he’s already had to recover from these types of losses so many times by now, in leagues, gym battles, and rival battles alike, even in this very season against Sawyer. Besides that, Serena’s Pokemon idol arc (yes I’m calling it that) mostly lived up to her predecessors in Dawn and May with her self-discovery after languishing in not knowing what she wants to be as a trainer after accomplishing her initial goal of meeting, her trials of deviating from her mom’s career, learning from and evolving her relationship with her idol as she becomes more within her reach, and beautifully animated, hype performances and emotional failures galore. There was the big shounen climax against Team Flare with Bonnie and Squishy’s relationship at the emotional core. Team Rocket’s shenanigans are still fun as always, and Jessie is a nice pompous faux-rival to Serena in the Pokemon Showcase. Clement’s arc of becoming a gym leader he and his little sister Bonnie could be proud of was a cathartic and badass evolution of him from the cute comedic science guy. Bonnie’s relationship with Squishy and Dedenne was about a well-done of a child character (or “younger than 10 yrs old,” pre-trainer child) arc as this franchise has offered yet, and her personality was always a playful, snarky, semi-immature balance to the older 3 kids she was surrounded by with a fun and occasionally heartfelt dynamic with her older brother (even their running gags just feel nostalgic by the end). One of the show’s biggest sticking points for a lot of people seemingly was the cast dynamic just being the best in the franchise, with Ash at its very core. While in other series Ash always had a more experienced companion with him (Brock and Misty both being gym leaders when Ash was just getting started in Kanto and Johto, and changing to only one companion with explicitly more experience than him in Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Unova with Brock later being replaced by Cilan), in Kalos, all of his traveling companions looked up to him in some way. Even Clement the gym leader wasn’t that confident in his skills as such, to the point where his lost access to his gym for awhile due to his own malfunctioning technology. All of these characters would gain more confidence due to Ash at some point in their journey, and all of them acknowledge this. Even his main rival Sawyer is basically starts out as an Ash fanboy after seeing his unique battle style, placing Ash as the idol he’s chasing until he eventually surpasses him. While he’s not perfect, is sometimes goofy and bullheaded (if less temperamental this time around), and loses against several different gym leaders and stronger trainers, his unbridled passion for getting to know and interact with Pokemon and his genuine maturity and mentality towards growth (even if at times very headfirst and straightforward, as characteristic of him) has culminated over the course of over a decade of gradual personal maturation by that point and finally honed into a charisma that could not only draw people towards him but inspire even those closest to him. That makes it hit all the harder when it crashes down completely in XYZ with a string of big losses to a rival and gym leader alongside a loss of ability to wield what was once the most powerful tool upon whom’s reliance eventually became a strategical and ego crutch: Ash-Greninja. That’s on top of the salt in the wound that Sawyer got his 8th badge before Ash, and that’s after already beating him for the first time. Then, he stays to watch his battle against the 8th gym leader only for Ash to lose, leaving him with a sense of disillusionment. It’s an unparalleled fall from grace for Ash that is built up for several episodes until he’s taken so many losses that he doesn’t even know how to come back from them, culminating in his biggest bout of depressive slump in the XY series, where after Serena tries to lift his confidence like he’s done for her in the past Ash lashes out at her, leaving Serena disillusioned. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the XY thinking back on it in broader strokes is how in so many ways it feels like the climax that every series before it had been building to. It’s like the refinement of Ash as a trainer had bled into every aspect of the show from the sharpened, refined, dynamic visuals to the step up in narrative quality to how the narrative plays off Ash’s maturity. The XY series is a whopping 140 episodes on the whole, with only Hunter x Hunter 2011 having a comparable length on this list. This, Hxh, and Made in Abyss are the three anime this decade that fully captured that sense of adventure that I crave in animation, worlds that feel like endless streams of imaginative ideas to explore. While Pokemon has a leg up by being based on a video games franchise with decades worth of lore and hundreds of magical creatures who only speak in varying vocal tones of their name, that makes it no less of a childlike immersive journey taken with a lovable group of tight knit friends. All their encounters, challenges, and growth being experiences that they’ll take with them for life, even as they inevitably part ways as their goals take them on different paths. There’s something beautiful about that sense that this ginormous episode length is still only a blip in these characters’ lives, and that after changing enough over the course of their journey, their new, more firm goals take them their separate ways to lives that’ll go far beyond this one time in their childhood. Metatextually, this is only a fraction of the now over 1000 episodes in the broader Pokemon anime series. These characters might encounter Ash again someday when they have free time in their lives, hence the often awaited character return arcs where past travel companions come back for a few episodes for varying personal reasons that they come to the region Ash is in, since these bonds are still incredibly important. It feels like how Hunter x Hunter’s 4 main characters split up in the middle of the show, remeet at various points in the show, and then split up again at the end to the point, except on an even larger scale and with a more obvious structure (not to say that makes it inherently better or worse). Of course, life goes on for all the characters in the show. While HxH is much more free-flowing and unpredictable with its narrative structure, Pokemon XY would only be the start of a more experimental approach to the anime franchise and would loosen its adherence to the trends that had made the series infamously stagnant. Pokemon Sun and Moon would radically overhaul the art style and tone of XY for a much more loose and expressive art style and more zany comedic tone. While not without its serious moments and emotional arcs, and it would go maybe even further with stylized sakuga due to the simplified art work being easier to draw quickly, the reaction was extremely polarized to this at first baffling subversion of the most serious, high tension season of the anime franchise yet. Despite the divisive response from the preestablished XY fanbase, SM surprisingly gained a whole new audience of people who preferred this style to even Pokemon XY, as it leaned into the Saturday Morning cartoon vibes of the OG anime, but more polished and concentrated to be as fun both visually and narratively as possible. I wish I hadn’t caved to what is in retrospect, criticisms that I mostly wouldn’t care about or just find pedantic. Even if I couldn’t experience it myself, I consider how the SM anime leaned so hard into its own identity and gained its own distinct fanbase to XY for it to be a sort of second miracle that I’ll definitely need to finish one day. The currently airing Pokemon Journeys, which started in 2019 and I’ve admittedly been on and off of keeping up with, threw out much of the traditional structure of the prior seasons, going around all the regions thus far, revisiting old protagonists and side characters from all different generations of the franchise, and building up to actually facing the Elite Four. Meanwhile the Pokemon films started deviating from the trend of being a pseudo-canon shounen filler movie, instead becoming an alternate universe take on Ash, centering more clearly consistently highly produced stories of legendaries/mythicals in the Pokemon world or reboots of older anime stories, starting with the bizarre and divisive I Choose You movie in 2017. Of course, there’s the Detective Pikachu movie in 2019 that I didn’t watch, but saw the varied reactions to from when it was announced to when it was released. My favorite film from this trend thus far is The Power of Us in 2018 with its multiple different original characters of vastly different age groups and plotlines ending up intersecting at this one mythical Pokemon in a similar way, which is a play on the Power of One movie from 1999. Though, another one of the trends that would represent the anime franchise gradually branching out would be the anime would be studios other than OLM getting to produce Pokemon anime side projects that get to explore more varied types of Pokemon narratives. Production IG and Xebec would work on the Pokemon Origins specials, which are a more game-faithful adaptation of the Pokemon Red and Blue games. Wit Studio would work on the Power of Us movie and more recently the Legends Arceus ONAs from earlier this year directed by eccentric webgen animator Ken Yamamoto. In the 2020s, Studio Colorido would work on Pokemon Twilight Wings, fellow webgenner Shingo Yamashita’s directorial anthology that’s the most beautiful visualization of the Sword and Shield’s Galar region that I’ve ever seen. Bones would of course produce the Gotcha! music video with the explosively vibrant directing and storyboards of Rie Matsumoto, which is currently my favorite piece of Pokemon animation of this decade so far. Many different studios would work on PokeToon, which is an anthology of more simplistic Pokemon centric-stories with different art styles and of varying episode lengths. Beyond that, there are more shorts and music videos that have just ended up in my YouTube recommended that I haven’t bothered to check where/if they are on MAL. If I’m being honest, it’s these side projects that I’ve been more excited for in the 2020s, as many of them feel like glimpses into a future of a Pokemon anime without Ash. The Pokemon world and, on a meta level, the franchise is so much bigger than Ash, and I think that these gradual but sure steps toward shaking up the concept of “Pokemon anime” is absolutely what will sustain my interest in the anime franchise depending on how far they’re willing to take it. At the time I started writing this particularly long segment of this blog post, I had recently written what I planned to be episodic reviews on the Pokemon Journeys anime as it aired. It turned out I had neither the interest nor time to dedicate to an endeavor like that, especially since the show wasn’t quite as stylistically or narratively cohesive as XY and Sun and Moon and felt like it couldn’t quite find its footing or a strong, distinct identity despite clearly trying to be something new. Though, I’ve tuned in now and then, particularly for major events like the 1000th episode, the Journeys 100th episode, and some of the character returns, and the show is at least decent and still maintains some of the charm of prior seasons. I even watched the 4 part ONA which featured Dawn, Brock, and Team Galactic as returning characters for a bizarre, yet fun plotline which made me realize how oddly dark and open-ended Team Galactic plotline in the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl anime actually became in its conclusion. I’m always down for Dawn and Brock, no matter what the context, and apparently this was Dawn’s second return in Journeys, but I heard it wasn’t handled that well the first time anyways, so whatever. I’ll definitely be tuning in for Pokemon Journey’s final arc with the Pokemon League just to see how they’d even handle such an plotline with how Ash already won an official league in the last series. Though, after all the running around the map to every region that they’ve done in this series, I’m honestly wondering what they plan on trying in the next one. After three series of increasingly challenging the status quo that people had been complaining about for years, going back to “normal” doesn’t feel feasible, and they can’t exactly pull the “winning the league” or “traveling across every region” stunt twice with the same impact. I feel like if the 2010s was the evolution and revolution of the franchise, the 2020s could be the true experimental period. Though, it awaits to be seen whether they’ll capitalize on that potential, especially with how Journeys didn’t achieve near the amount of XY or Sun and Moon. Whatever awaits, I’m at least glad to have gotten to talk about at least a fraction of my memories with this series. It was literally running for nearly every week of the entire decade, did you really think this still is all I have to talk about? The future of this franchise ranges from promising to at least interesting, so my journey with this series is likely far from over, but I’m immensely glad to have taken the massive ride so far. With the ups and downs, there really isn’t another anime with which I’ve had a connection like Pokemon.

12. Princess Principal (tv series)

The first time I heard about Princess Principal was in a video discussing the then burgeoning Studio 3hz as they were in the midst of their ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

13. A Silent Voice

Maybe it should be a sign that every anime Naoko Yamada’s directed this decade would end up in the top 15 of this list, and the lowest ranked one is the movie that a general audience seems to love the most. This being another one of the anime I watched before diving head deep into the medium, the first time I watched it at the recommendation of CellSpex’s 2017 animated movies list, I lost my shit at how visceral Shoya was as a portrayal of depression. Rewatching it after watching the rest of Yamada’s works, it fully sunk in how much I loved this film. One of KyoAni’s most gorgeous anime, some of Yamada’s most consistently tactile and visceral in terms of sound design, directing, and character animation. It almost feels like the ultimate KyoAni work, except there’s one show higher on this list that I think exemplifies their strengths even more. While I know it’s regarded as a butchered adaptation by some, particularly due to its weaker supporting cast, I found most of them still decently grounded or at least thematically fitting in terms of the type of social environment that the film was conveying. One of the more telling moments came when it was shown that the underlying mentalities that led to several characters bullying Shoya and/or Shoko or standing by as an onlooker hadn’t fully changed even in high school, as characters devolve back into their old habits, even while some of them were trying to move past them. While part of the film is about these characters starting the path to redemption and/or healing from the type of damaging social environment they created/were hurt by in middle school, I’d say more broadly it’s about communication and earnestly reaching out to connect despite those gaps in understanding. It’s one of those anime films where every image feels weighty with emotion in a similar way to my favorite Shinkai film 5 Centimeters per Second. Naoko Yamada’s increasingly hyperattentive and ambitious directing only became more impressive on a second watch, and this film marks a transition from an underrated genius could be wrongfully dismissed simply a moe director, to an overtly artsy filmmaker whose fixations would become increasingly more pointed from this film onward, maybe even to an alienating degree. Though, when I watch A Silent Voice, it’s not any of that pretentious shit that sits at the forefront of my mind; it’s just the emotional rawness and beating heart that overflows in every scene. It’s that I love Shoya, Shoko, and Nagatsuka with all my heart, and I want to see these characters overcome their self-loathing and isolation to reach some form of true fulfilling connection, despite how messy and at times painful reaching out for those connections can be.

14. Gakkougurashi

Though, when diving into the depths of depravity, a level of earnest resonance can be found within some of these stories. 

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15. Sarazanmai

A few months after watching Serial Experiments Lain for the first time and getting officially hooked on this whole anime thing, I craved thoroughly weird, seemingly indecipherable series like it. Mononoke and Texhnolyze were my next go-tos, as I’d only started Lain to begin with because of Trixie of Ygg Studio’s video on Chiaki Konaka intriguing me to his baffling, surreal, and often horror-tinged writing style. While unfortunately he would stop writing for anime series after the 2000s, among the other deeply idiosyncratic anime staff who remained active to keep anime weird in the 2010s was Kunihiko Ikuhara. The work he’s most famous for, Revolutionary Girl Utena, was another one of the anime I started directly after finishing Lain (though like Texhnolyze and Mononoke, I wasn’t quite able to connect with it on the level I eventually did with Lain and wouldn’t finish the series until years later), and I would fortunately get to experience a concentrated dose of his madness in 2019 when Sarazanmai became one of my most memorable seasonal anime watching experiences ever. Gorgeously produced from top to bottom and overflowing with symbolism and striking compositions, Sarazanmai had me strapped in from the first minutes of the first episode. Not only that, but the episode got me immediately acclimated to Kunihiko Ikuhara’s abstract and bonkers sense of humor that had me rolling and going insane as I was still in middle of sorting out what exactly I was looking at. Sarazanmai and Ikuhara’s anime original works as a whole, despite having a theatrical, Dezaki-esque melodramatic tinge to them and extremely pointed commentary on social and societal issues, always have a zany, endearing sense of humor alongside an optimism for the protagonists to be able to break out of the overwhelmingly pervasive system that they are born into, even if they lack the influence to completely break the system that reinforces certain broad sweeping social ills on their own (at least within the time span that the series covers). There’s a lot of prescient analysis that can and has been made (unfortunately mostly restricted to Utena, at least on YouTube) about every one of his show’s confrontation of different social issues, with the protagonists having to unlearn their own concessions to these systems. That Ikuhara can pack this inside one of the most lavishly produced and cinematographically hyperdense TV anime of the decade is nothing short of a miracle, especially in 2019. Also, gay. Like, there are at least 3 explicit gay boys in this show, and Utena and Yuri Kuma have obvious explicit (if contentious depending on who you ask about the latter show) depictions of wlw. Sarazanmai is the type of anime that I’m so happy to have watched weekly. It’s a bizarre, unmistakably memorable type of anime that’s simultaneously all the horny, goofy, melodramatic bullshit that anime often is, but written and directed by a veteran and cinematic genius who has the level of progressive (yes, I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a word I felt that was more fitting) social and societal awareness to infuse this medium with the type of empathetic, multi-faceted commentary that has the kind of perspective that I wish was more common in anime, as opposed to deeply embedded conservatism (whether that be gender essentialism or stereotypes of marginalized groups) that seems to tacitly rear its ugly head, subtly or otherwise, at some point even in the anime I love. It’s not even that Ikuhara is perfect in his navigation of these more damaging aspects of conservatism, but it’s honestly been more comforting now than ever to know that his shows are really reaching out their hands in understanding of their LGBTQ+ or impoverished teens often constricted by their society’s expectations of them. As I grew up and became much more politically aware over the years, Ikuhara’s anime were those which only became more interesting with time. I’ll be coming back to several of his shows for years to come, and I’ll eagerly await with what he’ll have to say about the shifting cultural zeitgeist next.

16. Mob Psycho 100 (seasons 1-2)

17. Beastars (season 1)
18. Wolf Children
19. Highschool of the Dead

Highschool of the Dead is a show I’ve been striving to explain the merits of for years now, since way too many people have fallen into the trap of seeing it only for its surface level appeal and completely missing the less obvious nuances laden in its narrative. And this is understandable. Highschool of the Dead is a show which leans hard into sex and violence, which it delivers on constantly. It’s not one to slow down and directly explain its themes and character development, letting all of that simply transpire in the background for any curious viewer to pick up on. It has a lot of easily recognizable strengths, like grippingly kinetic directing and animation, interesting and fleshed-out apocalyptic themes, an emotionally charged and atmospheric soundtrack, and some fairly compelling characters. On my first watch of the series in summer of 2018, I was pretty blown away by all of this, coming from this over-the-top ecchi, action anime. Of course, the show delivers hard on the expected appeal of sexy girls and fun action scenes, with hands-down some of the best animated fanservice in any anime I’ve seen and balls-clenchingly impactful directing which I only found more impressive on a rewatch. Though, what probably set it over the top as one of my favorite anime ever was the rampant debate over the show’s quality. I have heard many compelling arguments from both critics and fans of the series. The long and short of it was that the discourse surrounding this show got me thinking more critically as to whether it was really as good as I remembered it being. I wanted to settle the debate once and for all, since, more than any of my other favorite shows, I think Highschool of the Dead is severely underrated. I finally rewatched the first four episodes near the end of 2019 and even took some notes with timestamps to make sure I had all the relevant information straight. While I may actually make a future post fully detailing my stance on the show, I think its placement on this list should give you a relevant impression of my thoughts on it. Firstly, easily the most damning criticism I could make of the early episodes of Highschool of the Dead is their tone management. The show’s blatant and almost random employment of fanservice in these episodes is something I could easily see taking viewers out of the experience when this part of the story is mostly building the tenseness of the apocalypse. It’s the area where we’re actually supposed to take the show seriously, and get immersed in the tension of the apocalypse causing all of society to collapse. Though, the fairly rampant sexualization in some scenes is something I can see being distracting to some viewers. This was not the case for me. As someone who has watched hundreds of trashy fanservice in anime, I am too desensitized to it to be immediately thrown off by the instances of fanservice in HOTD. Secondly, the fanservice is totally diegetic and not that obtrusive outside of the visuals. For these first few episodes, most of the fanservice is not used for gags or drags the pacing to a halt in any way. It rarely even involves any goofy sound effects. It’s almost always purely visual and simply a result of the cinematography. While the sex is blatant and sometimes takes up most of a shot, it rarely feels out of step with the other elements of the show, nor does it ever completely dominate the tone of a scene. There are even occasional instances where it is used particularly creatively like the scene where it’s implemented from the perspective of Takashi looking down at Takagi’s shirt in episode 1 for character building. It’s more like fanservice is a natural element in the show’s world, and I kind of enjoy that. It gives the how its unique feel, since rarely is fanservice this organically intertwined with the show’s entire style so well. It’s because of how well the fanservice gells with the show as a whole that I barely find myself distracted by it, except when I’m specifically taking notes on the interesting ways it can sometimes be implemented in a scene. Again, it’s completely understandable if other people find the show’s style self-contradictory or just plain distracting, but I wouldn’t say it’s that big of a deal unless you are generally sensitive to fanservice in anime. Also, I know that episode 7 is basically pushes the ecchi to the forefront, but that episode is meant to be a cooldown where the characters are finally able to relax and settle into their situation anyways, so it’s use there is meant to be sexy self-indulgence for the sake of fun breather. I interpret that episode as the point where the show becomes more fun and sexy than bleak and tense, since the characters have all settled into their more friendly group dynamic at this point and have learned how to survive in the apocalypse. While there are also some connections I can draw between the show’s focus on the main cast as a group made of individual parts with their own unique contributions to the whole’s survival, I’ll leave that for when I finish the show (especially since that theme will be expanded upon further in the last couple of episodes). Unfortunately, like Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress from the same director, the series ends on a sort of unfulfiilling “to be continued” style cliffhanger. The only additional content was a completely self-indulgent fanservice OVA which is about as mindless as people claim the actual show to be. While the manga has been discontinued, there are still more chapters that the anime had not adapted, which I would hope to be turned into their own OVAs or movies or whatever if not for the fact that the HOTD anime is almost a decade old now. Though, even more than Kabaneri, I think Highschool of the Dead explored a significant array of interesting themes and delivered on satisfying character arcs throughout. While Rei’s development and Takashi’s position in the first several episodes fits in thematically with the show’s exploration of how people react to the apocalypse (which extends into an exploration of what power dynamics form therein, btw), Takagi, Hirano, and Saeko’s character development which surface more in the later episodes really cemented the show’s emotional backbone for me, collectively paying off in an astoundingly heartwarming scene in the one of the last couple of episodes which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t seen the show (or those who dropped it). While this blurb mostly explored the fanservice aspect of the show, I could and probably will further explore the character development and themes in a later post just based on the notes I already have. I could even talk about how awesome and sometimes creative the visual presentation is, because I don’t think anyone has quite gone far enough in extolling just how impeccable the visual flow is in this show, pacing out every shot and manipulating the weight of the animation to just the right degree where it can build tension and/or release it with the highest impact possible. That’s alongside frequent dynamic camera angles and criminally satisfying sound design. The show only gets more interesting the further into the story it gets, so I’m excited to finish my rewatch of it and cement my stance on it.

20. Monogatari Series (sans Bakemonogatari eps 1-13)
21. Made in Abyss (season 1)
22. Ping Pong the Animation
23. Hoshiai no Sora

There are few anime which capture and explore so many deeply personal social issues of adolescent youth like Hoshiai no Sora. The density of this show is almost unrivaled, coming at the very end of the decade, but leaving a sizable impact with deft character writing and thematic exploration across a broad swath of ideas. The personality disconnect between a parent and child, the gender self-discovery of a pubescent, discovering and accepting one’s sexuality, controlling parents who reject and sabotage the ambition and general happiness, and many, many, many more topics are examined from as many perspectives that can be crammed into the series’ 12 episodes (at least for now). It’s so dense, it’s so emotionally charged, so swiftly doles out character and dramatic developments that it’s relentlessly gripping from start to finish. I read an interview from veteran director Akane Kazuki where he expressed such an unfortunately rare empathetic perspective on LBGTQ+ characters where there are many anime even today that tend to portray LBGTQ+ characters with jokes at their expense or demeaning stereotypes, and looking back, it gives me hope that anime with these more empathetic and genuine-feeling representation could become more common in the 2020s (even if so far, there hasn’t been many exceptional anime with what I’d call great rep as of yet, compared to the 2010s). In the vast, oversaturated world of high school anime, I feel like Hoshiai no Sora clowned on all of them in terms of feeling like a genuine portrayal of teengers, stripping away or at least highly downplaying the clear-cut tropeyness to leave a beating heart of a wide cast of teens with a wide range of personalities that don’t need loud gimmicks to stand out. Each one has their own unique familial issues and their happenstance in entering their school’s dinky tennis team gives them a level of support and solidarity that allows some of them to at least better themselves and work through their emotions even if not all of their family situations are fully resolved. In a way, the abrupt ending caused by the production committee cutting the initially planned 2 cours down to one actually made the series feel more reminiscent of real-life with all its loose ends. Ultimately, the series ends up feeling like a vignette of a crucial experience in these characters’ young lives, and one of the most empathetic portrayals of high school I’ve seen in the medium. 

24. Planet With

25. Shiki

In the middle of watching this show in 2019, I wrote a blog post comparing it and Happy Sugar Life and why I controversially found the latter to be more enjoyable. After hearing that the 2nd half was where the chips would truly fall and the show would descend into full chaos, I decided to give the show a second chance and ended up declaring it easily the best horror anime outside of Perfect Blue. Yasunaru Takanashi delivers one of his most memorable and atmospheric soundtracks ever, with some utterly haunting tracks that contribute to the thickly built, sometimes bizarre tone of the first half and the descent into hell of the second half. While my frustration had come from how drawn out this first half felt with how it takes so long for the characters to figure out the twist that is revealed to the audience by episode 3 and is evident from ep 1, along with how there aren’t any characters that I would describe as “likeable” (at least not until the shit hits the fan, and they’re put in some brutal situations that force them to develop into more understandable or interesting people and grow into ones I’d actually want to root for) I ultimately appreciate how the series’s pacing at least keeps it on-message, for how the townspeople don’t want to break the face of old-school peacefulness that the village is built on. This translates to a mob mentality which serves as one of the biggest factors in escalating the conflict that brings the town to destruction. As vampires and zombies are often used as metaphors for some societal issue, Shiki uses vampires as a reckoning of the village’s aging generation and karma for their tendency toward mob mentality and preserving an idealized status quo, even if that means remaining in an insulated ignorance to the views of the outside world. The setting of a small village in the middle of nowhere, the show starting with a focus on Megumi (a young woman who immediately stands out both visually and in terms of personality from the rest of the town), the vampires eventually trapping them in the village by blocking off their paths of escape and communication lines with the world outside, and the show ending with only a few characters finally escaping the village all forms a parable about tradition and closed mindedness that isn’t exactly subtle once you start tracing the details of the plot symbolically. Though, across 22 episodes (and two excellent specials) the show fleshes out its themes and portrays them with unconventionally wonky designs and bizarre, morally dubious personalities that give the show’s progression an eccentric and fascinating tinge to convey its themes through.

26. Ms. Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (season 1)

In the wake of its season becoming my favorite anime of 2021, Dragon Maid admittedly shot way up on this list despite not hitting me as hard when I watched the first season for the first time. By winter 2017, I was still in the midst of the Pokemon anime community, but with it being the biggest non-sequel anime of the season, I ended up hearing about it through the seasonal meme osmosis that even ended up in some of PokemonRangerBoy12’s videos. At the time, I wasn’t deep into anime culture and watched the show in the semi-infamous yet personally nostalgic Funimation dub. I was basically still watching whatever I could find people talking positively about, and my fondness for Lucky Star and Haruhi Suzumiya before it would make me more interested in checking out slice-of-life anime, even if few of them would live up to those classics until I started diving deep into the medium in earnest in late 2018. I think it was in the summer of 2019 when I actually got around to finishing the show and watching the special episode, at which point I still hadn’t fully cultivated my appreciation for slice-of-life that I’d have when I finished the second season. Though, 

27. I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying
28. Land of the Lustrous
29. Psycho Pass (season 1 only)
30. Kase-san and Morning Glories
31. Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight (TV series)
32. Comic Girls
33. Hunter x Hunter 2011
34. Attack on Titan (seasons 1-3)
35. Fragtime
36. Zombieland Saga (season 1)
37. SSSS.Gridman
38. New Game! (season 1, still need to watch s2)
39. Fruits Basket 2019 (season 1)
40. Megalo Box (season 1)
41. Hulaing Babies (season 1)
42. Senki Zesshou Symphogear (seasons 1, 2, and 5, still need to watch the rest)

43. Pop Team Epic (season 1)

As someone who grew up in the era of “lol so random” often surreal kids cartoons, Adult Swim hosting some of the most hilariously druggy animated content ever put on television, and the Internet hosting an endless abyss of increasingly ADHD fueling memetic comedy, Pop Team Epic was the type of comedy manga adaptation that TV anime needed and none of you deserved. Created at now one of my favorite madcap anime studios, Kamikaze Douga (famous for Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s 3DCG OPs for parts 1, 2, 3, and now 6), helmed by director Jun Aoki who specializes in nonchalantly bringing creative multimedia presentation to whatever he directs, and adapted from a 4chan famous sporadic, irreverent, memetic, and frequently referential gag manga, the show was set to be the type of stream of consciousness bonkers non-sequitur comedy that of course would be a perfect fit to air on Adult Swim. With the adaptation throwing caution to the wind and being filled to the brim with its own gimmicks that could only be done in animation like having each episode split two *mostly* identical segments just with different voice actors or just the various kinds of mediums they used for different gags, Pop Team Epic is the type of comedy anime that I would expect to only be made in the 2000s when this level of casual experimentation on a comedy anime was a bit more common akin to say the various gimmicks of Lucky Star like karaoke EDs and Lucky Channel, but I’m at a loss to think of a TV comedy anime from that decade that compares to the sheer breadth of bizarre gimmicky ideas that Pop Team Epic has in spades, eschewing almost any roots of what would be considered a normal anime except for the most funhouse mirror anime schoolgirl character designs I’ve ever seen and the elements it takes to swiftly make a parody out of. Catching episodes of this on Toonami back in 2018 alongside the then new FLCL sequels, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure parts 3 and 4, legacy reruns (I guess) of Cowboy Bebop, and more made for what I still cherish as a memorable introduction to the Toonami block (since I never knew that it was revived nor what that it aired only on Saturdays). I’m glad Jun Aoki and Kamikaze Douga have brought similar creative insanity to Gal and Dino in 2020 and will likely continue to bring to season 2 which will be airing just next season. Nice to see they weren’t just bullshitting me when they were referencing whether or not there’d be renewed for a sequel in episode 12.

44. Ani ni Tsukeru Kusuri wa Nai! (season 1-2 only)

My disconnect with most comedy anime comes in how, if they’re not funny 80-90% of the time, they’d need an actually engaging core narrative that could hold my attention for whenever I wasn’t just laughing my ass off. Though, the exception would often come in the form of short series either running for low episode lengths (like this decade’s Wan Sheng Jie) or low episode counts (like Tsutomu Mizushima’s unhinged comedy OVAs Dai Mahou Tenge and Dokuro-chan). Helmed by Rareko, director of the much more well-known Aggretsuko, Ani ni Tsukeru runs at an even shorter 3-minutes with 2 seasons of the most consistently funny gags that I’ve seen all decade. Its second season was the peak of the franchise for me, just for settling into more dynamic arcs that, if not substantially progressed the characters, at least put them into more interesting situations that showed different sides of their personalities. Suede, one of only two YouTubers I’ve ever heard talk about this show, put it nicely when he talked about how the show derived humor from a much more realistic older brother-younger sister dynamic than the at best uncommonly wholesome relationships that they’re often portrayed with in anime (and you already know what the common worst type of portrayals are). The pair here are constantly clashing with each other, the older brother having a sense of responsibility toward his sister but also being much more of a loafing dolt than the more mindful, somewhat sardonic go-getter she is, but they still have their moments of genuine bonding in the midst of basically living alone with what seems like sparse finances. I presume this comes from how the webcomic is Chinese, with a sense of cartoony comedic timing and characterization that I’ve realized over the course of checking out several of the Chinese and Korean animation productions that spring up on MAL have a distinct sense of comedy that honestly feels like a fusion of western and Japanese animation sensibilities. Sampling hundreds of anime over the years has gotten me so familiar with and acclimated to a certain pacing and style that at this point it’s allowed me to return to animation from other cultures with a much greater appreciation for details I might’ve taken for granted before submerging myself in a specific set of styles for so long. Though, as much as I enjoyed watching the chemistry and dynamics build between these doofy high schoolers, what actually put this show on the list was how almost every single episode got me laughing out loud at least once. The timing is just so perfect, and the use of limited, minimalist animation as mentioned by CynicClinic (the other YouTuber I’ve seen talk about this show) only adds punchiness that makes the humor even funnier. 

45. A Place Further than the Universe

In the wake of studio Madhouse’s implosion around 2011 when many of its staff left, the production quality became more erratic across the rest of the 2010s, even with several noteworthy titles across the decade with the exceptional art design of the studio’s pre-2011 output. Though, with extremely popular shows like No Game No Life, One Punch Man, and Hunter x Hunter 2011 being released to great acclaim in this era, partially for their visual presentation, the studio has hardly been dormant in the 2010s and I think it’s safe to conclude that their foundations being hollowed out to a degree won’t stop them from creating technically marvelous digital anime in the future. One such series that completely blew up massively back in 2018 was A Place Further Than the Universe, an adventure series starring a cast of four girls fulfilling their respective ambitions by sailing to Antarctica to find one of the girls’ missing mother. It was a ludicrously widely praised show that was a near inescapable critical darling among the anime YouTube (hence referred to anitube, because it’s more commonly used and less letters to type) crowd, partially because of how unanimously inspiring the characters’ struggles to accomplish something that is portrayed as nearly impossible for the first couple of episodes. As someone just entering high school in a radically different environment from my entire life beforehand at the time I found out about the show a few months after it aired with an unpublished manuscript and a head full of a pointed dream of becoming an author, I connected hard with main girl Himari’s desire to make something more of her high school life, even if it seemed impossible at first glance. Beyond just connecting with their struggles to grasp at stars, Himari and all the girls later introduced were the type of characters that inspire me (guess how many times you’ll hear that verb in anime analysis videos on the show). The socially awkward yet absurdly hardworking Shirase who went so far as to work enough time at her jobs to pay for her trip to Antarctica out of pocket to find her mother was the type of crazy to light a fire under even a generation of jaded adults (I mean that both metatextually and in-universe of course). While I didn’t quite personally resonate with the show on the level I expected to past the first 3 episodes, where the struggle of Himari to escape her own doubt and stagnation were when I most resonated with the show, I enjoyed all the characters’ personalities, their fun chemistry, and their growth alongside each other in their chase of this wild dream. Though, this was bolstered to incredible heights by one of the best Madhouse regular directors, Atsuko Ishizuka, who’s overwhelming cinematic lighting and compositions lent an air of gravitas to every emotional beat, every uproarious triumph, every crushing sorrow, and every flash of inspiration, with the trademark balance of goofy personality driven comedy and heightened melodrama of Jukki Hanada’s scripts. The character designs are gorgeous and proportionally built to be more anatomically emphasized in the way that fellow Madhouse regular Takahiro Yoshimatsu seems to have mastered across many of his shows. On the whole, Yorimoi is one of the most broadly appealing and straightforwardly compelling coming-of-age tales that could be classified under the “cute girls doing cute things” moniker, making it an easy landmark title of the decade that I’m glad got produced. 

46. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Shifting gears to something completely uncontroversial, I finally watched Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood after a decade of observing its reputation as the most universally acclaimed anime ever made. Though, when I started the show in earnest, it came after hearing the minority of criticisms that had been steadily popping up against the show, particularly in relation to its 2003 counterpart. The divergences from the manga, darker tone, and more fleshed out take on what would become the first 13 episodes of Brotherhood convinced me to watch all of that series first. In a decade where glossy revivals of dormant franchises started picking up steam, FMA Brotherhood is the poster child for both the potential and pitfalls of these types of modernizations. While I’d say FMA Brotherhood has more technically impressive and consistent action animation than the original, Seiji Mizushima’s directing and Michiru Oshima’s music for 2003 is more cinematic and thoughtfully integrated (and as an aside, Yutaka Nakamura only worked on the first two OPs of Brotherhood, while some of his animation cuts in the 03 series are highlights of the entire franchise). While Brotherhood adapts the manga mostly well and faithfully after the first cour, 2003 starts strong right out the gate but with anime-original elements that can be hit or miss depending on how much you appreciate them thematically (“filler” episodes in the first half, the utterly bonkers left turn of an ending, the and… Archer). The supporting cast in Brotherhood is overall often more fleshed out and vibrant, but the main antagonists of 2003 are mostly more nuanced and fascinating. Though, that in itself is underselling how I think the cast dynamics and tone in both shows feed into each of their respective thematic goals pretty well, with 2003 being more of a tale of the brutal costs of trying to hold on to long gone bonds and attaining the unattainable and Brotherhood being a tale of the fortitude and value of humanity even with all its shortcomings through the intersections of relationships formed between its large cast of characters from a varied range of backgrounds. Despite not considering it a favorite myself, why I’m ultimately support (and hope for) Brotherhood’s enduring placement as the #1 anime on a site as dubious as MyAnimeList is that it feels like the most universal representation of anime as a medium. The range of its points of appeal is vast, its wide pool of characters is endearing and/or interesting, its narrative scale is epic (at least my modern anime standards), there’s no fanservice, filler, or significant dips in animation quality, its tone can alternate between light hijinx and grimmer drama, its its narrative payoffs are plentiful and only become more frequent as it builds to an excellent climax which pulls out all the stops to bring memorable, emotionally satisfying moments as everything ties together neatly and cohesively, and its life-affirming humanist core themes are universal yet thoroughly woven enough in the text to have enough meat for the critics to chew on. It’s the most polished form of shounen battle anime, the most broadly appealing type of anime there is, from a studio who had been perfecting the craft of cracking the West for the prior decade mainly with their popular action shows (e.g. Cowboy Bebop the movie, FMA 2003, Soul Eater, Eureka Seven, and outside of action with Ouran Highschool Host Club) and proceed to continue doing so for the following decade. I’m saying all this, and I didn’t even really like the show until episode 22, having been more aggravated by the obnoxiously jarring comedy, flatter direction, truncated pacing in the first cour, and less immersive sense of tone that generally set a pretty weak basis for my investment in the show moving forward, with the undercooked handling of certain scenes in those early episodes weakening later character moments and emotional beats that hinged upon them. Though, after the first scenes of Brotherhood that I considered truly worth the show’s legendary status in the last few minutes of episode 22, the show finally fully earned my investment and mostly kept that momentum growing all the way to its excellent ending. Sometimes I wonder how much higher I’d hold FMA Brotherhood in my mind if I had watched it as one of my first shounen battle anime instead of the much more controversial Fairy Tail, only to come to the conclusion that FT’s deeply woven found-family element, its much longer episode count, its calmer and sometimes outright random filler episodes (which were at their best in the 1st season that ran from 2009 to 2013), its unfettered, reckless, and even logic-defying earnesty, its iconic soundtrack (that Celtic flair, tho), even its fanservice that permeated at least 80% of the character designs (talking both the ripped men and curvy women), and more were all specific elements of that show made it connect with me in a specific way at the specific time I watched it. That’s the thing about Brotherhood, though. It’s the best anime at being broadly appealing, but in that way it could never be any higher on my personal list. Despite my nostalgic fondness for what’s probably the most infamous shounen battle anime ever, I wouldn’t consider the genre my thing for the most part. That said, the fact that it resonates much more strongly with so many other people and rarely ever leaves people outright not caring for it by the end is a testament to a level of resonance and technical craft that I respect in and of itself, and I’m perfectly happy for it to remain the go-to “most acclaimed anime of all time” (for whatever that’s worth).

47. Happy Sugar Life

Another trend in the 2010s was the edgelord schlock anime, which seemingly started with the explosive popularity of Mirai Nikki in 2011 and went on to produce absurdly grimdark death games seemingly just trying to one-up themselves to the point of being mostly impossible to take seriously. The studio behind Mirai Nikki, Studio Asread, seemingly built their entire portfolio off this type of anime (or similarly trashy ecchi anime). While a lot can be said about the edgier takes on different genres like isekai and magical girls that became popular during the ‘10s, the particular edgelord subversion that I think Happy Sugar Life is going for is romance. While it certainly can become comically over-the-top in its own edginess, what kept me intrigued was the psychotic yandere MC keeping a little girl in her house Satou’s honest attempts to learn what healthy love actually is and how she might be one of the more sane characters in this show full of maniacs and a few misguided younger characters pursuing unhealthy relationship dynamics due to their warped perceptions of love and the person they’re pursuing. While how the characters act is highly exaggerated to the point of unrealisticness, what kept the show engaging and sticky in my mind was the intrigue in seeing these extremely twisted personalities bounce off each other in a funhouse mirror version of a romance drama. It also helps that the directing has occasional bursts of creativity that ramp up the vividness of the tone and characters’ emotions. There’s one episode shot mostly from first person perspective with a painter character who’s speaking is only represented by a radio-like white line on a black background with static-y noises, wavering ever more wildly depending on the character’s desperation to control Satou as he paints her. It’s an interesting way to represent possessiveness in a one-off character, that romanticized view of someone and more specific to this character the desire to dissociate while still being a voyeur to this one perfect, captured image, possessiveness itself being a running theme throughout the show. With horror anime being already sparse in anime compared to other mediums, the few that come out that are actually good tend to stick out in how they present their themes compared to the rest of the medium. Though, due to the edginess of its premise and its general lack of restraint with what’s at its core very delicate subject matter relating to abuse and extremely toxic relationships, for many people this show will remain firmly in the failed attempts of anime horror. While I didn’t find Happy Sugar Life particularly scary, its main character being ultimately sincere and legitimately one of the most sane (or least insane) characters in the show made her an interesting foil to many of the other cast members and an entertaining protagonist since her psychotic malice is primarily directed at people with an even more twisted perception of love than her. In the end, Satou’s arc comes down to examining and reforming her own warped perception of love to protect the person she cares the most about, Shio, who in herself is carrying a whole ton of baggage under the mental defense mechanism of living as a happy child. Within the campy levels of unhinged characters and emotions that were common in these 2010s edgelord romps, the most interesting allure I’ve found with the small audience who did unironically resonate with some of these shows was the glimmer of light motivates the protags to survive in a world of unfiltered and exaggerated darkness. Thinking back on an anime like Magical Girl Site (which, as covered in a YouTube vid by Joyce Stick, seemingly adapted the source material to deliberately emphasize the solidarity and sympathy for its cast of brutally tortured children), even if the issues are heightened to unrealistic extremes, it could be cathartic in its own way to have the world’s cruelty portrayed with all its subtleties stripped away to instead portray a heightened emotional reality that’s as viscerally painful and chaotic as the worst moments of trauma can be. Most crucially, it’s those small glimmers of joy and hope in an existence that feels like it’s constantly beating you down and kicking all your vulnerabilities that really cements that resonance as something more powerful. Magical Girl Site is a bit different in that its protagonists do not keep a younger child locked in their house to protect them with romantic feelings toward them. And yet, with Satou being only a teenager herself, her traumatic upbringing must be confronted and gradually overcome for her to protect the one character in this show who’s legitimate innocence not only makes her the biggest light in the dark but also beacon of “purity” that many of the characters want for themselves: Shio. There’s much to be said about HSL’s exploration of “pure good” as a concept and the ways it can be perceived, seeing as that’s another thematic core that runs through the premise’s main subversion and the title itself, but I’ve already gone on for too long unraveling what about easily the most controversial anime on this list ended up sticking in my mind for 4 years. While Happy Sugar Life, Magical Girl Site, and many of the 2010s anime attempting edgy subversions end bittersweetly (emphasis on the bitter), what separates the self-indulgent edgefests that I hate from the marginally less indulgent edgefests that interested me was the cherishing of hope in human connection even as the people surrounding them threaten to eat them alive and abuse them for their own gain. In the vein the edgelord king himself, Mohiro Kitoh (despite the quality-wise controversial adaptations of Bokurano and Narutaru) and darker coming-of-age stories like Alien 9 and Evangelion, the best of these 2010s edgefests often have sympathy for the emotional scars and burdens adults can leave on children that can make growing up in a harsh world feel like an apocalypse. Though, they also portray the power these children have to break the cycle of suffering through embracing the warmth of solidarity that can come from true human connections, the most powerful basis of support to live through the torture that reality can be. Happy Sugar Life is then about children in search of that true human connection raised in a warped world that deprived them of it, and the stumbling steps they take as they attempt to reach it.

48. One Punch Man (season 1 only)

One of the most popular anime of the decade, One Punch Man was one of the anime I had been watching in my phase of passively checking out anime here and there back in the mid-2010s. Again, I heard about the show from PokemonRangerBoy12 and Anime America, mainly intrigued by the mass of memes that have permeated mainstream consciousness of the show. I checked out the first episode and left it at that for awhile, only to return to binge the whole first season on a day-off from school. It’s comedic spoof of its action narrative is so absurd and addicting that it’s pure hype fun. The two strongest aspects of OPM are its action animation and its exploration of its premise. The latter is perhaps some of the best of the decade, with extremely hard-hitting and kinetic scenes of sakuga that are insanely gratifying, exciting, or hilarious to watch depending on the context. Often it’s the comedic climaxes of most episodes that comprise the show’s most memorable scenes, the scenes that became inescapable memes in the wake of the show’s airing. Saitama just saying “okay” in the face of the over-the-top villainous monologue and subsequent power-charging of the most powerful being in the show in the thick of the season’s supposedly epic final arc is probably the most memetic scene of them all, and it’s one of the most holistic representation of the identity of the show. With Saitama as the main character, the typical shounen action narrative is not at all changed, but instead experienced from a new perspective. This perspective is from a human who has achieved their ultimate goal of insurmountable physical power, but who also feels completely unfulfilled when that endeavor proves to not be able to deal with any of their emotional hangups and has instead only become more isolated from the more ordinary humans around him. And from this perspective, this shounen action story is a farce. While everyone around Saitama takes the plot of OPM completely seriously, that’s only because they don’t have the unrivaled power to stand above it all and see it from a bird’s eye view. Instead, the world was actually operating on an unfair and punishing system which judges the value of heroes based solely on their physical prowess (power-scaling, maybe) and not any upstanding character traits that would actually befit a righteous hero (AKA Mumen Rider). From the bird’s eye view, Saitama also sees that the common citizens all feed buy into this absurd hierarchy and experiences it firsthand when he gets chastised in episode 6 for supposedly “stealing the credit” from legitimate S class heroes, since at this point, he’s far below that rank due to the prejudice of those judgemental forces sitting at the top of hierarchy taking every chance they can get to denounce him as unworthy of the rank. Along with the somewhat philosophical outlook of the show on the vapidness of what is essentially a shounen-action narrative that is written solely with powerscaling in mind, Saitama’s position as the protagonist also has lends itself to an occasionally emotional narrative throughline. Even with all of the external conflict occurring under his nose, he can hardly be brought to care in the face of his more pressing internal conflict of not being able to find much meaning in his life due to his powers just making every physical challenge a cakewalk to overcome and providing him no emotional development that would actually help him make some friends or interact with people in general. Therefore, he mostly holes up in his bedroom in a pretty drab apartment building to wait for the next force of evil to give his life some meaning. There’s a subtly sad element of Saitama’s power for me. The immense dedication and work shown in his flashbacks in episodes 1 and 2 that took to earn his omnipotent strength seemingly gave him tunnel vision. He had dedicated so much of his life to that one struggle, that one purpose of getting physically stronger, so that when he’s completed it, he cannot see any other purpose to his life outside of fighting monsters until he can somehow struggle even more to reach an even stronger state. Thus, in his downtime, Saitama doesn’t really know what to do with himself besides sit around and play video games. His social ineptitude, lack of manners, and general unfulfillment are mainly a result of that tunnel vision. Though, an interesting little detail is that he actually comes close to finding a solution. The interesting thing about his relationship with video games is that Saitama cannot breeze through it with his superpowers; they are a legitimate challenge that he has to once again work to overcome. That’s why one of my favorite scenes of season 2 is when King comes over to Saitama’s apartment and curbstomps him at a video game, giving Saitama a goal that he actually gets frustrated with out of anything in the entire series up to that point. Well, that’s excluding the crowd of people calling him a phony hero, which is also a conflict that he can’t solve by raising his fists (at least not raising it at them). Though, the most significant struggle for Saitama that I see his character heading towards is the struggle of building relationships with people. Throughout the entire series, Saitama becomes more fulfilled or is at least led towards being more fulfilled when other people enter his life. Genos breaks the monotony of Saitama’s routine of sitting around until he fights monsters when he suggests that he joins the Hero Association, which basically leads Saitama in the direction of deconstructing the system for the rest of the series and also introducing him to all the other friends that he meets. Saitama’s interactions with Mumen Rider at the bar genuinely feel like the most moving parts of the show because they’re the most grounded that Saitama has ever been, chatting with someone with no powers who he can just hangout normally with, as even Genos is caught up in his own dramatic shonen narrative. King in season 2 demonstrates this to a further degree, since he’s also just a human without superpowers who Saitama can interact with solely on the basis of their chemistry (based mainly in their common love of video games). At one point in season 2, King just spells out the merits of friendship to Saitama while they’re walking in the streets together, which he unfortunately goes onto ignore because he’s still a tunnel-visioned superhero at this point in the story. I’d expect the manga to introduce new friends with new perspectives into Saitama’s life to eventually make him realize the value of human connection, leading to his ultimate emotional satisfaction at the end of the series (I haven’t read any of the manga, so I wouldn’t know). With all that said, the biggest flaw with One Punch Man is that it can too frequently slip into vapidness of the action narrative it was critiquing when Saitama isn’t onscreen to give us that bird’s eye view. I got genuinely frustrated and bored during parts of the Deep Sea King arc, because I didn’t care about any of the characters enough individually to buy into the emotional stakes of that plotline. While Genos and Mumen Rider are fun because of their place in the story, their personalities just aren’t fleshed-out enough for me to be all that invested when they’re thrust in the protagonist’s seats until Saitama arrives to predictably wipe the floor with the villain as usual. This is ultimately the biggest problem I had with season 2 (writing-wise at least), since so much time was spent on some of the most generic shounen action plotlines imaginable being played mostly straight, except now that’s for the majority of the season. I only sat through season 2 out of misguided dedication to the franchise; there are A LOT of problems I had with it that make it an almost completely different show from season 1. That first season had a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve to pull with its inherently excellent concept, executed with enough punch in its presentation to make it a memorable joyride to go on to stick with me for the second half of the decade.

49. Oregairu (seasons 1-2)

In the decade where light novel adaptation began dominating the industry, a new wave of self-aware otaku culture parodies came crashing down in response to the increasingly mindlessly self-indulgent anime culture that sprung forth. While these types of meta-aware anime were nothing new, the 2010s in particular became so oversaturated with frequently half-baked attempts at meta-humor and trope subversions at the core of a show’s entire premise that everyone in the western fandom at least seemed to be sick of how lazy even the more ironic riffs on the tropes were. Oregairu is a particularly divisive take on this type of subversion, because its main character is so up his own ass with his Holden Caulfield-esque comments on how fake all his classmates and their social lives were in the way any pretentious loner teenager would be when isolated from anybody to rebuttal them. Though, the first indicator that set aside my cynicism was how the story is fully aware of how childish our main guy Hachiman is, and goes on to unravel his loner mindset until he learns to appreciate that the people around him are actually much more conscious and nuanced individuals than he initially projects them to be, and how he has a lot more growing to do in order to form meaningful connections of his own. While the legacy of these cynical, smartass light novel protagonists learning to grow close to a group of mostly girls chronologically extends Haruhi Suzumiya’s Kyon, to Monogatari’s Araragi, to Oregairu’s Hachiman, and Bunny Girl Senpai’s Sakuta have had diminishing returns as the tropes only get more mindlessly regurgitated and self-indulgent as the years go on, to the point where the pseudo-harem elements and overwrought melodrama feel less earned or interesting with each repetition (and that’s not even including the many outright dogshit LN adaptations across the 2010s that also follow this template). Though I wasn’t a huge fan of the more generic melodramatic bend the show took after season 1, which felt more even-handed between a parody and an underlying character drama, I still appreciated the catharsis from seeing the main three characters gradually learn how to form G E N U I N E relationships with each other with increasing sincerity, and the thoughtful storyboarding of season 1 traded for surprisingly Naoko Yamada-esque character animation in seasons 2-3 only helped bring to life the little nuances in these characters’ emotions and like only a good anime adaptation can.

Honorable Mentions (maybe don’t include writing about them, I don’t have that much to say about all of these)

50. Fate/Zero
51. Flip Flappers
52. Promare
53. Vinland Saga
54. Okko’s Inn (movie)
55. Space Patrol Luluco
56. Mirai of the Future
57. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
58. One Off
59. Kyousougiga
60. Penguin Highway
61. Aria the Avvenire
62. Gundam Thunderbolt
63. The Tale of Princess Kaguya
64. Oshiete Galko-chan
65. Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! 
66. Prison School
67. Angel Beats

Shorts + Short films

1. Samurai Noodles: The Originator 
2. Ano Hi no Kanojo-tachi
3. Furiko
4. Rain Town
5. Anime Tenchou Movie
6. Fastening Days

Cut content:

• It’s, to be mild, frustrating to see Jun Maeda get harassed off of Twitter by “anime fans” who hated the stupid twist in that show. 
• as broad as “cute things” could be stretched to include shows with girls fighting in tanks for sport

Honorable Mentions (maybe don’t include writing about them, I don’t have that much to say about all of these)

1. Flip Flappers
2. Promare
3. Vinland Saga
4. Okko’s Inn (movie)

Hands down the most technically impressive animation that Madhouse produced from this decade. The film is gorgeous top to bottom, flooring the much more standard-looking TV series released alongside it in 2018. Helmed by Madhouse veteran from spanning back to the 80s.

5. Space Patrol Luluco
6. Mirai of the Future
7. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
8. One Off
9. Kyousougiga

Rie Matsumoto’s quickly rose to become one of my favorite directors in the medium, with her explosive, colorful, dense visuals being precisely my aesthetic, blended with a clear beating heart underlying all of her chaotic spectacles. While I haven’t gotten around to Kekkai Sensen in time to see if it would make this list and the Gotcha! Pokemon music video she directed in 2020 being head and shoulders my favorite thing she’s directed thus far, that leaves the beautiful oddity that is Kyousougiga. A tale of fractured familial bonds told in one of the most bizarre and extravagant ways I’ve ever seen in this medium, while I couldn’t connect as much to the extremely exaggerated characters used to convey its themes, the visuals hold the most sway in my mind, especially in the stellar first episode and the semi-episodic structured first half. It was certainly odd to stumble upon this in I think 2018 or 2019 because I thought it looked cool and being taken to this imagination overload of a show, so I’ll probably need a rewatch to gain more clarity on the overall experience and see if it’d resonate with me on a more personal level then.

10. Penguin Highway
11. Aria the Avvenire

If I ever make a best anime of ‘00s list, Aria’s three TV seasons would almost certainly make the cut, and I might get to talking about the two new Aria movies from 2021 whenever Benedizione gets subbed, but Avvenire is infamously one of the weaker entries in the franchise. However, I love this franchise. While the designs, directing, and general art style aren’t quite as serenely appealing as ‘00s Aria, Choro Club’s music is still as soothing as ever and Junichi Satou’s tendency to slip in nuggets of sagely optimistic wisdom into nearly everything he directs made me shed a tear yet again. This OVA in particular hones in on the temporality and miraculousness of the chance encounters with people that result in the types of long-lasting bonds that influence you forever. It’s an outpouring of gratitude even within the tears of saying goodbye, followed by a walking forward to the new encounters of tomorrow, those new beauties that can always be found in this vast world of chance and coincidences. The greatest core values of this franchise are alive and well, a warm, beautiful appreciation for even the little things taken for granted in life.

12. Gundam Thunderbolt

War, chaos, and jazz, baby. Some of the slickest mecha animation to come of the decade and a solid double-sided narrative makes for a fun, well-done war action flick, even if it still falls into the trappings of making war look cool via visual spectacle even while condemning it thematically. Anyways, I need to watch more Gundam.

13. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The only Ghibli movie from this decade I remember watching, since my experience with the studio mostly is contained to childhood memories of watching movies in after-care at my elementary school. Though, this is easily one of the most aesthetically interesting anime films of the decade, with a fairy tale-based narrative that fully immersed me in the life story of this girl’s coming-of-age. I watched this film in middle school before my anime fandom properly kicked in, so like every Ghibli movie I’ll have to watch it again sometime down the line.

14. Oshiete Galko-chan
15. Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! 
16. Angel Beats

One of my first anime after hearing about it from the few anime related YouTubers I watched at the time, its insert songs, OP, and ED are iconic, Another Epilogue is an excellent wrap to the series’s loose ends, and its bizarre tone, comedy, and magical realism atmosphere are pure Key and Jun Maeda-core in a way I’ve only appreciated more as I’ve come to see their better and worse anime series. Key anime’s are melodramatic, comical, obtuse, and weird in the type of way that feels very distinctly “anime” yet in a way that’s somehow feels endearingly sincere instead of cynical/annoying in a way that felt most common in 2000s anime specifically (at least from what I’ve seen). Watching something like The Day I Became God, it felt almost out of place in the 2020s anime landscape, in a way that someone smarter than me could probably explain, since I can’t quite put it into words but it’s easy to feel. 

Upon searching AniDb for the staff of Yofukashi no Uta, I quickly grew to appreciate the chief director Tetsuya Miyanishi for doing an incredible job directing and storyboarding the show’s OP. Oozing with memorable imagery and compositions matching the beat of the music, his striking directing and storyboards helped to create one of the most distinctive OPs of the season. However, it feels like his contribution to the show’s essence has been overshadowed next to popular series director Tomoyuki Itamura, who seems to be receiving the bulk of the attention from fans due to his prior work directing most of the wildly popular Monogatari series and the recent Vanitas no Karte. Yofukashi is Miyanashi’s directorial debut helming a full TV series, but the visual experimentation is likely partially influenced by his prior work alongside his co-director Itamura. Miyanishi also directed and storyboarded both OPs of Vanitas no Kartes and directed ep 6 of Owarimonogatari 2nd season at Shaft, both shows directed by Itamura. I had wondered if the varied use of textography in this OP could be traced back to the influence of Tatsuya Oishi, who was director of Bakemonogatari before Itamura made his directorial debut inheriting the Monogatari franchise along with some of Oishi’s stylistic quirks (one being the use of brief text flashes on monochromatic backgrounds that Oishi started in Bake and Itamura carried through to the seasons directed). Related to Shaft, he’s directed episodes 8, 14, and 20 of March Comes in Like a Lion season 2 and worked as a assistant production manager on episode 7 of Madoka Magica, which may contribute to the Shaft-lite style he’s taken to storyboarding eps 1 and 4 of Yofukashi (with there only being 4 eps out at the time of writing this). While Miyanashi’s font choice and at times rapidly moving text in Yofukashi’s OP resembles a modern music video anime a bit more than Oishi’s style, I wonder if having worked on Monogatari himself and with a director heavily influenced by Oishi was part of the inspiration for Miyanashi’s use of text here along with the particular timing of the editing, flat colored shading, and shot compositions which all felt reminiscent of Shaft’s shows.

The massive walls of text spread across the white backgrounds towards the end even reminded me of Ef: A Tale of Memories/Melodies’s OPs back from Shaft’s early Shinbo days in 2007-08, but those were directed by Shin Oonuma, who had left Shaft by 2010 and thus is a bit too disconnected from Miyanashi’s lineage for me to even tentatively believe he had an influence. Regardless of that, the OP’s visuals are nonetheless extremely Shaft-like.

I’m excited for Miyanashi’s already eccentric style and to see what his future holds once he directs a series completely on his own. Studio Shaft’s iconic visual style has been fairly diluted and inconsistent in the 2020s so far, since a lot of noteworthy staff members left around 2018-2019, but it’s good to see some of the directors still able to bring a similarly intense style to shows outside of the studio.