2016 started with a Studio Deen series about men telling stories on stage.
I had never heard of rakugo until Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinju. At the time I just watched everything that came out in a season, so I popped this on without knowning anything about it and before I knew it 45 minutes had passed and I’d barely noticed it. As I said the first time I took part in Twelve Days of Anime, this was anime of the year for me. And that in a very competitive year. what set it apart from me from every other good series released this year is the confidence with which it tells its story, not worried about showing entire rakugo performances, several minutes of looking at a guy on stage telling a story, relying on voice acting and character animation to keep your attention.
Another excellent series that came out early in the year was Hai to Gensou no Grimgar. What looked like just another isekai series, with a group of people kidnapped to a fantasy world, losing their memories in the process and forced to become adventurers to survive, turns into something else quickly. Basically, our heroes are just draftees in a race war against goblins and while all the competent people have joined other groups, our protagonists barely survive. I wrote about Grimgar before, one of my top ten anime of 2016. This was a series that showed isekai could be more than just cookie cutter power fantasy.
In an early indication that Netflix is the graveyard of anime, Kuromukuro was a great mecha series that nobody watched. It had great fights, interesting mecha designs (even if they were 3D), likeable characters (unsurprisingly as this was a P.A.Works series), a plot that actually got resolved and a high school girl teaming up with a 400 year old samurai to fight off an alien invasion. But since Netflix didn’t release it on a weekly basis but rather in two batches, it didn’t fit in with contemporary anime watching habits and it got lost in the flood of anime coming out. The other mecha series that didn’t get the attention it deserved had itself to blame. Production issues meant that the last few episodes of Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars had to be delayed. A pity, because here you had a super robot show with actual 2D, not 3D mecha.
2016 was chock-full of excellent series. Everybody remembers Yuri!!! on Ice of course, about a professional skater who feels he failed at his passion and his love life both, until his childhood idol comes over all the way to Japan from Russia to coach him and make him a champion again. But there was also the first season of Sangatsu no Lion, one of Shaft’s best series, about a depressed teenage shogi player who learns to enjoy life again through the love of the family of three sisters who more or less adopt him. It stood apart because of how faithful it was to the original manga, each episode adapting two chapters, in order without skipping the side stories the original indulged in.
then there was Flip FlapperS, an experimental and very gay Magical Girl series. The second season of Hibike! Euphonium, once again upping the standards for how to depict music playing in anime but disappointing by kiboshing the relationship between the main two characters. Gi(a)rlish Number was a deeply cynical look at the anime and voice actress industry. Classicaloid was a fun Sunrise kids’ show about various composers resurrected as androids and the poor girl who had to deal with their antics. Thunderbolt Fantasy may or may not have been anime, but the over the top wuxia puppet show from Taiwan was a surprise hit nonetheless.
Evne shows that should’ve been terrible, like Shounen Maid, about a young boy who starts living with his estranged uncle after his mother’s death and who earns his keep by acting as his maid, including the uniform, was actually rather good? It turned out to be less unfunny hijinks about a boy maid and more a surprisingly deep series about grief, memory and the importance of family and how to build one if you lost your own.
The funniest part of 2016 in hindsight is the number of people who complained about the isekai boom because we got Grimgar, Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! and later Re-Zero. All of which were rather atypical and were nothing compared to the flood of cookie cutter isekais of only one-two years later. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Biggest surprise of the year: Aggretsko, which everybody else only discovered two years later. A cute and cuddly Sanrio character, the red panda protagonist was a hapless office lady by day, a death metal screaming kareoke queen by night. Originally broadcast as a series of one minute shorts, a few years on it would get a proper series, was released on Netflix and was interesting and different enough it broke out of the Netflix trap to become a cult classic.
Statistics: 173 series registered, 151 series watched, for what I suspect is the best want to watch to watched ratio this decade. I watched a lot of crap though, from overly complicated harem nonsense like
This is day eight of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2017: when an ultra low budget flash anime conquered the world.
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