2017 showed that a great vision, storytelling and characterisation could overcome bargain basement animation.
Kemono Friends was made on a shoestring budget by a studio that barely employed a dozen people, as an ad for a mobile game that had already been shuttered. It became one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of 2017because it had something many much more slicker anime lacked: heart. The simple story of a girl waking up without memories in the over grown ruins of a futuristic safari park, befriending a serval catgirl and going on a quest to find her origins was enough to hook people. It proved how effective a good setting and not being too quick to answer questions could be in keeping people interested. But it wouldn’t be half as good without the friendship between Kaban and Serval.
Biggest disappointment of the year has to go to Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul. The original Shingeki no Bahamut had been a nice fantasy romp and this started out strong as well despite missing Favaro, the original’s best feature. Instead we got a new protagonist, a half dragon girl just trying to earn a living in the capital with her inhuman strength. Best part of this was our heroine blushing and threatening to “hulk out” everytime she saw a bloke she fancied. But that all was traded away for a boring plot of humans oppressing both the angel and demon races after having gained the upper hand at the end of the first series. The villain responsible was boring but the series loved him and kept him winning and when I learned he was “redeemed” in the end with no consequences for his genocide, I checked out. Still got seven episodes to go but no desire to finish it.
Other disappointing sequels this year: Seiren, spiritual succesor to Amagami, one of the better harem romances. This time around it focused too much on the former’s penchant for strange fetishes and not enough on the actual romances. I didn’t like the tournament arc in the new Boku no Hero Academia season either. Most of those are a waste of time. Worse than that though was the remake of Kino no Tabi, for which the light novel fans got to vote for the stories to be adapted. Unfortunately that led to a certain incoherence compared to the original, while the adaptation itself was both bland and worse, took liberties with Kino’s gender. Kino after all is ungendered or non-binary, neither boy nor girl, but the new series seemed determined to undermine this, refering to them explicitly as a girl multiple times.
One series everybody loved but I didn’t was Net-juu no Susume. As I said in 2017: MMO Junkie is rape culture. You got the protagonist, a woman who plays a male character online, being manipulated in a date with one of her co-players, a bloke who plays a female character in the same game. He knows or suspects she is his fellow gamer; she doesn’t. It was all very icky especially with the rape jokey text shown above. A pity, as so much of the series was great otherwise. On the whole I ended up like the high school romcom Gamers! better: funnier, more sympathetic characters and no rape jokes.
Speaking of high school romance, both Tsuki ga Kirei and Just Because! were great examples of how to do one right. Both stayed away from the usual anime cliches, were a bit more realistic in their setting and characterisation. Both had some seriously good animation too, always in service to the story. Both also managed to break my heart a bit, especially the former, where the love triangle that had been created was resolved in the most realistic way possible. No endless spinning out, it was clear from the start only one person could win but it still hurt to see the other lose their love. Both in the end proved you could tell a satisfying romance with a proper ending in just twelve episodes.
On the slice of moe front, nothing was as moe as the pair of moeblobs and their kettenkrad travel around a post-apocalyptic wasteland in Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou. That particular series was the sort of melancholy that only the Japanese seem able to do, somehow finding a bit of healing in the death of humanity. Urara Meirochou was a more traditional slice of moe series, about four apprentice storytellers in a magical city steeped in Japanese mythology. Also a bit of yuri never hurts. Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon took a somehwat crap manga and made something beautiful out of it, as expected of KyoAni, creating a story about a working too hard software developer, her dragon maid and the dragon daughter they adopted. Frame Arms Girl did something similar, but with a high school girl and the intelligent, living action figures a friend sent to her to test. Action Heroine Cheer Fruits was a fun series about a couple of friends putting together an amateur hero show to promote their town. Dive was a rarity, a Free knockoff with lesser animated pretty boys going diving. Konohana Kitan was another Japanese mythology based series, this time about a fox spirit going to work at a traditional Japanese inn.
Unexpected gems this year included, of course, Houseki no Kuni, about genderless gem people fighting against alien abduction by what looked like Hindu=-esque gods.But also Animegataris a school club series that seemed to celebrate anime/otaku culture until it took a sharp right turn into showing what happens if you dive too deep into it. 18 If was a sort of anthology series about a guy who has to rescue all sorts of damsels in distress, stuck in dreams. Hit and miss, some of the episodes had some of the best animation I saw all year. Quanzhi Gaoshou was a Chinese series released here through Youtube, about a guy kicked off a pro-gaming team and making his way back. Kabukibu! was about a high school kabuki club and was surprisingly inclusive and supportive.
2017 in general was a strong year; some of the best series I haven’t even mentioned yet. Little Witch Academia would be my personal best series of the year. If only because my little niece watches it on Netflix. Well animated, well written, accesible without being patronising, this hit all the buttons for me. I even went as far as saying that LWA fanfic kept my sane that year.
Statistically, there were 163 series I wanted to watch this year, down ten from last year. I watched 148 of them, which does actually make it a better ratio than last year of 173/152. A scary amount of anime in any case.
This is day nine of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2018: a year of moe.
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