Anime

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 Norn9 to mopey angst drama Divine Gate to the just plain bizarre, what were they thinking Phantasy Star Online 2 the Animation. At this point I hadn’t yet learned that you could just give up on series, that you didn’t need to finish just because you had started.

This is day eight of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2017: when an ultra low budget flash anime conquered the world.

2015 was the year I put my mouth to the spigot of seasonal anime, opened the throttle and drank deep.

Rolling Girls was one of those done in one series that did what it had set out to do and didn’t need anything more. As I put it a few years ago, it’s basically a bunch of mob characters on a road trip. By now it has become a bit of a cult favourite, but I think for the longest time people didn’t know what to make of it because it didn’t fit neatly in any particular genre. The protagonists remained more bystanders than heroes and was all a bit messy. The same could be said about Junketsu no Maria, about a virgin witch wanting to end the Hundred Years War between France and England, opposed by God himself. Again, not a series you knew what to expect of going in. For another series in the same season, Yuri Kuma Arashi (“Lesbian Bear Storm”) the unexpected was the expected, directed as it was by one of the Revolutionary Girl Utena and Penguin Drum creators. I hate the first episode of it so much that it took me years to finish it, once I understood what it actually tried to do.

Koufuku Graffiti was a cute slice of moe show about a middle school girl who loves to cook, having learned to do so from her grandmother. It all sounds and looks very cozy, with her making friends through her cooking, but that’s only on the surface. In the first episode we find her living alone, her grandmother having died some time before, her parents doing “important jobs” halfway round the world not bothering with their child and she herself pretty obviously clinically depressed. It’s only through a distant cousin visiting her that she learns to rediscover the joys of cooking and eating and slowly manages to get out of her slump. The worst thing about all this is that I don’t think the series itself understood how depressed she was or how shitty her parents were. Ending theme is very cute though.

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata on the surface seems like just another typical otaku bait show: obnoxious teenage nerd makes dating game together with a group of girls all much more talented than he, who for some inexplicable reason are all attracted to him but he’s too dense to see it. He even has a muse that inspired him to create this game … until he discovers his muse is his very ordinary classmate Megumi, who just doesn’t behave like a proper game character. All the other girls are well defined stereotypes, but she insists on being vague, undefined, difficult. Megumi is what makes the series work, deeply sarcastic, easily looking through the absurdities of otaku life and our nominal protagonist’s pretensions, but kind enough not to shatter his illusions too quickly. It’s still a celebration of otakudom, with the highlight being the clip above, but it’s smart enough to recognise its fallacies.

Noragami Aragato was the first sequel to an anime I’d seen already that I watched on a weekly basis. Liek the original, it was a good fantasy action show and it could’ve done with a second sequel. Peeping Life TV Season 1?? was a strange improv/sketch show using all kinds of classic anime characters like Astro Boy. Everybody loathed Himouto! Umaru-chan because the protagonist was a hideously entitled lazy otaku moeblob, but I liked her. She calmed down after the first couple of episodes and the friendship between her and her friends (a shy country girl, a tsundere with a scary face, a rival/princess character) was great.

Go! Princess Precure was the first Precure series I’d finished after I’d watched the original and I would still argue it was the best. Most people like Heart Catch Precure best, but I think this just is slightly better. There’s some gorgeous animation in the later episodes.

What else did I like? Kekkai Sensen was an urban fantasy/superhero show set in a twisted version of New York. Show by Rock!! saw a shy girl isekaied to a world of funny animals where she became a member of a rock group and may have found love with one of its members. Hibike! Euphonium saw KyoAni pushing the boundaries of tv anime again with its depictions of band concerts. Ore Monogatari!! was a very sweet romance anime. Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo was a romcom where the two leads swapped bodies. Shokugeki no Soma had people orgasming after eating good food. Death Parade was a good, quirky fantasy series but its first episode initially put me off with its nihilism. Dungeon ni Deai wo Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka had the busty god Hestia to recommend itself.

The Statistics: 179 series registrered in my library, 119 watched. Autumn 2015 was the first season I watched week by week, though there were two series from the Summer season I’d also watched week by week: Wakakozake, about an office lady having a nice meal after work and Monster Musume, about a hapless nerd having to take care of an ever increasing menagerie of monster girls. The first was cute, the second horny without being creepy. the best series I watched in Autumn was One-Punch Man, the first anime I saw that made me buy the original manga. Other than that I followed no less than four different Magic School Battle Harem series (Asterix Wars, Rakudai Kishi No Cavalry, Lance N` Masques, Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai, a tiddy show (Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid) and even some acvtual good shows (Concrete Revolutio, Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru.

This is day seven of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2016: motto motto anime.

2014 is the year Metafilter forced me to watch Aldnoah.Zero. But apart from that it was a pretty good year.

That Witch Craft Works was an …interesting show you can perhaps tell from its ending theme, where cute little chibi witches are singing while stuck in medieval torture devices. It seemws to start as yet another series where an ordinary teenage dirt bag accidently enters the magical backstages of the world to get involved into some sort of secret war and get himself a battle harem. But instead, he’s the hapless princess that needs to be rescued by the most popular girl in the school, who turns out to be a witch. As does his little sister. And the various transfer students that turn up all of a sudden. All of it is done so deadpan that for the longest time I wasn’t sure whether this was all mean to be taken serious or whether the characters really were as dumb as they seemed to be. An urban fantasy series for those who like the Dortmunder crime novels.

Thanks to that Metafilter group watch I got interested into watching anime properly again. Aldnoah.Zero then was the first series I actually watched seasonally, as the episodes came out. Not knowing anything about Crunchyroll or streaming or whatever, I watched it the old fashioned way: torrents. And then only for the first three-four episodes? Because of going to the London SF Worldcon I stopped watching for a while and never picked it up again. I ended up finishing it much much later and getting disappointed like everybody else.

Trinity Seven is not a good series,let me make that clear, but it was one of the first modern anime series I finished when I really started watching anime again in late 2014/2015. Unlike Witch Craft Works this series took its battle harem setting completely serious, with our protagonist being just an ordinary teenager until it turns out he has vast magical powers and must learn to use them to harness the Trinity Seven, the seven most powerful mages at his new magical school. All girls of course. It was a fun series, mostly because it was the first time I’d watched a series like this and all those cliches looked fresh to me.

the Japan Animator Expo on the other hand was very good, a series of stand alone shorts created to showcase the art and range of Japanese animation. If you look closer, you can see the inspirations for several later series pop up here already. It used to be all available on its own website, but as of now you need to scour Youtube to find the individual episodes.

This aside, for me 2014 was more a year of good fun series than a year in which anything really extraordinary came out. Space Dandy was fine but not the saviour of anime that it was proclaimed to be at the time. (And how often has it been mentioned since?) Instead, when I think of 2014 I think of shows like Noragami about a down on his luck, penniless god and the high school girl bound to him. Or Hitsugi no Chaika, about the daughter of the defeated demonic overlord, who is going round the world attempting to find the pieces of his corpse so she can give him a proper burial. Or Ore Twintail ni Narimasu, where a boy with a twintail fetish is transformed in a magical girl by an alien scientist to fight alien invaders with other, lesser fetishes.

On the sports front, Baby Steps was mostly only servicably (ha!) animated tennis show, but with a compelling story that saw me finish the first season in less than a week. Noticable for having our new to sport protagonist being inspired by a female tennis player and the series never weakened her to big him up. Haikyuu!! was the next big thing for those people who like cute boys playing cool sports. Ping Pong on the other hand wasn;t cute at all, but one of the best anime series ever nonetheless. More cute boys were on call in the second season of Free.

Idol wise, we got the launch of Pripara. Every girl in the world, at one point in their lives, will receive a pri ticket, which will give her access to the magical world of PriPara. Where, if they want to, they can become idols. What sets the series apart is its acceptance of all kinds of girls being idols, even girls who some people may think are actually boys. An incredibly positive and affirming series, with a message for our own world. At 140 episodes it is a bit of an investment to watch, but I found it incredibly entertaining. The sort of series I’d never thought I’d watch.

Statistically: 173 series on my to watch list, of which 98 have already been watched.

This is day six of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2015: when all hope was lost and I started watching anime seasonally.

2012 was the year of tankery.

Not the first series to notice that geeks liked cute girls and geeks like military stuff, so why not combine the two, but one of the more succesful. One season, several OVAs, a movie sequel, another movie sequel, in six parts and the revival of the local economy of the town in which it was set thanks to geek tourism. The idea of tanks battles being a typical female sport, a pastime to make young girls “loveable like the clatter of iron tracks is hilarious and the series took it all serious enough. Making warfare look all cute and moe isn’t necessarily the most progressive thing to do, but the series was great fun and the battles were awesome. At heart, this was basically a high school sports series, just with tanks. You got the setup, the assembly of teams, the challenges to get to the final, the inevitable training and powering up sequences to take on increasingly stronger enemies and a ragtag bunch of underdogs taking on the elites of the tankery world and winning despite the odds.

Another was another type of anime altogether. Supposed to be an atmospheric, terrifying horror series, it’s instead most remembered for its incredible camp, over the top death scenes like the one above. Who the hell sharpens their umbrella this much? Naff as it was, I did like it though. Horror being rare in anime, beggars cannot be choosers. The only other series that even touched horror were the comedy zombie romp Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? in its second season and the also zombie based romcom Sankarea. You might also count the survival death game Btooom while High School of the Death got an OVA, but that was it.

Moving from horror to comedy, this was in much better shape this year. Kill Me Baby stoner humour may not have been to everybody’s tastes, but surely nobody disliked the the ending theme with its strange dance. Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou/the Daily Lives of High School Boys was somewhat similar to last year’s Nichijou, consisting of a mix of slapstick and character based humour, each episode have multiple sketches and a largish cast to act them out. Also like Nichijou, it’s one of the best comedies of the decade. A much more niche sort comedy was provided by Joshiraku, with a quartet of four rakugo storytellers talking to each other, the voice over each episode reminding the viewer that even if the dialogue is uninteresting, at least the girls were cute. Even more niche: Teekyuu a short, rapid fire tennis based comedy that has gotten seven or eight sequels since. You need more knowledge of Japanese than I have to get the most of it though.

On the romance side of things, I liked Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun enough to also finish the original manga, but you have to be able to move past the very early scene in which the male lead threatens to rape the female protagonist. In general the story revolves around a stoic 16 year old girl only interested in getting a good job and career and therefore rejecting anything that threatens her studying. the male lead on the other hand is a wild child who in the end only she can tame. What makes the series is the humour and the characters, as well as the supporting cast. Sukitte Li Na Yo meanwhile revolved around a shy girl without friends who catches the attention of her school’s prince and slowly comes out of her shell as a result. Their relationship is established relatively quickly, rather than keeping the will they won’t they pattern of most romance series.

If you’re more in the mood fo a harem series, Oniichan dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai yo ne! was fairly typical but with the added zest of incest. Something also present, but much less so in To Love-Ru: Darkness, based on one of the most succesful ecchi manga romances of the 21st century. Fun with various alien princesses and their love for an unremarkable high school boy. The protagonist of Seitokai no Ichizon Lv. 2 might want it to be a harem series, but his harem mates refused. High School DxD was a pervy harem show, with the protagonist literally sell his soul to be surrounded by a bevy of demonic beauties. Completely basic, but popular enough to get several sequels over the course of the decade.

Of course the most important series of 2012 was a series whose succes would reshape anime for the next decade thanks to its setting, characters and well done wishfulfilment, a series based on Kawahara Reki’s already popular light novels. I’m talking of course about Accel World. Kidding. Sword Art Online, for all its flaws, for all that everybody got sick of it, was and is hugely influential, kicking off the whole Trapped in Fantasyland/Isekai genre. Whether videogameland or a more traditional but still RPG based fantasyland, the idea that your innate nerd ability to play games would make you king in another world was seductive to say the least. Personally, I’d argue that had the first SAO series stopped with Kirito coming out of his coma, it would’ve been a great series, but the second half of that first series undid most of the good it did. Nevertheless I’ve kept watching each new SAO series as they’ve come out. Best way to watch it is still the abridged series though.

It was a good year for idols. Yesterday I completely forgot to mention that Pretty Rhythm, which would evolve into the Pripara series, debuted in 2011, while this year saw the debut of its main rival, Aikatsu. Both are based on a range of arcade collectable card games and both are arguably the modern equivalents of the traditional Mahou Shoujo series: aimed at preteen and teen girls, featuring transformations, pretty dresses and everyday problems resolved through some form of magic, be it singing or otherwise. And whereas magical girl shows had the monster of the week as the highlight of each episode, the magical idol show has the performance of the week. When I got back into anime some five years ago I’d never suspect that I would be watching this sort of kid show, shows that aren’t even picked up by any of the streaming services here, but still fansubbed the old fashioned way. But I love them. They have heart, a surprising amount of depth and cute characters. On the more adult side, there was the biggest idol group in the world getting its own anime: AKB48 became AKB0048, underground freedom fighters in a Galaxy that had forbidden any kind of entertainment and especially idols. A pretty out there idea that was handled very well creating a series that worked well both as an idol series and a sort of space opera.

Good series not yet mentioned include two KyoAni series: Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, a lovely and hilarious romance between an embarassed ex-nerd and the girl who still believes in his dark history. That was almost as good as anime could get, but the more serious Hyouka has a shot at being the anime of the decade. So has Kyousougiga, a strange little story about three kids stuck in a mirror city. There were also two Monogatari series: Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari, combining somewhat pretensious philosophy with being horny on main. Nazo no Kanojo X managed to go even further with the latter, taking horny and perverting it into something unique if slightly nauseating if you’re sensitive to its kinks.

Statistically: I’ve gotten 164 shows in my library this year, showing that anime production was still increasing, having watched 90 of them, all of them after they aired. We’re sort of getting an idea of what modern anime is starting to look like this year, what with the debut of SAO, but also the establishment of the great Aikatsu/PriPara rivalry. There are more slice of moe series and fewer old fashioned harem shows as well.

This is day four of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2013, the year I started noticing anime again.