2019 was the year of this ridiculously cute dance.
2019 was also the year of watching much less anime for me. There are various reasons for that. I’ve become more discerning in what I want to watch, I’ve found myself watching other things more (football, tokusatsu, etc) and I’ve found myself just not that interested in keeping up so much. Even when I watched anime, it was mostly the low effort series I found myself watching, rather than the ones where you actually have to keep your brain actively engaged.
So I’ve started but not finished series as Mob Psycho 100 season 2, Dororo, Yakusoku no Neverland, Fruits Basket or Carole and Tuesday. Instead, what I watched were things like Endro, Miru Tights or Sounan Desu Ka?, none of which required much effort to watch. Anecdotically, I’ve always heard that the average anime fan watches seasonal anime for roughly two years, so this seems right on schedule, having done so since Fall 2015. Whether this is the case for me I’m not sure yet, but in any case it leaves me struggling to say much about this year.
One excellent series I did watch but never heard anybody talk about was Rilakkuma to Kaoru-san, a stop-motion (!) series brought out on Netflix, which I discovered purely by accident while browsing through their anime catalog. I put on the first episode and before I knew it had watched the entire series. Thought his series about a living stuffed teddy bear, his friends and “owner” sounds whimsical at first, there’s actually a hard headed realism to the series. The titular Kaoru-san is a twentysomething office lady working a dead end job with co-workers who are only there to get a man, only to be nagged by her mother to come back home and take over the wine farm. Lonely, borderline depressed and the butt of everybody’s joke, she survives on the love of her stuffed animal companions. A somewhat bitter series to be honest, but sometimes that’s just what you need in the endless sea of ganbare! and youth drama.
But that’s all I have to say about 2019.
Stats: 131 series in my library, quite a few less than in the last few years, 59 watched. As said, I watched a lot less anime this year than I used to.
This is day eleven of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: summing up.