Articles with the Tag Twelve Days of Anime

2018 started with a high school girl indulging her penguin fetish.

Sora yori mo Tooi Basho was the anime of the year for me. Tamaki Mari is a very ordinary second year high school girl who one day suddenly realises that she’s a very ordinary second year high school girl. She wants a cause and finds it in Shirase, obsessed with getting to Antarctica, because that’s where her mother died three years ago. Together with Hinata, who dropped out of high school and who was looking for something interesting to do before she takes college entrance exams and Yuzuki, a child actress/idol whose company though it would be a great stunt to send her there, they do go to Antarctica. Free from the usual anime bullshit, this is by turns incredibly fucking funny and emotionally devastating, especially the penultimate episode, when Shirase comes to terms with her mother’s death.

Another early 2018 anime that left me emotionally devastated: Devilman Crybaby. That came out very early in January on Netflix. For about a week after my Twitter timeline was full of happy, queer monster girls as everybody watched and got invested in it. So on the last weekend of my holidays I sat down and watched it too and realised it was all a lie. There were no happy endings, just the bleakest depiction of humanity self destructing I’ve ever seen in anime. It took me a good solid day of happy fun slice of moe series to get my mood back up again.

Luckily there were a lot of those. Yuzu Camp was about a girl who likes to go solo camping in winter, as well as about the camping club at her local high school, who go camping together. It was all incredibly comfy and good natured and made even something as mundane as eating ramen at a campfire look epic. Mitsuboshi Colors was about three little girls getting up to mischief and was hilariously funny in how shitty these three could act. Hinamatsuri had a similar sort of energy to it, if more deadpan. It also took a right turn into the plight of the homeless in Japan halfway through, which sounds strange but worked. There was Ramen Daisuki Koizumi-san, about a girl who loves eating ramen and her friend/stalker who loves her very much. There was Slow Start, about a girl who had to skip a year between middle and high school and is terrified people might find out and Hakumei to Mikochi, two literal little women being only a few centimers tall living together in a magical world. And then there was Uma Musume: Pretty Derby about literal horse girl idols who do actual horse races followed by idol concerts. It was better than it sounds.

Comic Girls was a show about an anxiety ridden high school mangaka who on the suggestion of her editor starts living in a dorm with three other high school mangaka. Equally insecure and thirsty, Kaos was actually a thinly disguised, hopefully exaggerated version of the original manga’s creator. Most of the show was well animated, fluffy fun, but Kaos’s anxiety is handled seriously. The same goes for the attraction Kaos has for one of her dorm mates. It’s this that made comci Girls standout from the crowd of slice of moe series this year.

In 2018, both Aikatsu and Pripara revamped themselves, starting new series. Aikatsu Friends mainly followed the same formula as the original Aikatsu and Aikatsu Stars, but Kiratto Pri☆chan changed its magical idol setup for more of a Youtube idol setting. Neither were officially released here and the fansubs for the latter have been disappointing too. There was also Layton Mystery Tanteisha: Katri no Nazotoki File, a kids detective show starring the daughter of professor Layton. Venerable youkai manga Gegege no Kitarou also got a new series. But the biggest kids show remained Precure and Hug tto! Precure was one of the best entries in the franchise. Unabashedly queer, giving us the first boy precure, who was introduced as genderqueer and who had a boyfriend in the brother of one of the Cures as well as what was clearly a lesbian couple with Emiru and Lulu, as seen above. It was of course never spelled out as such but it was there.

Biggest anime “controversy” of the year was about Zombieland Saga, when one of the characters, the cheerful Lily, was revealed to be trans and to have literally died of gender dysphoria. First, there were the usual rightwing assholes who insisted it was all made up by the “sjws” at Crunchyroll, which is par for the course if no less irritating for it. But then things got surreal. One particular image of Lily, with a badly photoshopped gun in her hands and the text “shut the fuck up, terfs” became widly used whenever some transphobe spouted hatred on twitter. This image then was used as evidence of how transphobes are “oppressed”, used by a transphobic SNP MP in the British Parliament!

Statistics: 183 series in my library, 131 watched. I started having trouble keeping up with seasonal anime in the latter part of the year, as I started a new assignment and just couldn’t bring myself to watch anything, let alone series I had to actually pay attention to. There are quite a few good series I still need to finish, like To Be Heroine, High Score Girl and the new FLCL sequels.

This is day ten of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2019 is not actually over yet.

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.

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.