So in addition to getting some writing motivation, I’ve also been spending some more time on Bluesky lately (it’s possible the two are related). One thing I missed from the heyday of Twitter was the low barrier of interaction between myself and the people who I admired and followed, and I think Bluesky has brought at least some of that back (until it too goes down the drain someday). It’s a good environment to trade news and memes, as well as little bite-sized personality quizzes and opinions.
Recently I saw several folks I follow posting an anime grid with their favorites outlined by subject. While I often have a difficult time when someone asks me to name my “top ten” anime series (I just don’t find it useful to attempt to rank my favorites), if I’m being asked which anime are best at specific things, that’s something I have an easier time doing, even though I definitely have multiple answers to some of the prompts.
If you’re interested in filling out the grid for yourself, you can find it linked HERE. Below are my “justifications” for my picks.
Favorite Anime: Den-noh Coil (or Dennou Coil depending on where and when you source it) – This is the answer I give whenever someone asks me what my overall favorite anime is. While I don’t necessarily think it’s the best anime I’ve ever watched, even after almost 20 years I still find myself pondering what it has to say about technology’s interaction with human behavior. There’s a lot I want to say about this series and I’m probably due for a re-watch at this point, so perhaps I can provide it its own post. In short, however, it’s well-animated, thematically-interesting, and it’s something that people from a wide spectrum of age groups can enjoy for various reasons.
Best Story: Gankutsuou – I think it’s difficult to argue that this tale of long-planned revenge based on the classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” doesn’t have one of the most compelling stories in anime. Coupling its character drama with its very particular style of visual futurism creates a whole package that’s unforgettable. I know several people who’ve sought out the source material after watching Gankutsou.
Favorite Art Style: Kaiba – My favorite anecdote about this series is that I was visiting a discussion forum when it was originally released and someone was trying to argue that it wasn’t anime because “it didn’t look like anime.” Leaving that specific critique aside, I think the visual style of Kaiba can be a bit disarming, because its characters have a very childlike, soft, and retro look to them that initially obscures the fact that this series deals very seriously with what makes a person themselves by exploring the concept within a universe where memories and personalities are transferable between bodies. Is our humanity the product of our physical bodies, our thoughts, or some byproduct of the interaction between the two? I think the character designs only help to bolster this discussion since they’re all so variable, and the contrasts between how the characters look and how they behave can vary so greatly.
Biggest Personal Impact: Revolutionary Girl Utena – This series is the type of show that, much like Evangelion, can mean different things depending on your stage of life and the depth of your own life experience when you watch it. For me, its initial impact was that at the time I experienced it for the first time, I’d only watched some very easy-to-obtain and popular anime (Trigun, Sailor Moon, etc.) and so when those first chords of Zettai, Unmei, Mokushiroku hit when I was attending my college anime club for the first time I was overwhelmed by the idea that anime could be so beautiful and so strange at the same time. I first identified with Utena, and her caricature of princely heroism. On later rewatches, I identified more with Anthy, whose reactions to her experiences only revealed themselves as more and more relatable as my life went on. It was the first series I’d watched that I felt had really given me things to think about and had a large part in my desire to write about anime. If you enjoy reading my writing, you have Utena to thank for that.
Best Fight Scenes: Revue Starlight – Possibly an unorthodox choice, but when I think about anime battles the things that I find memorable mostly boil down to framing and creativity rather than simply pure action (at which this series is also fairly adept). Each of the fights in the show is expressed as a musical number with songs and choreography that the characters display as they swing their swords or shoot their arrows. The movie ramps this all up even further, with a fight scene on a train that’s unforgettable – I was lucky enough to attend the U.S. premiere at Anime Central and was just blown away. I would say the show is sort of a spiritual cousin to Revolutionary Girl Utena (director Furukawa was a protege of Kunihiko Ikuhara, so it’s not just our collective imagining that the storytelling style is similar) and I think the fight scenes serve a similar storytelling purpose between the two, so take that however you prefer.
Overhated: Wonder Egg Priority – I’ve written quite a bit about this one already, so to keep things brief, I think this series is particularly difficult to get a handle on because it’s dressed-up in all kinds of extra “stuff” that distracts (by design!) from what is happening in real time to Ai, the main character. With all the talk lately about what constitutes “grooming,” we’re all still very poor at recognizing it when it’s happening, and at its core I think that that’s what this series is about. Now, the fact that its production encountered some issues/delays as it went on and that the show introduced some characters in the last few episodes without really defining their purpose certainly didn’t help viewers connect with the series, but I think in many cases people let their frustration keep them from recognizing that the story’s “anticlimax” was really the “good end;” Ai’s mother prevented Ai from becoming a victim, even if Ai didn’t recognize that.
Underrated: Planet With – Maybe calling this “underrated” is a little bit of a stretch (it’s at about 70% on AniList) but I think its relative uniqueness as a series focused on the power of forgiveness rather than revenge and its status as an anime-original story that’s just kind of weird is worth a bit more attention than it’s ever really gotten from the Western anime fandom at large. I like it for its quick pace, its interesting characters, and its expression of the idea that two sides of a conflict can both have good reasons for acting and believing the way that they do. I also find it impressive that it manages to endear an entire cast of characters to us within such a short time. It’s just a lot of fun and a surprisingly heartfelt watch that I continue to ponder.
Overrated: Code Geass – This is one of those series that passed me by originally, but I felt obligated to watch it since after a while it had become embedded into anime fandom as a common recommendation. I borrowed the discs of the first season, watched it in its entirety, got to the end… and then felt no urge to continue into the second season (which I hear is better, but by that point I had already lost interest). I didn’t think the series was bad and I personally enjoy the weird CLAMP character designs (8-foot-tall people are a feature, not a bug) but beyond that I didn’t really see the appeal. I realize this is blasphemous, but I suppose we all feel this way about something popular. This one is mine.
Has Aged Well: Mononoke – This is a bit of a cheat since there have been some new films added to this franchise recently, so it’s been on my mind quite a bit. But watching the first two of those (and eagerly awaiting the third) has led me to ponder the original TV series (along with Bakeneko 1) and I just feel that its themes, which are all focus on injustices to women, remain very relevant. In a way I wish they weren’t, but unfortunately society just doesn’t change that quickly, especially in this particular area. In any case, given that there’s been a nice Blu-ray release of the show in my region recently and the series looks as good as ever, I wanted to take the opportunity to shine a light on it again here.
Criminally Overlooked: The Orbital Children – I feel that Netflix can sometimes be the place where good anime goes to die. My main beef is that they’re happy to call an anime a “Netflix Original” but spend next to no effort advertising it more broadly than one email letting you know that, since you’ve watched other anime, you might also want to add this new one to your watch list. What put The Orbital Children on my radar wasn’t Netflix, but the fact that I’d been waiting since 2007 for Mitsuo Iso to direct another anime, and so I’d been anticipating it for years. It’s not a perfect show by any means, but even at only 6 episodes long it manages to echo what I love about Den-noh Coil – its combination of science fiction with something that I can only inadequately define as spiritual shines through, and there are some fun callbacks to his previous effort. I’ll forever wonder what could have been done with a full cour, but sometimes you have to be satisfied with what you actually get.
Favorite Protagonist: Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit – This was a tough question for me to answer, mostly because there are quite a few answers that I could give and they’d all be somewhat truthful. If we want to go for recency bias, Maki from Journal With Witch would be pretty high up on the list. But when I recall what it felt like for me to watch Moribito the first time, and to come face-to-face with a protagonist like Balsa, I felt that it was worth calling that out. While the discussion has gotten more nuanced over the past several years, for so long the discussion of “good” women characters in anime has focused on how much “ass they can kick,” rather than any other aspect of their personality. For me, Balsa was one of the first examples I encountered of a character who could not only hold her own in the fight (the importance of which is debatable to me when it comes to being a well-rounded person), but also had a very real and understandable code of ethics and an actual personality, and who actually looked and acted like an adult. While it’s slowly shown improvement over the years as it’s become somewhat more mainstream, at this time in my anime fandom, Balsa was a real revelation to me.
Favorite Antagonist: Golden Kamuy – While the actual moral standing of any one person in this series is extremely debatable, I think we can agree that, at least from the perspective of the characters we’re closest to, Lieutenant Tsurumi is the “bad guy.” Early on he’s sort of a cartoonish weirdo, but like the majority of the characters over the course of the series you gain some perspective into the type of person he is and the things he’s experienced, and you gain some sympathy while still wholeheartedly believing that this man should not get what he wants. Tsurumi inspires men to do his bidding, serves as a father figure, tragically lost his family, and also wants to overthrow the government. He’s at times both comical and terrifying, a balance that very few series can manage to maintain for very long. Golden Kamuy is the rare exception. The runner-up slot goes to Ogata, who I have a crush on.
Best Soundtrack: From the New World – I realize this is a bit of an odd choice and like a lot of the other prompts there were multiple things I could have put here, but From the New World has haunted me for years now partly because of its soundtrack so I wanted to point it out. It’s very fitting to the series in that the soundscape evokes both the feeling of the ancient past and the far off future; it helps to convey the narrative in its own way. There’s something about the chord structure of “The Traditional Song of Shadows” that leaves me breathless every time I hear it, and it’s difficult for me to explain it any more clearly than that. I think it’s the perfect compliment to the series.
Best Romance: My Love Story – I’ve watched a lot of romance anime in my time, and while I often wish that there were more of them that weren’t set in high school it’s a fact that some of those are very good. My Love Story is just kind of cute and funny from beginning to end. It manages to strike a balance between minor romantic hurdles, comedy, and saccharine cuteness that few anime can, and the main characters are such nice people that I can’t help but root for them. It’s really no more complicated than that.
I Want to Talk About This One: Devilman Crybaby – I should say, I want to talk about this one after I’ve gotten a chance to watch it again, because it’s been several years now and I’m probably due for a re-watch. However, I think Devilman in general is worth talking about, simply because of the things it’s inspired in its aftermath – in particular, Berserk and Evangelion owe some visual motifs to it, and its various anime adaptations are all interesting in some way or another. But this entry is incredibly striking in both its visual style and its social commentary, and it’s something I’d like to talk about (or write about) a lot more, now that it’s no longer new and it’s really getting a ton of attention anymore.
Well, that’s it for this one. Once again, if you’d like to make your own grid, you can fill one out here. I’d love to know what’s on your list!
One reply on “Getting to Know You the Anime Way”
Looking forward to talking about Devilman Crybaby a bit!