shakugan no shana

now here's one only the most decrepit boomers will remember, it was already kind of regarded as an "old gem" by the one who memed me into watching it, the friend whose recommendations i should've stopped listening to way sooner. if i had to describe it i'd say it's a lightnovelcore "urban fantasy" mixed with some magical girl elements, shana basically transforms into a "flaming" form to fight a series of magicians (mostly weirdo perverts for some reason) who come to pick a fight with her. oh, there was also this maid side character who shows up eventually who had this annoying verbal tic of attaching ~de-arimasu to the end of every line of dialogue that i probably wouldn't have noticed if the subs didn't insist on putting it in (untranslated) every single time, which always drew my attention. at one point i even conducted an inconclusive search to try and figure out what it meant, so then each appearence became a monument to my failure to determine its meaning. to this day any time i hear that expression it still jumps out to my ears like a shrill whistle.
somehow it got 3 seasons of 24 episodes each, the entire middle season consisting almost entirely of mind-numbing daily life filler, mostly this love triangle between main character yuji, shana, and normal school friend whatsherface. i ought to have dropped it at that point but at the time i was in this weird mindset where i'd grind through and dutifully finish every episode of a show, even if i wasn't really enjoying it. however, it's almost redeemed by the third season, i hate to give spoilers but nobody is gonna watch this anyway, what happens is that the milquetoast main character gets possessed or something and goes full joker mode, more-or-less becoming the villain. he instigates a war that leads to a bunch of epic high-budget battles, and it all culminates in a ballsy grand scheme to get everyone a happy ending. i'm not sure it's all worth the brutal slog through the first two seasons, though. oh yes, also, the first op/ed are legendary bangers, op is absolutely classic i've sound and the ed is by the same singer who did "a cruel angel's thesis".

shakunetsu no takkyuu musume

a classic "our group of quirky but loveable protagonists goes up against a crew of certifiably-insane psychos in battle to the death for the regional championship" high school sports show. also, all of the girls seem to be getting off on ping pong, i mean what is all that "i must get DOKI DOKI off of playing super hard against this player" business. then there's the great lengths the animators go to in order to depict just how SWEATY everyone is getting playing such intense ping pong. it could be a fetish thing (KINOma citrus always seems to choose one to focus on in their shows), but when i tried my hand at ping pong many years ago my yugoslav coach bato, in one of the rare moments when i understood him through his thick accent, made the dubious claim that table tennis is the best exercise. also: why did japanese schools let perverts design their athletic uniforms for so long? speaking of which, look at that poster up above, it draws the eyes in to the exposed midriff at the center, but then the navel is covered by a ping pong ball... whoever designed it was a true sicko.
one last thing i must mention: for absolutely no reason, the soundtrack goes UNBELIEVABLY hard. i listen to openings/endings pretty frequently, but this is pretty much the only show where i'll also go for the full OST.

madoka

probably the closest that anime has ever come to assembling “the dream team”: directed by akiyuki shinbou (best known as TV anime’s most avant-garde director) with animation production by his studio shaft, character design by ume aoki (best known as the author of genre-defining slice of life and long-running kirara staple hidamari sketch), and script by gen urobuchi (best known for writing a disgusting pornographic video-game in which the protagonist has intercourse with an eldritch entity that looks like a little girl).
one of the most perfectly paced shows i’ve ever watched – it gets through more than other shows would struggle to do in twice the length, there is not a single extraneous scene, and yet at no point does it feel rushed, an incredible sleight of hand. it still amazes how much they got through in a mere 12 24-min episodes. i would be willing to call it anime’s supreme masterpiece.

mirai nikki

ah yes, god is dying so to choose his successor he bestows the ability to see the future using their phones to 11 bloodthirsty psychopaths and reserved, mild-mannered middle schooler amano yukiteru, then has them fight it out in a kind of battle royale/hunger games type thing. a classic premise, i really want to call it nietzschean but i don't know enough nietzsche to be sure.
overall the plot is an absolute mess, strongly reeks of "making it up as i go along", papered over with gratuitous gore and most character's motivations being inexplicable because they are simply insane. however, i must give it credit for being bad in a grand, ambitious way, with constant zany plot twists incorporating every sort of edge imaginable. it really feels like you've been on quite a ride by the end of it, i'm starting to think that back in the day even the bad shows were better. it's not the sort of thing you see very much anymore, a lot of bad shows these days give the impression that nobody cares and even the staff have given up. i actually find myself slightly missing all these edgy gorefests now that every other show is a stupid wish-fulfillment isekai based on a light novel crapped out by some salaryman on his phone while on toilet breaks at his soul-crushing job.
i don't know if this was the first show to do the "yandere" thing but it was certainly one of the most prominent, and probably ruined hundreds of relationships. i also never want to hear anyone say "yuki" again, especially in a plaintive voice. the second opening is sung entirely in the most gratuitous engrish i've ever heard in a show, it even contains spoilers but i doubt any japanese or english speakers ever catch them without subtitles.

kodomo no omocha

i've only seen a couple episodes so far but it's absolutely cooking. frenetic pacing, a good watch if your attention span is fried, random little musical numbers and a guaranteed cliffhanger every episode. sana’s motormouth is the final boss of understanding spoken japanese

look back

plebs watched this because it's an adaptation of a work by the chainsaw man mangaka. patricians watched this because it's the feature-length directorial debut of the guy who directed "flip flappers"

summer pockets reflection blue

might as well throw this in... contains LETHAL levels of nostalgia for that teenage summer vacation you spent staying with relatives on a remote island in seto inland sea, that is to say something you've never actually experienced... my sources tell me that feeling called "anemoia", though i wonder if it's one of those terms no one actually uses like "sonder" ( well, i just looked it up and turns out both were coined in 2012 by the same guy who compiled a whole book of them). another reminder that there is nothing more wabi-sabi than the brief but beautiful span of summer vacation. going into my "impeccable island vibes" list, along with, uhh... Myst and... Riven: The Sequel to Myst? a highlight is the surprisingly fleshed-out ping-pong minigame side story, it shouldn't have been that difficult but i was playing on a laptop trackpad, i still don't know how i managed to complete it.

bocchi (the rant)

not even close to the best show in its genre (cgdct) but somehow this one managed to break out of the usual audience for these types of shows and into some of the “normie weeb” audience, gaining a permanent foothold in the minds of certain specimens of obnoxious internet memers and discord addicts. my personal theory is that this happened because it had a lot of easily-memeable scenes, specifically bocchi’s brief breakdowns which deployed a lot of creative animation. they were extremely easy to cut into shareable gifs and spread far and wide, just like family guy clips. also, to those same discord addicts, bocchi’s comedic struggles with social anxiety were “relatable”, in a “post-ironic memes about depression” kind of way. me when i accidentally say "you too" to the alaska airlines gate agent scanning my ticket when she says "have a nice flight": gif of bocchi having a seizure and dying
even though i have a whole blog post titled after it, i don’t care for it all that much, i skipped out on the nendoroids even though the sculpts were good, i didn’t buy the manga because i didn't like the art style (though i do like the anime art style) even though they pushed it HARD at kinokuniya for the longest time (the show was a surprise hit abroad so there wasn’t an english translation for a while but that didn't stop them from putting the japanese versions front and center, i guess they were hoping fans who didn’t even know japanese would pick it up as “merch”), and just the other day i deleted the show to make space on my hard drive for a cracked copy of pump it up prime 2. i guess it didn’t hit as hard for me because i’ve never fantasized about being in a band or having friends, but hypothetically if i were in a band, i know i would do lead vocals, with a stage presence so strong they’d call me something like “the demon”, just like shin hae-chul (except without the whole dying young due to medical malpractice thing, hopefully).
bocchi’s affliction obviously invites comparisons with anime's GOAT socially-awkward girl, tomoko kuroki. ultimately, i think tomoko is the more compelling character, bocchi doesn’t really have any personality besides being hideously shy, otherwise she’s just generically nice and canonically has huge honkers hidden under that trackuit (what an inspired addition). tomoko, on the other hand, has enough personality that maybe 90% of her show is just her internal monologue, seething with bitterness and rage beneath her pitifully shy and awkward exterior, filled with incel rhetoric years before that term even came into common usage. you wonder: did being an outcast make her bitter, or is she an outcast because of her distasteful personality? there's the disturbing nagging feeling that perhaps tomoko just might deserve to be alone...

code geass

one question that fascinated umberto eco was why the count of monte cristo is so good, in spite of being objectively poorly-written and laden with tropes and clichés. eco's theory is that such works manage to rise above and become transcendant specifically because they contain all the clichés, deployed to perfection. based on that line of thought, in my opinion code geass is the monte cristo of anime. it has everything: a revenge plot, secret identities, supernatural powers, mysterious girls, fan service, hammy villains, multiple romantic interests, ludicrous KEIKAKUS, criticism of the media, mechas, outrageous twists, and in between all of that they somehow STILL find time for the kind of high school hijinks that anime viewers know and love. it has plenty of flaws of course, like absurd asspulls and contrived plot points, but according to eco obvious flaws also appear to be a necessary element of "cult" works. anyways, i will defend this show until the end of time.

girls und panzer

what a simultaneously brilliant yet moronic concept, this is exactly the sort of thing fiction was invented for. only the japanese could have come up with something like this. fundamentally it's a sports show, but centered around a completely made-up sport that could not possibly work in real life for dozens of reasons, though one that dudes would be guaranteed to go nuts for if it were. this is wish fulfillment done right. the icing on top, in-universe somehow it’s all cute girls who are into it, which honestly makes it more of a fantasy than 99% of isekai. the producers could have rested on their laurels and done quite well for themselves based off the premise alone, but no, they didn’t stop there, they went for it on the story and made each tank battle a thrilling affair with plenty of twists and turns with creative (although dubiously realistic) tactics. exquisite.

code lyoko

if we want to get technical this was the first anime i ever saw, though it's actually franime. many don't know this but the french are some of the biggest weebs, maybe it's some kind of mutual affinity between snobbish cultures because the japanese are such big ouiaboos that they get "paris syndrome" when they finally visit and it doesn't live up to their expectations. anyways, i only watched it once, on a hawaiian airlines flight back in the day when they used to let you rent these personal media player devices that went on your tray table. they only had like three episodes and knowing how inflight entertainment goes it probably was a couple random ones from the middle, but i got obsessed with them and watched them on repeat during most of the flight. on the drive back home i was even inspired to write down a bunch of notes to try and remember what i saw, it grabbed ahold of me like nothing else i'd seen before. it was so powerful even in diluted form, instinctively i understood the danger of what i'd discovered and kept clear and pure for years. but as is obvious from this page, eventually i let my guard down and it lured me in, and i fell into sin. despite that, i still think they should have showed this in french class instead of "téléfrançais", this québécois kids show set in a junkyard with a creepy talking pineapple that became one of those surreal childhood memories you think may have just been a fever dream but then you look it up and it's 100% real.

yuri seijin naoko-san

now THIS is denpa

death note

i feel like this is another premise that would never fly in western tv. “you write their name in a notebook and it kills people? rubbish, it’s too simple, it’s too stupid, it sounds like a gimmick from a goosebumps book, we can’t do this, people would think we are insulting their taste and intelligence”. i applaud the japanese for making it work, i always enjoy a good battle of ruses. generally they were quite good although there was definitely a couple times that they wrote themselves into a corner and had to come up with something contrived. this, i think, is the kind of battle-of-minds i wanted from the a24 netflix series "beef". i complained about it in an old blog post (and so did sam kriss in a substack), but instead they decided to squander such a promising premise and went all in on a bunch of therapybrained pop psych drivel. regrettable.
incidentally i think this is a great example of a microgenre i've theorized about, the "rules drama", where most of the plot is driven by exploring the full consequences of a set of rules. the death note comes with a strict set of rules which are emphasized throughout the show, and a good number of light's schemes creatively exploit them.

haruhi

by all rights, this show should have been completely unremarkable. i’m pretty sure it got made because the light novel was enormously popular but i can’t imagine why, somehow it takes the premise of “hanging out with a bunch of characters with supernatural/sci-fi abilities” and makes it quotidian. maybe that's the whole point, it's all a big joke on the viewer, you sit glued to the screen closely watching that powder keg of a premise for any hint that it's about to explode, and then the show ends and nothing ever really happened, the show's climax ends up being that scene where kyon ALMOST lays a richly-deserved hand on haruhi when she goes completely off On Her Shit, but of course he doesn't actually do it. or, maybe people really liked the snarky main character who is “so over this shit”, a novel and innovative character archetype back when this show aired in 1976 (fact check: not even remotely close to when this show aired). as they say, “god knows”.
the anime, however, is spared from mediocrity by kyoto animation's signature superb animation, and also for the astounding and absolutely perplexing decision to air the episodes out of order. what could they have possibly meant by that? was it some kind of grand artistic statement, or perhaps an elaborate tactic to hide the fact that the plot is rather lacking? either way, years down the line the "haruhi watch order" question inspired an anon to prove a new combinatorics theorem.
then they went ahead and TOPPED that in the second season with one of the bravest and most insane students in the history of television, the "endless eight" arc. here's the situation: it's been three years since you produced the smash-hit first season, on track to becoming one of the most popular anime of all time. people are obsessed with it, spontaneously breaking out into the hare hare yukai dance in the streets and the school cafeteria. there is plenty of material remaining to adapt, so of course you're doing season two. the hype for it is unreal, fans are frothing at the mouth and everyone on the production committee is throwing money at you to get this shit made because it's a guaranteed winner. your budget is stratospheric, your resources effectively unlimited. you HAVE to deliver. so what do you do? after one "normal" episode, you remain absolutely faithful to the source material and proceed to adapt the time loop arc "endless eight", by producing and airing eight consecutive episodes that are almost entirely the same. when i first encountered it, i thought for sure i had accidentally selected the same episode again, so i skipped ahead one and it was the same thing again. 「きょん君、電話？」
was it merely a cunning scheme to save money by reusing animation? well no, because episode contained brand new animation of the exact same scenes. i'm talking new shots, new camera angles, characters wearing slightly different outfits. each episode was entirely reanimated, all at that same kyoto animation standard. absolutely incredible, i highly doubt we'll ever see a more, er, "realistic" depiction of a time loop because no one else could possibly ever be maniacal enough to risk boring viewers to that extent. bravo!

onegai my melody

i’m positive 99.9% of the people out there rocking various kuromi merch have not done their time in the trenches and watched even a single episode of onegai my melody, shameful. could not be me. this was a real “taking off the training wheels” moment because the only two options are english hardsubs or straight rawdogging it, so i had no choice but to watch it with no subtitles whatsoever. about half of the episodes have never been subtitled in english at all.
you may wonder: who in their right mind would possibly watch this? as a certified MORIWACKY MANIAC, it is my solemn duty to make my way through moriwaki makoto’s entire filmography, which includes this show.
i had my doubts to begin but a couple episodes in there was an episode with a crazy guy who lived in a house full of trash, including an ENTIRE CAR in the vestibule, and i was sold. there are quite a few unusual things about this show, in fact. for one, it has the vibe of a mahou shoujo, but if you pay attention you realize that the protagonist uta actually has almost no role in resolving the conflict of each episode, every single time my melody just shows up and deus ex machina's it by waving around the melody key and saying "onegai?"🥺. the bad guys also win pretty frequently, there's a typical episodic structure where somebody has some hidden wish, kuromi grants it but of course in monkey-paw way and things go very wrong, my melody shows up and undoes it, and then the person regrets it all and thanks my melody for saving them, yielding a white music note for my melody to collect. but occasionally the person is completely unrepentant and goes “wow that rampage i just went on was freaking EPIC”, and to everyone’s surprise yields kuromi some delicious black music notes for his butt-monkey eggplant (tapir) sidekick to consume. also, if the "kuromi note" is to be believed, kuromi really was wronged many times by my melody's carelessness and naivety. the show really pops off, though, for about 10 episodes 3/4 in, when even the writers seem to have gotten tired of the formulaic structure and played with the formula a bit. disaster was averted at least once through an accidental gay kiss. from there, they go on to do a classic JRPG final boss ending.

elfen lied

GHASTLY rigamarole. the kind of show your friend or older brother takes you aside one stormy night and reverently introduces you to as if it is some dangerous forbidden text, thereby inducting you into a kind of perverted secret society. to many raised on a steady diet of disney or cartoon network, it is a revelatory work demonstrating that animation can include gratuitous gore and/or nudity. i won't lie, this is the first anime i ever saw. it's possibly the high-water mark of the peculiar noughties near-centennial anime revival of the old “ero guro nansensu” trend that in the 1930s yielded literary delicacies like edogawa ranpo's "human chair" and, of course, DOGRA MAGRA. the show contains moe and edge in nearly equal amounts. the op/ed are jarring, sung in latin and putting characters into gustav klimt paintings, perplexingly pretentious and oddly high concept compared to the rest of the show.

bongo bongo dogs

early in college my friend dated a girl for all of a month who was obsessed with this show and got into it himself to an embarrassing degree, which led to him trying to show it to me. i was barely able to stomach even one episode, no media had ever made me unironically think "MY CULTURE IS NOT A COSTUME!!!" before this show. also, it bothered me how they did random chibi gag scenes in the exact same style as fullmetal alchemist (same animation studio, i believe). in the end it was all worth it because i was able to pull of an incredible prank by convincing my friend to "tantei opera milky holmes" by telling him that it had basically the same premise, detectives in yokohama, but better (all technically true). every episode of milky holmes starts off with this dark little animated narration about the eternal fight between detectives and phantom thieves that really does make it seem similar, before suddenly going into one of the most aggressively moe OP's of all time. the reaction when that happened was priceless.

evangelion

enough pseudointellectual ink has been spilled over this show, instead i encourage anyone reading this who hasn't already seen it to watch "Extracurricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno" immediately. ok, i will also say this: i believe at the heart of evangelion is the struggle between anno-the-otaku and anno-the-artist, the struggle to create a truly original work, the struggle to recapture the grand narrative (coupled with a healthy dose of the pathological self-awareness of the postmodern artist). at stake: can otaku, the creature of copies, create genuine art? the tentative answer: no...
p.s. liking rei is a serious red flag

bakemonogatari

a better match between studio and adapted work has probably never been found. RELENTLESSLY stylish. probably the show i would have most liked to have directed. (i don’t remember writing that last sentence but it’s probably true)

angel beats

i had a lot of troubling nailing this show down, but then one day i had a sudden brainwave and pinned it down precisely: it's anime LOST! they had to swap out the island for a high school because it's an anime of course, but besides that they both feature a huge cast stuck in a mysterious location that may or may not be limbo or hell or a dream or something. the show had such extreme "based on a vn" vibes that i was shocked to discover it was an anime original, though it does seem that they later made a vn adaptation. the main character's backstory was so over-the-top tragic that it puts many creators of outright suffering porn to shame, and they just casually dropped it as an episode somewhere in the back half of the series. it goes so far that it practically overflows and turns comedic instead.

hidamari sketch

if you subtract urobuchi from madoka, this is what you get.

time travel shoujo

absolutely run out of stuff to watch and prepared to probe the depths of ostensibly-educational japanimation? do you want to watch the only anime in history that namedrops Giordano Bruno? look no further. i knew this one was a keeper when ten minutes in, a character gets hit with a baseball and nearly dies from a heart attack as a result. he's revived by a defibrillator, i think the point was to demonstrate the importance of electricity in the sort of outrageous manner my middle school self would go about it. this might also be the only anime with time travel that DOESN’T feature a time loop. honestly the funniest thing about it is how absolutely unconcerned the characters are about creating any sort of time paradoxes, they go around casually breaking ALL the established time travel rules and almost make bill and ted look responsible in comparison. even the "adult" in the room, the main character's dad who invents time travel, seems to use it exclusively to go back in time and gush while meeting all of his historical scientist heroes, talking about how he’s from the future and how he’s visiting because of how famous they’re gonna get from their work that often they haven't even done yet. in one episode i’m pretty sure he even tries to alter history by giving one of them a bulletproof vest so he can survive an assassination attempt. though the villains are part of some sinister organization, they're kind of justified because they're just trying to collect a debt, they bankrolled his expensive research and he disappeared into the past without paying it off...

kimi no na wa

i remember when this movie came out, absolutely everybody was talking about how GORGEOUS the background art was, which absolutely baffled me because i couldn’t remember there being anything notable about the art at all. then at some point i remembered that i watched the most pirated version in existence, watermarked 240p hardsubbed in both chinese and english with a long anti-piracy warning scrolling across the scene approximately every 10 minutes. on top of that, i watched it on one of my oldest and shittiest laptops, possibly an iBook G3. at the time, though, that was the only version available to torrent because it was still playing in theatres and hadn’t come out on blu-ray or anything yet, it was probably some kind of chinese dvd release beta version that somebody leaked. the twist got me so hard that i had to pause and walk around the house for 10 minutes shouting “NO! NO! NO! THEY DIDN’T!” before resuming.

cardcaptor sakura

very highly regarded however the truth is that within mahou shoujo, it is inferior to ojamajo doremi in almost every way besides the fact that the show looks VERY good, character design/costumes are on point and the genuine hand-drawn cel animation is beautiful. besides that, the plot of almost every episode is extremely formulaic and the characterization is so-so when compared to doremi. style over substance, i suppose. i remember reading one rave review prior to watching calling it the “best depiction of puppy love ever put to screen” and after watching all i can say is ???

nanoha

i'm fairly sure this is one of the first magical girl shows targeted specifically at the sizable audience of older male viewers that the genre had attracted. there are a few giveaways, just in the opening: it doesn't include subtitles for the opening song (a staple of children's anime), and oh yeah, there's a gratuitous panty shot in the brief transformation sequence. i didn't actually find out the most notable thing about this show until quite recently (and when i found out i almost fell out of my chair): it was directed by AKIYUKI SHINBOU, who years down the line would go on to direct madoka magica. allegedly when starting to write madoka, urobuchi remarked that he didn't really know anything about mahou shoujo, so shinbou instructed him to watch this show for research, which honestly isn't that representative of the genre as a whole...
as one of his earlier shows, shinbou didn't yet have the latitude to break out his style, so it's a lot tamer visually than his usual fare. its major innovation was introducing significant sci-fi elements to mahou shoujo (mostly beam weapon attacks that had the bonus of being easy to animate) and also tons of panty shots of nanoha, who i'm pretty sure was supposed to be a fourth grader. it really was the wild west (east?) back then.
the only thing i can solidly remember is that there is this absolutely baffling dinner scene in the first episode (starting at 15:22, for those curious) where the animation undergoes a jarring shift in style and quality, to the extent that you might even call it overanimated. suddenly, the line work gains an extra degree of detail and character movements are animated so precisely that they look practically rotoscoped. there's even MULTIPLE characters moving at the same time! what is this, akira? then, just like that, it ends after the next cut, and never returns for the rest of the show. it feels like a fever dream, what the heck happened? i almost thought i'd imagined it, but i went back just now to make sure and it's one hundred percent real. i guess they must've subcontracted that one scene out to some studio or animator that went way too hard or something.
otherwise, the show is really a product of the time, though i will say that the op is great (could just be because i'm a big mizuki nana fan). i'm also impressed they bothered to get an actual native english speaker to voice the "raising heart" thingy, incidentally the same person who does the english announcements on the tokaido shinkansen.