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I decided to wait a little to stew on my answers, but here we are. Winners! Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song: This show blew me the gently caress away. The Terminator but idols is certainly an elevator pitch, but it vastly undersells the scope and craft of the series. Vivy is a show about averting an AI rebellion from the perspective of the AI's, and it does magnificently characterizing them as being somewhere in the uncanny valley in a fascinatingly sympathetic way. The show consistently demonstrates that these characters, these people, are recognizable and empathetic and understandable but that they are not human being with how they interact or just the timescale the show uses. And it keeps that perspective all the way through right up to the end. There are so many stories about robots and AI becoming more human, but those mainly come from the human side of things. Vivy is weird and interesting because of how directly it drives at the dissimilarities between the AI characters and the humans they work with. It also didn't end with the lead really "becoming human", and I think that was definitely a strength of the show. And speaking of the ending, I thought it was brilliant. I think the only thing I would change would be removing the post-credits sequence from the finale, the show didn't need that at all given the themes they were running with. I probably can't truthfully say it was the "best" show I saw last year for however nebulous you define "best", but I will say it was the show that stuck with me the hardest, the show that hit me the hardest, and the show that I was the most thrilled with and engaged with week to week, and so I have no problem putting it is my number one anime of the year. Odd Taxi: The other show from that season that blew me the gently caress away. I was not prepared for Odd Taxi, like I said when you call Vivy "Terminator but with idols" you undersell it, but you are technically getting across most of the thrust of the story: there are singers and time travel and robots and an AI rebellion. On the other hand Odd Taxi had the initial pitch of "a weird walrus taxidriver chews the fat with his eccentric passengers in a city with anthropomorphic animals", which actually badly misrepresents everything in the show and why it's a masterpiece. The pitch on animecharts does indeed mention the mystery of the missing girl, but even bringing that up feels slightly disingenuous. Odd Taxi is a neo-noir crime drama, a series of incredibly in-depth character vignettes, a complicated and tumultuous slice of life, a meditation on society and the entertainment, a critical thesis studying ambition, desire, and desperation, a densely woven tapestry depicting the zeitgeist for certain slice of the world, a comedy, tragedy, a mystery, a thriller, and an affirming and weirdly positive show about a bunch of messed up but relatable people. And it sounds ridiculous to say it does all of that in 13 episodes, but it does, amazingly enough it does. It also has some of the best dialogue I've ever heard in anything. I put it under Vivy, but 10 years from now it probably will be one of my top 10 of the decade. Again, holy gently caress. Neon Genesis Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time: I honestly didn't think they were going to make it y'all. Me and a friend had been joking for years that Eva four was never going to come out, what with schedule slippage and all the other stuff that Anno was doing and some of the weird things happening in and around the project, but it came out. And then it successfully managed to come together and tie up a final resolution not just to the film series, not just to the anime, not just the previous Eva movies, but sort to the entire concept and existence and being of the franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion. This was a final thesis statement, a capstone, a fully justified and satisfying ending. This was THE conclusion, and even a couple months after watching it it's still striking how final it all was. It may well be the single best retro revival I have ever seen, and it makes me all the more pissed off at DA:LEK from last year, but I digress. I'm honestly not sure what else to say, more than the End of Evangelion this was the end of Evangelion. I salute it. Jujutsu Kaisen: This show made it look easy. Shounen battle manga are a dime a dozen, but Jujutsu Kaisen basically showed them all up. It casually does everything right: it had a ridiculously strong cast who were all well-balanced, it created a fully thought out world and power system, it had crazy good action, excellent pacing, and the anime also added on top-notch production values and a soundtrack that went hard and a stellar cast. It makes it look effortless, it just saunters in sinking hit after hit after hit after hit all the way to the ending. Goddamn I need another season of it. JJK seems like it set out to be the best action manga of the decade and my hats off to it, it is utterly lapping the competition. Heike Monogatari: Similarly every year I watch anime I absolutely love and can't actually recommend with a pile of asterisks. This year it was Heike Monogatari, a dense and high fidelity semi meta-textual adaptation of a centuries-old Japanese novel the show kind of assumes you already are at least familiar with. The show is not kind to newcomers, people are intentionally designed to look like each other to make a point about them, court intrigue is brought up and dispensed with under the assumption that you in the audience will get all the weird subtle nuances of people interacting, characters mention relationships only in passing and take it as a given you'll just follow along with the web of mistresses and political alliances and half siblings and noble houses and so on and so forth. No, this show sure as gently caress does not make it easy for you to watch it. It also had the strongest emotional impact on me of any anime I watched this year. Quite frankly I was left as a wreck after some of the harsher episodes, and when the characters cried and wept and met their predetermined ends goddamn I was right there with them crying as well. I don't blame anyone who founded impenetrable, but I toughed it out and man did I find some serious feels on the inside. The show is also freaking gorgeous which might help. Honorable Mentions! 86: 86 was an incredibly good show and probably my fifth before I watched Eva. Almost certainly the best Mecha anime that aired on television this year. It also was an incredibly compelling one and done kind of series, I'll be completely honest and say I had no interest in watching the second season. I have no doubt it's still brilliant, but the show could've easily ended on episode 10 and been glorious. Maybe that's why I didn't feel like continuing on with it, I honestly just didn't feel like continuing the story. Moonlit Fantasy: Isekai of the year, easy. Moonlit Fantasy demonstrated an impressive commitment to craft and a desire to tell a good story when it entered the isekai genre, grabbed all the usual trappings of that particular story, and then actually bothered to try by providing multifaceted characterization for its cast and exploring various aspects of its world and having everyone actually have their own motivations and not necessarily facing the same way all the time. In other words, it decided to tell a story with characters that had personalities in a setting that allowed for drama and conflict. Funny how that works. At the same time, shoutouts to Slime Witch and isekai drugstore, I'm not going to pretend they were high art but they knew what they wanted to be and were quite enjoyable being it. Night Beyond the Tricorner Window: I keep seeing people saying this was a horrible adaptation of the manga, which has me really curious about the manga because I thought this was an awesome show and possibly my fall Anime of the Season (Heike aired weirdly). It had a weird and interesting world, a cast of really strong compelling characters, good direction, strong dialogue and thoughtful storytelling, and overall I thought it was drat good. I liked that it was a story about the supernatural that was always grounded in the temporal, the weird magic and psychic powers people threw around were ultimately extensions and relations to completely mundane things. And if the manga supposed to be so much better than it I gotta say I'm curious what the anime got wrong considering the scores of things it did right. Getter Arc: This is not the anime of the year, not even close. Just for starters it is really ugly and the CG is rough… And that doubly sucks because Ken Ishikawa drew some absolutely gorgeous art in the manga this was adapted from. At the same time I think it's my favorite adaptation of the year, not despite but BECAUSE it strayed so far from the source material. Getter Arc didn't just adapt the two final manga volumes of Getter Robo before Ken Ishikawa's untimely death, it pulled in ALL the Getter Robo it could get its hands on. Every single surviving character who could show up (and a couple who couldn't) showed up, every bit of back story fluff and lore that might've been relevant to the story is retold, detail after detail, beat after beat, they are all expanded and embellished and explored and brought out a little bit more. It's still ugly. It still ends on a cliffhanger. It doesn't quite track with the original manga even besides the embellishments and it didn't quite shake off the shadow of Ishikawa's passing. And yet, the cliffhanger they ended on, the open ending they closed with, it felt so much more satisfying, so much more complete than where the manga leaves off. This was a love letter, a standout attempt to give a worthy anime to Getter Robo's final outing, and I will salute it for that. Shikizakura: This little show surprised me. You wouldn't think a CG animated Super Sentai riff would be anything to write home about, but it hit way over its weight class and honestly surprised me. It had essentially none of the problems you usually expect when it comes to CG, especially CG action sequence. The models are expressive and have facial expressions and display body language and actually seem to exist in the world and interact with it and each other and meanwhile the fight choreography is very strong and the blows have weight and impact and the sound effects are all on point. Several times the show goes to 2D animation and I will honestly say the first time it happened it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize it had happened because of how good the 3D CGI had been up until that point. It's a good show, not a great show, but really solid and had extremely nice action chops and stands out as kind of a showcase for that kind of medium. Honestly, I think the show could've used another cour to really flesh out the cast and give more room for its later plot lines to breathe. As it stands, it is a satisfying action show that had some great fights even in 3D. Incidentally, shoutouts to Sakugan, another show that could've really used another cour. Yurucamp 2/Super Cub: It feels a wee bit unfair to lump these two shows together because they have enough things to make them distinct in characterization and themes, on the other hand they are both soothing shows about the everyday lives of high school girls with hobbies. Yuru Camp has more comedy, Super Cub has a stronger central theme, I like the characters in the former more, the latter had more variety, both of them were excellent. In a less stacked year I would happily have put one or the other in my top five because both of them were delightful, but man oh man 2021 did not disappoint when it came to anime. Rumble Garanndoll: 86 was probably the best Mecha anime that aired on TV, but rumble Garanndoll was I think my favorite TV Mecha anime of the year. Despite the baseline pitch of a giant robot powered by various forms of Japanese geek entertainment the show took a surprisingly reflective and self-critical look at the heroic rebellious otaku underground. The show spared no expense to show the characters and their weaknesses, flaws, and limitations, and by proxy the weaknesses, flaws, and limitations of all the things they loved and all the things they represented. And at the same time it was also quietly positive about all these things, expressing a warts-and-all love of these people and the things they were obsessed with. It also managed to pull a real coup at the very end there. After skirting around giving a central thesis for the heroes or a rallying cry in favor of dweebdom it ended on a literal last-minute reveal that recontextualized the rest of the series and only after that did it take a true idealistic stance in favor of nerd ephemera. Hats off to this one, they earned that utopian fancy. Ongoing shows that still deserve mention! Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS: It's been what, four, five years since the Yu-Gi-Oh anime has been good? Got it has been a relief to have SEVENS around as a reminder of what made the series worth a drat in the first place: good, likable characters having cool duels with each other to progress a completely ridiculous plot. Was it really that hard? Double shoutouts to SEVENS for having exceptional character balance and making sure all the ancillary characters have things to do be dueling or otherwise. Tropical Rouge Precure: When precure is good it's an absolute delight so I'm glad that Tropical Rouge nailed it. It probably won't get above honorable mention next year (the franchise has done better) but it was still a consistent treat every week. It certainly pulled me up watching it every week after the doldrums of late period Digimon Adventure 20. Digimon Ghost Game: we're only 13 episodes in so there is plenty of time for this to crash and burn as has happened with Digimon seasons in the past, but there's also still plenty of time for this to take off and absolutely soar. Still, it has a very strong production team so I'm crossing my fingers that the show started as it means to go on. And it is an odd numbered seasons so that's a possible mark in its favor. And holy gently caress was episode 13 quite the episode... Ranking of Kings: Watch this space for anime the year 2022!
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Jan 10, 2022 05:51
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:37 |
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chiasaur11 posted:but Chainsaw Man And if Chainsaw Man the anime is as good as everyone says the manga is it will probably be on my list for 2022. However this was about anime that air in 2021, and among those JJK was hilariously superior.
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Jan 10, 2022 19:18
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