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Honorable Mentions Uma Musume Season 2 -- Takes a sugary gacha franchise about girls who are also horses and so they MUST RACE RAAAAGH and uses real-life events to build a compelling story. A great sports anime with a bunch of added silliness. It's not my AOTY but if you were to measure the emotional distance between what I expected and what I got this anime comes in at #1. You can watch Season 2 on its own (like I did) and get straight to the goodness, but if you really liked what you found and want more, or are a rabid completionist, you can always watch season 1 too. Heike Monogatari -- I enjoyed this one quite a lot, mostly for the artistry and Biwa's performances. There are times when you can practically feel yourself sitting on a tatami mat listening to a traveling songstress recant tales of the doomed Taira clan. That said, its runtime needed to be longer. Individual character arcs are built up and some of them hit home, but overall the blistering pace just wasn't the best fit for this kind of story. Still liked it though. Re:Zero S2 -- "Hey Mals, I thought RE:0 S2P2 sucked? What gives?" Mmmm, nah. S2 did get rough at times -- you can clearly see that the staff were struggling against animation deadlines -- which results in characters spending a (*40K Ork voice*) bunch o' times TALKIN' when they shoulda been FIGHTIN'. And there were also some plotlines carried from the source that could've been dropped entirely. Yea that's right WN fans: Ryuzu Meyer could've been completely excluded and the story would've been better for it. Bring it! But even despite all that, S2 (I'm including Part 1 and 2 together) had multiple of the strongest episodes of the series. It also addressed the series' biggest "Why doesn't he just do _____?" issue head-on, and the main leads conjured their largest character growth yet because of it. The amount of minutes of animation we got was also insane: I can't think of another anime that skipped both its opening and ending so often to cram in as much as they could. We probably won't see it happen again for a long time. I'm eagerly looking forward to the next adaptation, despite the aforementioned wobbles. 86: Eighty-Six -- One of the few anime I've dropped, and then picked back up and liked it. The first few episodes were not my thing, the sense of gravitas and grounding of the world was warped, and naive. But what saves this anime is a series of reveals and bold choices that pay off in spades. Alas, I have not actually finished the second half of it, and since the last few episodes won't be airing until March of next year, I'm putting this one on hold. Don't be surprised if you see this on my AOTY list next year. Now, on to AOTY... #5: Odd Taxi I imagine that this will be high on a number of others' lists this year, so I'll keep my description short. An unconventional art style that ends up being plot-relevant, paired with a wide variety of characters that span the entire gamut of personalities, from an attention-seeking-wannabe to a yakuza enforcer to a c-tier-idol to a comedian finally making it big to a taxi driver, whose lives are all interwoven in a crime drama with a nice dose of humor. It's pretty fantastic, and for anyone who's tired of the usual anime personality archetypes, Odd Taxi would be the first thing that I point them to. #4: Vivy: Flourite Eye's Song Whew, what was up with Spring Season? Not one but two of my best-ofs for this year!? Crazy. If I had to vote purely on the best-looking anime of 2021, Vivy would be #1. Studio Wit's specialists were paired with an anime that made use of their talents like two perfectly-fitted jigsaw pieces. Wit may have been the ones making Vivy, but it feels like an anime such as Vivy was made for Wit. But enough of gushing about looks; how's the plot? We start about half a century in the future, where an autonomous songstress AI named Diva is struggling to fulfill her mission. Her singing might be technically flawless, given that she's an AI who never tires, but she struggles to captivate anyone. In this world, all AIs are governed by a singular mission, and hers is to make people happy with her singing. Naturally, she can't make them happy if they're all dead, which is how she gets roped up in a conspiracy to sabotage AIs after a rogue AI virus shows her apocalyptic images of humanity's slaughter that it claims will happen in a century. I very much appreciated that the show commits itself to Vivy's perspective as an AI, whether it was her having conversations with other AIs in a fraction of a second or loading her consciousness up through a database or coding an entirely separate personality as a means of dealing with trauma. There are human characters, but they remain in supporting roles rather than stealing the show. It'd be like if Terminator 2 shot the movie entirely from the terminator's perspective, and that terminator was also really into singing. Oh, and you get to see that terminator struggle and bit-by-bit succeed in becoming human in spirit. And that's the highlight of this anime, for me. Vivy's alien struggle to understand humanity was grounded and relatable. The only reason this isn't my number 1 of the year is because, plot-wise, the first half was phenomenal and the second half was merely enjoyable. Yea, I wasn't a fan of the final villain, I was hoping for more. But even then, every episode still managed to have something in it that wowed me, and the first half was so drat good I can't not include Vivy as one of my favorites of the year. Just, uh, don't watch the last twenty seconds of it. Completely pointless and undermines what came before. #3: Sonny Boy Going into this anime, I read "cast of 30+ school students", "transported to another world", and "start developing powers", and was immediately ready for a hackneyed death-game on a remote island with body parts flying everywhere. Turns out, the show couldn't be further from that (despite the best efforts of one of the characters). Good luck getting anyone to coherently describe the plot of Sonny Boy. Yea, you could hand-wave it all with the ever-vague "It's a growing up metaphor." But that doesn't really describe what Sonny Boy is. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe Sonny Boy, I'd say, "A bunch of students in a limbo-like paradise discover that God plays dice with the universe, and that they are all just one of the sides of the dice that didn't come up." From the get-go, Sonny Boy is cinematically different from most anime: silence pervades throughout until it is briefly punctuated by its eclectic, awesome OST. The screen goes pitch-black for long enough that you wonder if your TV broadcast cut out, only for that darkness to be pierced by bright color shining through. Every episode starts in-media-res, skipping over the usual panicking and homesickness that would have eaten up valuable runtime. Honestly, the closest anime I can think of to Sonny Boy is (the original, and only) Fooly Cooly. It's like that, but substitutes the zaniness for pensiveness, and is also less straightforward. For some, that's going to be a problem -- concrete answers are hard to come by here, and I wouldn't blame someone for dropping Sonny Boy because of it. But it also makes it entertaining to watch, when every adventure the main characters get up to not only reveals new, strange rules of their world but then ties it back to philosophical ponderings on solitude, achievements, conformity, and even deathless death. And it does something like this every episode! I loved Sonny Boy. I loved the characters, I loved the artwork, I loved the soundtrack, and even if I struggled to understand them, I loved the themes. Also, a shout-out for making a character who is actually smart, rather than the usual "I knew you knew that I knew that you knew because I observed that scant detail months ago with my photographic memory and also I'm a genius inventor" tripe that anime is so chock-full of. #2: Megalobox: Nomad I can't believe that a sequel to an anime I was ambivalent about landed here, but here we are. Also, more Spring anime. Go figure. I respected the first season, but didn't enjoy it much. It managed the impressive feat of being both cliche and anticlimactic. But the second season is such a higher step up from the first it's unreal. Seriously, I had to check if it was the same director because it felt completely different. And it stands well on its own, too; you could jump right in at S2 and not feel lost. Set five years after the end of the previous entry, we face a Joe who is at his lowest. He's lost everything except boxing, and arguably even that. From here on out, every battle and defeat Joe experiences hits hard. And that makes every victory, and even the losses, fulfilling in ways that most anime don't get the chance to. I was impressed that the anime didn't pull its punches regarding the plot beats surrounding Joe. And it wasn't just him: pretty much every character gets fleshed out really well, each with their own metaphorical battlefield. Winning isn't in the cards for all of them, and the way those characters confront that left me satisfied. Everything they do feels earned. I haven't even mentioned the killer soundtrack, and what is probably the best ending song of the year. If you haven't watched this one yet, you should. #1: Drum roll... Drum roll... Drum roll... #1: SSSS.Dynazenon "_____ is a teenager at Normal High School. Down on his luck, he encounters a mysterious stranger named _____ who informs said teen that he is one of the special few who can use _____, a weapon that can transform and combine please buy our toys into ______! And that is the only thing that can stop gigantic ______ from wreaking havoc on his hometown! The monsters are being controlled by ______: an ORGANIZATION of EVIL that seeks to destroy the ([__] school / [__] city / [__] world)! Now, he and <X> other similarly-relatable-and-marketable teens need to team up to stop them! While also going to school! While also learning how to pilot _____! Will the new friends be able to defeat the monster of the week and preserve the status quo!? Yes LOL Tune in every episode to find out! Repeat for several seasons, maybe a movie or two, until the characters are so flat and one-note that the target demographic loses interest." You've probably known of some show like the above description. I initially bounced off of Dynazenon. The intentional mimicry of tokusatsu that the action scenes follow never really appealed to me, even in the previous SSSS.Gridman. But unlike the previous installment, the fights felt especially lacking in gravitas and the characters didn't seem to care that much. The villains were strangely flat, especially for a franchise whose previous entry was all about humanizing and exploring its main villain. It was never really clear what their goals were. I wasn't really sure why the character of Chise was even included in the anime. A bunch of mysteries were left unresolved, and the romance, while human and real and cute, left me wondering why it had eaten up so much screen-time. So, what happened? Why on earth is this my #1 anime of 2021? Well, sit down friends, and I'll tell you. First off, while yes, the characters are all new and you could jump straight in without watching SSSS.Gridman: don't do that. You see, Dynazenon is playing a game with its audience from the very beginning. A game that only those who watched Gridman will be in on. From the start, they know that Gridman-watchers are going to be asking "Who's going to be it? Who's going to be the one? The show drops little hints: it could be this person. It could be that person. It could be any one of them. And using your own attention against you, the direction starts to control the way you think. It's subtle, but it's there. With a little bit of priming the audience, the show knows that a quick shot of a side-glance suddenly implies a world of conflict repeating itself. That a bit of verbal hesitancy implies murder. That a sticker on a phone serves as a window into a character's mindset. That a pin on a hat denotes special status. And the details, once connected, reveal other details that previously you missed. But that by itself wouldn't be enough to justify an AOTY contender. No, what happened was I started digging into the details that Dynazenon hid within itself. Looking online to see what other people had noticed. And during my digging, I came upon a fan theory. A theory that not only explained almost every unresolved mystery (except one*), but what it was that the villains were truly after. So I rewatched Dynazenon and... it holds up. I'm convinced. Not only did I see where the actual plane of conflict lay, but also what the trap laid out for our protagonists was, what the actual goal of (at least one of) the villains was, and just how close said villains were to winning. And that, if the villains had won, maybe SSSS.Dynazenon would've come to resemble the show described in my first paragraph. I'm not going to go into what that theory was here, since I can't do that without heavy spoilers, and I believe that the purpose of the AOTY thread is to sell new anime to people who haven't seen them. But know this: Dynazenon is a very coy show. It never tells you outright what the answer is, to any of the questions it raises; that you have to find for yourself. But it does sprinkle enough "coincidences" and other details throughout for you to realize that those aren't coincidences after all. I strongly recommend watching it twice. Going into it the second time, here are some questions I'd like you, the potential viewer, to think about : 1) What's the theme of the anime? Especially considering episode ten. Why was that the capstone moment? 2) Who was the highest ranking villain, and what was (s)he paying special attention to? 3) What was special about the main lead? What were the "coincidences"? 4) Given your answer to #1, what would've been the gravest trap the main characters could have fallen into? Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I'm just a tin-foiled loony connecting pictures on a dimly-lit basement wall with tacks and yarn. But even if I'm right, the amount of digging and research this show asks is honestly too much for most. For that reason, I probably will never recommend it. But also for that reason, it is special to me, and for those willing to dig into the discussions surrounding the anime: it might be special for you, too. That makes it my anime of the year. *The only mystery still left a mystery for me that I have yet to see a good explanation for was: whose hand was it scattering the seeds in the very beginning? I suspect that will be the subject of the upcoming movie. And I'll be there watching closely. Malsangoroth fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 02:23
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GorfZaplen posted:I agree. 
Malsangoroth fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 04:06
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I liked Vivy. I have also not played Detroit Become Human. What I'm gathering is that I should play Detroit Become Human.
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Jan 18, 2022 06:31
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