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It has been almost two decades since I started watching anime as it airs. 2022 might be the year in which I've watched the least amount of tv anime. By all accounts it has been a pretty good year, between the multiple mainstream hits that everyone and their mother watched as well as plenty of more specialized shows that folks went hog wild for if they were in that niche. But personally I just find myself driven more and more towards mostly just caring about movies with the occasional tv show thrown in, primarily if it's a director or franchise I have some fondness for. What tv shows I did watch this year were good in expected ways. To rattle off a few, it's not like Attack on Titan, Lupin, Spy x Family, Mob, etc were unknown qualities to me. They're good! People like them for plenty of excellent reasons! It's just that for me this year there wasn't anything that was all that fresh and exciting in the tv space. Last year had Wonder Egg Priority and Oddtaxi, both incredible shows that came outta nowhere with little fanfare prior to airing. I didn't get anything like that this year but that's fine, it doesn't happen every year. Perhaps, related to all that, this is the year in which I have felt a lil alienated from my fellow anime-likers. It's not a surprise to me as it's something I've witnessed for so many years but outside of a few specific names and franchises, most anime-likers just don't have a lot of chatter over movies. I can't blame them, lots of folks wanna talk about what's new and hot but there's no simple apparatus to corral folks who aren't already on board that particular train. All too many anime movies get inconvenient showtimes in brief windows; if you can't be free at 7 PM on a weekday during a single week then you gotta wait awhile before you can watch it at home (and if you're not meticulously keeping track then you'll never know when it's out there!). This is not to moan about not having anyone to talk anime movies about. Rather, instead of talking about them with my fellow anime-likers I tend to talk about them with my fellow film freaks (not to be confused with the 80s Batman villain Film Freak, who reenacted murders from classic movies. Though I would like to hear his thoughts on Inu-Oh!). This is all just a long-winded way preamble for me to say that in recent years my choices have been leaning more on the movie side of things and this year continues this trend. It's probably gonna be like that for the foreseeable future. I still watch plenty of anime but hell, in 2022 I watched over 60 anime movies and didn't even manage to get through 10 tv shows. But as far as the anime-liker life goes, it's hardly a bad one. I'm content with it. Now on to my list  1) Inu-Oh - Every year a Yuasa anime comes out, it's by default my #1 unless I can think of a good reason to shift it downward. I still gotta rewatch Inu-Oh to properly digest it, but I never would have imagined that 2022 would have me telling my pals that the new Yuasa movie and the new Baz Luhrmann movie have a lot in common (For starters, the way they both modernized old genres of music!). I'm still mad I couldn't catch it on the big screen. 2) Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko - Paradoxically, while I am indifferent to the whole "slice of life" thing when it comes to more long-running stuff, I quite like it in movies. Perhaps it's because when you have a limited possible number of vignettes to string together, that's all the more pressure to make them a cohesive fit. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko does an excellent job in that regard, helped by its very lively animation. 3) Goodbye, Don Gless - Surprised at how criminally underwatched* this movie was, especially given how well-regarded A Place Further Than the Universe is. Personally it's a show that didn't grab me, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Goodbye, Don Glees. It's a pleasant mix of an 80s coming of age adventure movie with some more modern sensibilities and pathos to the point where if I had to recommend any of my top 5 this year to someone who doesn't watch anime, if I didn't know anything about their tastes at all I'd definitely pick this. *Even by the metric of folks who go out and watch Fathom Events stuff it performed worse than most anime movies released in the west in 2022. Pretty rough! 4) Mob Psycho 100 Season 3 - Mob is great. I feel like at this point everyone knows that. I don't feel the need to dive deep into why, it just is. Kudos for it sticking the landing, it might have been a more standard kind of ending than what Mob as a series normally goes for with its story arcs but hell, it's executed well enough. 5) Tatami Time Machine Blues - Tatami Galaxy is a very important anime to me, and if it aired a few years earlier it could have legitimately changed my life. So when a sequel was announced without Yuasa's involvement, I didn't know what to make of it. Particularly since the general media trend of legacy sequels has been getting a bit tiring. Thankfully, Tatami Time Machine Blues manages to recapture some of that magic despite sometimes running the risk of coming off as something dreadful like a reunion special or fanfiction, though thankfully it never goes that far. As these kinds of legacy sequels go it might not be as great as something like Matrix Resurrections, but at least it's no Ghostbusters Afterlife. That's a win in my book. Honorable mentions: Lupin the 3rd Part VI - After Part V I was worried about the future of Lupin anime, wondering if Part V was a sign of things to come with the series. More concerned with serialization and lore than being entertaining (the biggest crime any Lupin media can commit), I never finished it despite being a big enough Lupin fan that I've seen every movie (and there are a fair share of stinkers in the bunch!). Thankfully, my fears amounted to nothing as Part VI contains easily some of the best standalone episodes of Lupin outside of The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. There's a large variety to them, from episodes giving a new spin on classic Lupin formulas to Mamoru Oshii finally getting involved with Lupin. The wide variety of writers gives it a breath of fresh air, especially as there are a fair amount of episodes written by authors instead of anime writers which really gives this season some extra spice. Hey, let's face it, unless you're The Woman Called Fujiko Mine then your serialized Lupin story is gonna be a shrug at best and aggressively boring at worst. Part V got pretty egregious in that regard but Part VI's is tolerable. But you can just skip all that. There's about a dozen episodes or so that are standalone and are well worth your time. Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer - Never could get far with the manga but the anime kept me interested. Far as the fluidity of animation goes, I don't care about sakuga because I'm built different. It's directed well enough and that's what matters to me. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero - Those madmen finally figured out how to make a Dragon Ball movie that manages to succeed at both the comedy and the action.
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Jan 13, 2023 19:51
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| # ¿ May 23, 2024 16:29 |
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