Roving Thoughts archives

Memorable anime from 2000 (for me)

For various reasons I feel like looking back at the anime from the first decade or so of this century, year by year (partly because I by and large now have a certain amount of distance from it, since I saw most of it years ago). I can't possibly do my usual 'best N I watched in' style of entry for old years because I have no idea what I actually watched back then, so the best I can do is look at what (first) aired in those years and that I still think is memorable or notable. This is a personal version of memorable and as such will skip some famous works that I personally didn't watch or that didn't stick with me in any particular way.

(For example, InuYasha started in 2000 but I never really watched it. Love Hina is also a 2000 series, I saw all of the TV show, but I don't think it's memorable for me in the way I want to cover here.)

Note that memorable does not necessarily mean good and there's at least one series that's going to cause me to froth mightily when I get to its year. For the most part this will be anime that I've seen most or all of. I'm taking date information from Wikipedia (which turns out to be a bit incomplete) and Anime-Planet.

Standouts:

• FLCL: I have nothing to say about this that other people haven't said better, except that watching it cold was a very trippy experience that probably can't be duplicated today (by the time you see it you'll likely have heard at least something about it).

• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: This is an amazing movie. I have nothing coherent to say about it and others have written lots about it anyways.

  (Wikipedia doesn't list it as a 2000 movie because it was released in France in 1999. It was released in Japan in 2000 so it counts for me.)

Ordinarily memorable:

• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust: This was epic in a good way with all sorts of nice action scenes and some reasonably affecting characters.

• Blood: The Last Vampire: This was an excellent little unpretentious movie for what it was. I still have fond memories of several scenes (including one genuinely funny stereotype-puncturing one). It spawned a whole series of other works that I am progressively less fond of.

• NieA_7: This is a less well regarded Yoshitoshi ABe work but I enjoyed it a fair bit. It is slower and smaller in scope than his other works but no less charming.

• Escaflowne (the movie): Oh boy. The TV series was fine but the movie version of the story was kind of a trainwreck, with changes left and right. I once had a lot more opinions about this but they've faded with time.

Honorable mentions:

• Ah! My Goddess: The Movie: I was actually surprised to realize that I remember quite a lot from this film, including a quite nice race scene. It's well done and a quite good distillation of the essence of AMG.

• Initial D: Extra Stage: I get to count Initial D in this because Extra Stage aired in 2000. Extra Stage is a nice little side story focusing on some of my favorite secondary characters.

• Android Kikaider: This takes an old Japanese tokusatsu show and turns it into a surprisingly affecting psychological thriller that's lovingly drawn in an old-school style to boot.

Things I haven't seen:

• Banner of the Stars: I've seen Crest of the Stars and have always wanted to watch more, but Banner fell into the 00s gulf in my anime watching.

There are a number of other shows from 2000 that I have definite and often fond memories of but that I don't think are memorable enough for me to say anything about here. An incomplete list is Boys Be..., Yami no Matsuei, Gatekeepers, Gravitation, Hand Maid May, Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran, Love Hina, and Vandread.

(Some might be more memorable if I had seen all of the show instead of just parts.)

Sidebar: Me and incomplete or missed series from the 00s

The early 00s have a lot of incomplete series for me because I fell out of watching anime for a while. At the start of the 00s I was watching anime through various local anime clubs, but around here they steadily withered away as digital fansubs grew (which was kind of sad to see). For various reasons I didn't make the transition myself right away and only started watching anime on the computer rather later on. So there's a bunch of series that I saw some but not all of through an anime club before the anime club closed down, but I never went back to watch the rest of.

(And a certain amount of series that aired then, I missed at the time, and I've never gone back to watch since.)