Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Spring 2014 anime season

As before, it's time for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well my final views match up with my early impressions and my midway views. Sort of as I did in my winter season retrospective, there's one show I'm ranking based on how much I'm enjoying it instead of how good I think it is (for everything else I think the two match up quite well).

Excellent:

• Ping Pong: This is the total surprise of the season for me, far more than I expected at the start of the season. My best description of it (borrowed from somewhere else) is that in the end it's a character piece carefully disguised as a sports story, and what a character piece it is. It is full of interesting real people and it covers its events with a beautifully understated touch. It is unafraid to show instead of tell and more than that, to show without jumping up and down to point out certain things. I found it powerful, affecting, and in the end touching.

  I liked the art style. I think it worked very well for how the story was told and how the story was told really helped the impact of the story.

  For more raving about how good Ping Pong is, see eg Bobduh (also).

• Knights of Sidonia: This is far from a flawless show but what elevates it here is that it absolutely nails a certain sense of atmosphere and ambivalence, and it's also a gorgeously SF show. I have come around to feeling that it absolutely needs to be in full CGI to work, not just for the stunningly well done battle scenes but also to draw a real distance between it and more 'anime' shows. The show is also genuinely well directed and well written, things that are unfortunately rare in anime. One sign of this is that it's willing to confidently depart from strict adherence to the manga storyline in order to improve the experience of the anime.

  (Some people feel that the large scale death rate in the show has caused this aspect of it to lose its impact. I disagree personally because I think that the show is going for a different sort of impact that is less about people dying and more about the massive death rate among the pilots.)

  I'm eagerly looking forward to its continuation in the fall.

  (See eg Bobduh's reaction to episode 11 for both praise and criticism.)

• Mushishi second season: This is still an excellent show, one that I think is better than Sidonia, but I've wound up feeling at a distance from it for most of the season. My current theory for why is that the episodes have lacked any sort of ongoing thread that runs between them. Sure, Ginko shows up in each of them, but for most episodes he's just been an oracular presence that solves problems or watches things happen; we haven't really been pulled into him emotionally. The exception that proves the rule is the marvelous episode 10, which is all about Ginko being unsettled and getting yanked around and us seeing the really weird side of the mushi.

  To put it one way, Mushishi has been great to watch but Sidonia has affected me when I watch it.

  (Mushishi was unfortunately hit with production delays that pushed back episodes 11 and 12 to its fall season continuation. Some rumours say that these are more plot and Ginko-heavy episodes; if they'd aired this season I might well have a much stronger opinion of Mushishi overall, based on my reaction to episode 10.)

Plain good fun:

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This wrapped up its first big arc with a nice big bang and a well done pivot to move the overall story forward. It continues to be a solid show with competence all around in its execution and I'm quite looking forward to the second season.

  (I have little to say here because this is effectively a midseason pause instead of anything more climactic. Of course the show is executing a midseason story pivot now; it was about time if things weren't going to drag.)

Relatively ordinary:

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: This wound up being a perfectly competent and decently interesting show with some interesting and intriguing characters. It's just not particularly memorable as these shows go because it's not particularly exceptional. Tensai is the best and most interesting character, with Juugo second.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: I've continued to watch this basically as a comedy and it's continued to deliver that way. Things have stayed absurd and crazy and there have been some nice moments. I have no particularly deep emotional engagement with anyone in the show the way I have in every show from Chaika on up.

This season has turned out to be excellent, with several shows that are basically certain to rank highly in my eventual 'Best N in 2014' entry. While I'm disappointed with the failure of a few shows, this is much better than I expected at the start of the season; both Sidonia and especially Ping Pong turned out to be far more powerful shows than I anticipated.

(Looking back at my early Ping Pong impressions kind of makes me laugh now. And it's not that the show drastically improved over the course of its run. Its excellence was there from the start but I didn't trust the show to sustain it all the way through, so I was cautious.)

Checking in on the Spring 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season and as usual, it's a bit delayed. The headline news is that I've wound up feeling that this season is a pretty strong one, although I've also wound up dropping a number of shows.

Things I'm still watching:

• Mushishi second season: Either I have rosy memories of the first season or this season is tilting much more towards horror than the first season did. Whichever it is, the show still has Mushishi's deft and understated touch. And it's made me genuinely laugh.

• Ping Pong: What makes me so enthused about Ping Pong is that it's mostly doing a sort of story and exploring a collection of characters that I haven't really seen before in sports shows. Pretty much everyone both feels human and is interesting. I find the stylistic animation mostly just interesting, although I do think it helps the story and helps things stand out.

• Knights of Sidonia: If I had to describe this in one word I'd call it relentless; in animated form the show has acquired a visceral punch that the manga lacked for me. The battles are not soaring action affirmations but claustrophobic, tense exercises in people being all too human, things that you dread instead of looking forward to.

  (This is not as uncomfortable as, say, RideBack, but it is not exactly pleasant and cheerful.)

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This has slowed down some from the early episodes but it's staying solid and interesting, and it keeps pushing the plot forward at a decent pace. I'm glad that it's getting a second season. And as they say, 'Chaika a cute'.

  (Plus, casting all your magic with giant sniper rifles is always amusing. Wands, pah.)

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: This was trucking along as an ordinary show and then episode 4 happened and made pretty much everyone much more interesting. The show hasn't always delivered since then but it has come through pretty regularly, so I'm happy.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: It took a while for the show to really grow on me, but it has. JoJo's is plain flat out absurd, crazy, and over the top and I just roll with it on those terms and enjoy the spectacle. I suppose what I'm saying here is that it's really a comedy.

Dropped:

• Haikyuu!!: This is a perfectly good sports show with perfectly good animation, characters, and so on. It's just not exceptional enough to overcome the fact that I generally don't get really enthused about straightforward sports shows, so I took the end of a recent storyline as a good point to stop watching.

• Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii: Despite everything nice I said about it in my initial impressions it turned out that I wasn't all that taken with the show after all. When it hit my least favorite manga storyline at episode 4 I found myself with no motivation to keep watching.

Now declared as misses:

• Captain Earth: I patiently gave this seven episodes to do anything sufficiently interesting and coherent and it didn't. It doesn't help that the show is periodically wince-inducingly clumsy and stupid (cf).

• Mekakucity Actors: This is basically the same as with Captain Earth. There is probably more here in the show than with CE (and certainly less stupidity), but the slow pace and the obscurity irritated me. I likely gave the show too many chances given my previous standard of 'stop promising, start delivering'.

• Black Bullet: After three episodes I concluded that this was just a typical light novel adaptation that had managed some flashes of being good. This was not enough to continue watching it.

  (It does have one of the better opening songs of the season, though.)

• Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei: I came to my senses immediately after writing my initial impressions and never watched any more. From all reports I made the right decision.

Six shows, with three of them being solidly good, is enough to make me happy about this season.

Sidebar: My favorite OP songs of the season

For my tastes, Knights of Sidonia first, Black Bullet a relatively distant second, and then Ping Pong. Nothing else really ranks, sadly including Mushishi (the first season's OP is great although somewhat creepy if you listen to the lyrics, but I don't like this season's OP at all and always skip it). After some qualms the full version of the Sidonia OP has been growing on me.

As far as EDs go, you can't really top JoJo's.

Brief early impressions of the Spring 2014 anime season

It's time for my early impressions of this season so that I can organize my thoughts and then later see how badly I did at predicting what would be good and what would make me throw up my hands in despair. Early in the run of first episodes I thought I was going to have real difficulty sorting out what to watch, but as time went on I realized that there was a clear dividing line poking up out of my early confusion. Unlike back in winter this was not a line of active failure but instead a line of indifference.

Shows are ranked in rough order of how much I'm enjoying them.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season: It's just like the first series continued, which is great. I can't think of anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said in my entry on 2005.

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This had the most interesting and enticing first episode of the season, one that demonstrated a mastery of throwing us into the middle of things and illuminating the world through actions instead of exposition lumps. Never boring, always active, this episode went places. Now I just have to hope that the rest of the show keeps delivering (which the second episode did decently).

• Knights of Sidonia: I don't know how I'd feel about this if I hadn't read a lot of the manga but as it is the first episode works very well for me, partly because I know what's going on with a lot of the mysterious bits. But beyond that I think it did a good job of pushing the story forward, quietly setting up the world without infodumps, and so on. The CGI doesn't bother me but then I'm not picky about that stuff. The second episode did decently with the action and continuing the good work of the first episode and had some nice little touches.

Things that I'm reasonably enthused with:

• Ping Pong: The fact that none of the protagonists are particularly likable people makes me think that this may be doing something unusual with its plot instead of being yet another standard sports story. If it has something interesting to say I'm willing to keep watching.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: I'm taking another shot at watching JoJo's with this and so far it's going pretty well. The second episode had a surprisingly brutal bit and it remains very much the essence of action shonen. Hopefully I won't find it too over the top.

• Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii: Again, I've read the manga so I know what's going on and a bunch of what's coming, which inevitably influences my reactions. Nike and the other major characters are as charming (and sometimes irritating) as they were in the manga and I'm on board for watching more of the antics in animated form.

• Mekakucity Actors: The first episode was interesting but also deliberately opaque. The latter was well enough done that I want to watch more, although it could all collapse like a house of cards. I don't think its collection of standard Shaft stylistic tics either helps or hurts it, but other people may have stronger feelings about this than I do and I'll admit that not much actually happened in the first two episodes.

At least a bit marginal already:

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: I like the idea of the premise and the two episodes were decent although not spectacular, which is good enough to keep me watching for now.

• Black Bullet: The first episode was a sodden, charm-less light novel adaptation, complete with exposition lumps and vaguely cringe-inducing fanservice. People said good things about the second episode so I gave it another chance and the result was an order of magnitude better, in that it was reasonably watchable and interesting. I may not stay with this for long but I'm at least willing to give it a third episode.

• Captain Earth: This show is well done overall but has two strikes against it. It's a mecha show and I'm not particularly a mecha fan, and the second episode had one the most eye-rollingly cartoonish bad characters I've seen since the second half of Sword Art Online. Oh, and while it's well done there's nothing here that's really compelling.

  In short, sadly this is no Star Driver. It's much more conventional than that, to its detriment.

• Haikyuu!!: On the good side this has production values and decent characters, but on the other side it seems to be doing a relatively standard sports story and I'm historically not too attracted to those. This may fall down into the 'not for me' category. At the moment I feel like continuing to watch until the action slows down.

Watching despite myself:

• Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei: This isn't really a good show and it's not even good competence porn, but it is kind of fascinating to see the next way that the protagonist is going to turn out to be a special, misunderstood, and amazingly overpowered snowflake. He's already been revealed as a ninja master and special combat mage, so what will they come up with next? I expect to get bored of this at some point, probably when the show starts taking the 'plot' seriously and stops having the protagonist show off all the time. In short I'm watching this purely for the spectacle and I'm not all that engaged with the spectacle at that.

  (It's possible to do this kind of premise well but Mahouka is not even coming close.)

  Mahouka is sort of like Sword Art Online in that both clearly have a bunch of money and effort put into their production but suffer from defects in the actual core content. The result is something that's mostly quite watchable on a moment to moment level (because it looks good, scenes are decently well staged, and so on) but then you wake up and ask 'I was watching what happen?' See also Bobduh's takedown of episode 2.

The line of 'meh', where the shows are not actively repulsive but don't particularly inspire any interest in more:

• Seikoku no Dragonar: Bland but not actively irritating. There is nothing here that we haven't seen before and the execution isn't well enough done to overcome that. It deserves special note for particularly clumsily and badly executed fanservice.

• Akuma no Riddle (at 2 eps): This is teasing us with stuff I don't expect it to really deliver on, especially as it's adopted from an incomplete manga and we know how that one goes as far as answering mysteries and delivering satisfying conclusions.

• Soul Eater Not!: If I strip away all of my fond memories of Soul Eater, there's just not very much novel or compelling in here. We had one nice fight scene but apparently that's going to be a rarity and the character chemistry is too over the top to be really interesting.

• Brynhildr in the Darkness: Meh. The first episode was okay but not at all inspiring.

(Having written all that I'm feeling the temptation to give some of these another episode or two. Not so much because I think that they're better than I've rated them here but instead because I want them to be better than that and I keep hoping that maybe another episode will change things. This is a foolish hope but it tempts me.)

Outright miss:

• Atelier Escha & Logy - Alchemists of the Dusk Sky: I want to like the quiet and low-key mood, but after two episodes it's just too slow for me. To be honest part of it is that I'm simply finding Escha to be kind of irritating; she's a bit too squeaky and immature and over-genki.

• M3 - Sono Kuroki Hagane: Total failure to engage my interest. It's bland, absurd, and infuriating, combining an entire collection of lazy cliches with completely uninspiring production and writing that veers between clumsy and insulting.

So very clearly not my thing:

• One Week Friends: I've heard praise for this but at the same time the praise makes it pretty clear that this is not in my area of interest.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports:

• No Game, No Life: I don't expect this to measure up to last year's Mondaiji (cf).

• selector infected WIXOSS

• Broken Blade: I've watched four out of the six movies already but have stalled out there, which I'm taking as a sign that I'm not going to be particularly enthused about the TV series version either. If I feel the urge I'll finish the movies instead of the TV series.

There are no ongoing shows that have carried over from last season, so I get to start with a clean slate this time around. I suspect that I'm going to wind up dropping at least some shows above the line of meh just because following eleven or twelve shows is a relatively lot for me.

Looking back at the Winter 2014 anime season

It's time for the usual retrospective look back at the season to go with my early impressions and my midway views. This time I've decided to be different in my ranking; instead of ranking series more or less on how good they are, which I usually do, I'm going to rank by pure enjoyment.

Plain good fun:

• Witch Craft Works: This show demonstrates the power of understanding that your basic premise comes straight out of bad light novel cliches (although it's actually adopted from a manga) and therefor should be ignored as much as possible. In the hands of anyone who took the basic plot seriously WCW would have been a disaster; instead it succeeds brilliantly at being entertaining by de-emphasizing the core plot in favour of a parade of diversions, from Tanpopo's antics to Kagari's deadpan craziness.

  WCW has no pretensions of being any deeper than a pothole after a rainstorm but it more than makes up for this with pure amusement value. That made it the most consistently enjoyable show I watched all season and gets it the first place ranking here.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It delivered almost exactly what I was expecting, including an excellent troll in the last episode. Every episode made me laugh, often several times. I could ask for no more in a comedy.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: Zvezda is the best show I watched this season. It had heart, intelligence, and a solid sense of fun and humour and was far more ambitious than WCW and SY. The problem is that while it quietly aimed high it didn't always hit that mark; while perfectly decent, the result sometimes felt like a bit of a letdown. This came to a head in the final episode, which was perfectly good but couldn't quite deliver on the promise of either the previous few episodes or the opening of the first episode.

• Noragami: This continued its good execution through the end and as a result I wouldn't mind a second season (as you might expect for a 12-episode series based on an ongoing manga, the major things are in no way resolved or concluded). I liked that it was willing to be subtle about some things. I disagree with people about the idea that the season should have ended with Yukine's plotline but that argument doesn't fit in the margins of this summary.

  (Whatever you do, don't watch the OAD. The OAD might as well be a different and significantly worse show, or at least a bad dream version.)

(In a way these four shows neatly split into two shows that were mostly about spectacle and two shows that were primarily about substance. The spectacle based shows executed it better than the substance based ones.)

Ordinary:

• Space Dandy: Ultimately this is an indulgent show, in that it indulges the animators, the writers, and the directors involved by allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want. The result is very uneven, kind of interesting on occasion, and not very compelling (I didn't find even the good episodes to be particularly powerful). In essence what we're getting here is a bunch of art cinema experiments and like most experiments many of them are only really interesting as 'look what we can do' things. Still, the zombies episode.

  Apparently this may be just what Watanabe wanted, so I can't exactly call Space Dandy a failure as such. But I don't think it's a success.

• Robot Girls Z: I wound up watching all three episodes, mostly out of a feeling that I might as well. It was okay, which makes it the kind of thing I've been trying to stop watching. Fans of old giant robot shows apparently got more out of it than I did.

Carried over from the fall:

• KILL la KILL: As I put it on Twitter KLK is an epic and spectacular show, and I'd add 'showy' to that list of adjectives. I think it clearly succeeded at what it set out to do, namely being BURNING ANIME in a good way. To deal with one issue: I don't think KLK (strongly) intended to have messages, although I do think it had themes that it worked into the narrative.

  Episode 22 and its ending and how people reacted to it is really the encapsulated KILL la KILL experience in one moment. KLK is all about delivering fanservice of the sort that doesn't involve nearly naked people (although it has them too, and in a much less fanservicy way than you might think).

• Log Horizon: This stayed strong through the nominal end. Since the show is getting a second season it didn't bother to invent some sort of temporary finish to things but just wrapped up the current story and hung out a 'here is your second season introduction cliffhanger' sign. I'm perfectly fine with this; the last few episodes were a good way to wind down from the more intense earlier ones. Log Horizon took a while to build up but the eventual payoffs were good.

  As peculiar as it sounds, I think that Log Horizon is above all thoughtful and intelligent. It did any number of interesting things with the intersection of MMO mechanics, MMO players, and a real world, and the smart characters in it felt genuinely smart. And I really liked a number of 'well of course' moments that it gave me, such as Crusty's enthusiasm for combat once he got into it. See also my fall retrospective.

• Tokyo Ravens: For reasons that boil down to 'I was bored and it was made to look appealing' I marathoned this right at the end of the season despite having dismissed it back in the fall. I don't regret this overall but I also don't regret skipping the show in the fall; I think it was drastically improved by being marathoned instead of doled out week by week. The first two episodes are weak and the final episode induced eye-rolling, but apart from that I found it surprisingly fun.

  (I also benefited from having been spoiled on one or two plot twists ahead of time, which made it easier to enjoy watching some bits.)

  One refreshing thing about TR is that it never beat around the bush about issues. Several times it raised suspicions and then immediately confirmed them in the next episode or two rather than drawing things out the way that many other shows would. The protagonist was still as dense as lead but the other characters were pretty smart and aware and not at all confused about who liked who and what was going on; as a result it skipped any number of tedious cliches that are common to the genre.

If I did a merged ranking of the carried over fall shows with this season's shows KILL la KILL would be clearly on top and Log Horizon might beat Witch Craft Works. Tokyo Ravens would be on the boundary of ordinary (and I would rate it much higher than Space Dandy, which spent the entire season on the edge of being dropped).

Ignoring the shows that carried over from the fall, I think this was a good but not great season. Four solidly enjoyable shows is not a bad number.

Why I don't rate the Rebuild of Evangelion movies all that highly

Back in my best N in 2013 entry I mentioned that while I'd seen all three currently available Rebuild of Evangelion movies in 2013, none of them made my year-end list for reasons beyond the scope of that entry. Today I feel like elaborating on that passing remark.

Fundamentally the reason I don't find the movies really impressive is that I've already seen both Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series) and End of Evangelion. Having seen both, there is not much really new and impressive that the Rebuild movies bring to the table. There are two sides to this, one for the TV series and one for EoE.

While the production values of the first two movies are higher than the TV series, the TV series covers basically the same ground in more depth and as a result has more fully developed and interesting characters. This is really what you'd expect because the TV series simply has more time. The movie hits the high points and adds some twists but its limited time forces it to simplify many elements (often ones I quite like) and I don't think it really adds more than one or two new things to compensate for this (the 'seaside' scene was nice but about it). Rebuild's desire to retread most of the same ground confines it and lessens it.

As for the third movie, it's mostly incoherent and unexciting as a movie (although it has some spectacular action sequences). What it really is is yet another giant Anno gesture in the direction of the fans, and as mentioned I've already seen Anno's first version of that. End of Evangelion is in many ways the ultimate middle finger to fans and I saw it years ago. By now yet more gestures from Anno to the fans have lost their ability to shock and impress me; now my reaction is more 'what, again?' (with a side of 'haven't you got tired of this yet?').

(The other difference between You Can (Not) Redo and End of Evangelion is that EoE tells a coherent and powerful story that just happens to be brutally ugly and 3.0 doesn't really. EoE is successful as a movie, not just as a gesture to fans.)

So the short version is: the Rebuild movies look nice but they aren't doing anything particularly new and interesting and they aren't significantly great purely as movies. This still makes them decent movies that I didn't regret watching but they're not 'best N in 2013' material.

(The first two movies are probably close to the best that they could be under the circumstances, but I tend to think that almost any relatively faithful movie retelling of a good TV series is going to suffer because of having less time. The movies did have some stabs at departing from the straight and narrow of the TV series but I didn't find those compelling enough on their own merits.)

I do accept that Anno is trying to say things to and about the Evangelion fandom; see Bobduh for one analysis of this. I'm just not particularly compelled by Anno's commentary, at least wrapped up in this form. To put it unkindly, being meta does not automatically make you interesting.

Checking in on the Winter 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. I don't think that this is a really strong season so far and it also feels kind of odd to me; despite watching a reasonable number of shows I've wound up somehow feeling that this season is a slow one (perhaps because many of the shows I'm watching are packed into the weekend with basically nothing coming out during the week). This is tempting me towards probably unwise ideas, like say trying to get into the frequently praised Hunter x Hunter.

(A less ambitious version would be giving Gundam Build Fighters a try.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: This is being generally fun and funny with periodic additions of pointed commentary and weirdness. As I hoped it's playing the absurdism straight but not seriously and managing to be surprisingly charming in the process.

• Witch Craft Works: This was a surprise midseason pickup after I read enough praise of it to push me over the edge. I have to tell you that what people say about it being entertaining is true; it doesn't aspire to being deep but it is both funny and clever. Part of the enjoyment for someone like me is watching it thoroughly invert the usual gender tropes of this genre in all sorts of ways.

  So far the Tower Witches are never not funny.

  (One of the reasons the show is genuinely funny is that it doesn't overplay its hand with jokes. There's no standing around extending the joke or repeating it to make sure you got it; the show brushes over the joke and moves on.)

• Noragami: The execution continues to be very well done and the twists of the story are reasonably surprising and interesting (Nora's story was not was I was expecting and is in some ways worse and sadder). Hiyori is the clear best character of the show and is really what makes it.

  (One sign of quality execution is that Hiyori has more than one out of school outfit. Sometimes she has more than one in a single episode.)

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It continues to reliably hit my funny bone and in fact makes me laugh on a regular basis.

  (I admit that I'm watching this somewhat slowly, as there's no plot anticipation or 'what will they do next' to make watching it feel urgent.)

Perpetually on the edge:

• Space Dandy: This show is more or less the humour equivalent of a decently well done action show. If it sounds like I'm making excuses for Space Dandy it's because I am. Overall I feel that the show is much better at the small stuff than assembling it into an interesting and compelling framework.

  (To be unkind, this is much more Kids on the Slope than Cowboy Bebop.)

• Robot Girls Z: It turns out they got a new joke or two for the second episode. It's probably amusing enough for me to finish it (so far I've seen one of the three sections of the second episode).

Dropped:

• Nobunagun: My gut is unenthused about this and I've learned the hard way that I should trust it. I think the problem is that I'm just not that interested in any of the characters or what's going on. That the show keeps doing crazy things can only carry it so far.

  (I'd say that the show's low animation budget is showing but to be honest it did right from the start. I was just willing to overlook its use of style to cover the lack of actual animation in the early days.)

In shows carried over from last season, both KILL la KILL and Log Horizon are still doing excellent work. Both have reached the point where stuff is really starting to happen and Log Horizon especially is coming through in all sorts of interesting ways. If I ranked them here they would both come before anything from this season, with KILL la KILL first.

My memorable anime from 2005

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet. As before I'm mostly listing shows in alphabetical order instead of trying to come up with preference order.

Standouts (in order):

• Mushishi: Better people than me have written lyrical appreciations for this quiet and beautiful work. It is about a lot of things but most of all it's about people; it simply explores them through the marvelously fantastic.

• Honey and Clover: This is one of the handful of ordinary life shows that I like, and in fact I pretty much love it. It's the characters and their interactions that make Honey and Clover, but the art and the direction is pretty good too. One reason the show works so well is that it's set in university and has reasonably mature characters and even actual adults.

  (My heresy is that I've never finished watching the second season because I found the ending of Honey and Clover itself to be perfectly satisfying. Someday I'll fix that.)

• Noein: This had some great science fiction concepts and excellent animation mixed in with an art style that can sometimes be offputting, characters that sometimes irritate people (while at the same time often being great), and a complex series of events that can be hard to follow. I wave my hands. I loved it when I saw it and I remember it fondly even now. It has any number of stunning moments, including a number of fight scenes.

• Shakugan no Shana: Regardless of what came after it, the first season of Shana was an excellent show that I look back on fondly. It has all sorts of good characters, a collection of disturbing antagonists, a number of interesting and sometimes creepy concepts, and pretty good animation and action. It's also one of the few action shows with a girl as their primary protagonist, which is a refreshing change.

Ordinarily memorable (in alphabetical order):

• Air: This has the distinction of being the only Key-based show that I've ever liked, and at that I much preferred the odd modern age segments to the much more standard-fantasy ones set in the past. It's possible my opinion of it would drop if I ever rewatched it, so I'm unlikely to ever do so.

• Fairy Musketeers Akazukin OVA: This had an interesting concept with a bunch of kick-ass characters but unfortunately is not exactly a complete story. Although the subsequent TV show has more depth, I never really forgave it for turning Akazukin herself into basically a moe goof (the OVA Akazukin is competent and outright dangerous; the TV series one, not so much).

• Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid: TSR is basically the payoff for all of the character and plot development throughout FMP. We got to see any number of people flower and do cool things, especially Chidori.

• Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu: Bittersweet but touching, this was a quiet little OVA series that managed to be periodically spectacular, sometimes funny, and surprisingly realistic (in ways that are spoilers to discuss).

• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's: This is where the Nanoha series really hits its stride and becomes excellent. Everything clicks, from characters through the multi-layered plot.

  (Note that yes, it still has those questionable transformation sequences and it's still a magical girls show primarily aimed at otaku, not actual girls.)

• Sousei no Aquarion: Although it involves giant robots and sometimes they do crazy things, the show actually has a solid plot, story, setting, and even a set of characters that I rather like (because, among other things, they're interesting people going through interesting conflicts).

Honorable mentions for shows that were fun but nothing more:

• Black Cat: A decent adventure and action series with some nice characters. I am sort of underselling this show here, but.

• Gun x Sword: Underneath a bunch of other things I remember it as having some reasonably interesting things to say about people being driven by revenge. I don't think they were novel things, but at least it was trying.

• Zettai Shonen: This was, well, weird (and deliberately so, and successfully). I remember enjoying it and thinking it was good but in practice I can't really remember any details, which means that listing it here is sort of a guilty reaction.

As before this is not all of the 2005 shows that I've seen, but the other ones don't make this entry for various reasons. Also, I probably should include Jigoku Shoujo here since I have very vivid memories from trying to watch it.

Want to see:

• Eureka Seven: This has been repeatedly praised as the great show that Eureka Seven AO isn't in the end.

• Kamichu! (maybe): On the one hand I watched a few episodes of this and liked it quite a bit. On the other hand I've heard that it decays by the end.

At this point I will mention that Aria also aired in 2005. I've never watched it but a lot of people praise it highly.

Perfect Blue and the importance of genre

(This entry has spoilers for Perfect Blue that you should avoid if you haven't seen it already.)

Perfect Blue presents itself as a psychological thriller. That's what the advertising copy will tell you, that's what Wikipedia will tell you, that's how people tend to describe it, and that's the face that the film first puts forward when you see it, especially at the start. As a psychological thriller the film is powerful, affecting, and genuinely suspenseful and mysterious; almost right up until the end you're not sure what's going on and so on.

(The reveals themselves are powerful and clever and beautiful. Really, Perfect Blue is a great film. It's not too late to stop reading and see it yourself.)

This is how I saw Perfect Blue when I saw it and probably how most people see it. But in thinking about it shortly afterwards I realized that this is not the only way to see Perfect Blue, because it's also a murder mystery. And if it's watched as a murder mystery Perfect Blue is a quite different experience, one that's a lot less mysterious and in fact somewhat obvious. There are two reasons for this.

To start with, if you're told that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery you're going to put less weight on a bunch of the odd stuff that happens because you know it's just there to throw you off the scent and the real explanation is, say, someone hallucinating. You know it can't be real because the rules of the genre say that it isn't. Second, it's actually not that difficult to work out who the guilty party is fairly early on and figure out a fair amount of what's really going on. This isn't so much because the film directly scatters in-world clues around (although I think it does some of that) but because as a murder mystery Perfect Blue follows the rules of the genre and there are a number of spots where these genre rules draw your attention to something important and get you to interpret it in a particular way.

In general, if someone tells you that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery and you watch it that way you're probably going to be less affected by the psychological thriller aspects of it. Rather than being the core of the film they are more of an (interesting) distraction from the mystery that you already know is there. As you follow Mima's increasingly disturbing life there's likely to be a little voice in your head that's looking for whodunit and what they're doing and so on, a voice that's simply not there if you watch Perfect Blue as the psychological thriller that its publicity pushes you towards.

I'm not certain I've seen anything besides Perfect Blue where the genre I thought the work was in was so important; if someone had told me that Perfect Blue was a murder mystery I would have watched it in a quite different way and seen different things when I did so. But just the thought that perceived genre can significantly alter my perceptions of a work has stayed with me ever since, and sometimes I look at other works and wonder.

(Godannar is the closest I've come to this feeling. If I knew for sure that Godannar had been intended as straight up serious, I think my opinion of it would drop for reasons beyond this aside.)

Sidebar: Why I think Perfect Blue follows the genre rules

To put it simply, the genre rules exist in part to make the mystery comprehensible. We want things to have explanations so we want to be able to look backwards and see what actually happened and why (and to feel that the whole thing makes sense). That look backwards requires the basics of motives and opportunity and so on to be present from the start.

Sidebar: Genre rules and one bit in Perfect Blue

I mentioned above that mystery genre rules point some things out to you. For instance, in a murder mystery you pretty much don't have people who are simply upset at some early development. For good story reasons, their emotions are going to figure into the mystery later; either they'll show up as explicit red herrings to draw out the investigation or they've just acquired a motive to do something. The more that the work doesn't use them as a red herring, the more you suspect them.

The culprit in Perfect Blue basically jumps up and down at one point to show that they have a motive. Watching the movie as a psychological thriller I didn't think anything of it because it felt like a natural character reaction; thinking back through the lens of the mystery genre that moment stood out like a sore thumb and made the character suspect number one, especially since the movie didn't really give us any others.

(When you watch Perfect Blue as a psychological thriller you don't think about 'who did it' at all and so you don't think about things like the paucity of suspects, because the film doesn't need suspects. Mima is having some sort of increasing breakdown and that's sufficient explanation by itself, right up until the film reaches its climax.)

My memorable anime from 2004

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant; in fact there is one show in this list that stands out based on how much I viscerally disliked something it did. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet.

2004 is not the awesome year that 2002 was but it turns out to have a lot of plain good shows. The highs are not as high as 2002 but there's a lot more depth to the field, if that makes sense.

The biggest standouts (in preference order):

• Paranoia Agent: This show is amazing. I have no coherent words for it, especially ones that aren't spoilers. Episode 8 is a work of joyous art (and yes, I know that that's an odd thing to say given its contents).

• Windy Tales: Although this has an unconventional art style, I'm going to call it simply beautiful. It starts out with a flying cat (yes, really) and goes on from there to tell a series of affecting quiet stories. I love it unreasonably.

• Melody of Oblivion: What MoO does really well is be disturbingly weird. If the weirdness doesn't resonate with you, you're going to hate it; if it does, the entire show is a whole succession of wild rides. I loved the show, including all of the crazy mythological things it does, and think that it's underappreciated. And yes, I think it's supposed to be a somewhat uncomfortable watch all throughout, including the ending and the fanservice.

  (To pique your interest I'll note that it's written by Yoji Enokido, who also worked on Utena and Star Driver. This should give you a good idea of what you're in for.)

Standouts (in alphabetical order):

• Fantastic Children: The best description I can come up with is that this is an excellent children's science fiction adventure story, one that's good enough to be appreciated by all ages. Please note that I consider this strong praise.

• Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo: This oozes style and visual flair (some of it distracting), and the writing is decent and interesting; many people love it and rate it very highly. I can't, because late in the show's run it threw a melodramatic and gratuitous character death in my face and immediately lost me (and it's a death that doesn't occur in the original source material). That one moment made me want to throw the show against the wall and I dropped it on the spot.

  (I have to admit that even before the death totally irritated me I was sort of feeling that the show's stylishness was overcoming the story.)

• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig: I don't love this quite as much as I love the first season, but that merely makes it my second favorite Ghost in the Shell work. Everything good about the first season continues on in this, it's just not quite as shiny and new and exceptional this time around. The show is still excellent.

• Jubei-chan 2: This is an excellent followup to the first Jubei-chan (which can't really be called a 'season' because it's complete in and of itself). It reinforces what was good about Jubei-chan while adding its own layer of nice work and contributing its own set of great moments and subtle nuances.

  (Note that it can't be watched without having seen the first Jubei-chan.)

• My-HiME: This is Sunrise doing magical girls with mecha and carefully breaking any number of genre conventions in the process (but throwing in once-standard Sunrise elements like the midseason shock plot twist). The whole thing is simply a well put together package; characters, mecha designs, animation, story, everything. Some people hate the ending but I think it's fine and is perfectly appropriate for the show as a whole. I love the anti-cliche things that the show does with a number of the characters.

  (In many ways I think that this is Sunrise at the height of their powers and appeal.)

• Samurai Champloo: This show is a masterclass in how you do style and mix up your genres and settings, as Watanabe makes a whole series of crazy mashups work (primarily crossing classical samurai with hip-hop). One of the things that I always liked is how Mugen and Jin have such different (and fitting) sword styles.

• Uta Kata: The show starts out as a relatively normal magical girl story (of the old kind where the magical girl is given powers that she explores instead of given powers to fight things) and then goes into increasingly darker and more disturbing territory. This is not shock for the sake of shock; it's much more interesting and affecting than that.

Ordinarily memorable:

• Tweeny Witches aka Magical Girl Squad Arusu: Don't let the somewhat odd art style or setting put you off; this show has heart and a lot of appeal, and over the course of its run actually delivers a pretty darn epic adventure story.

  (This is also known as Mahou Shoujotai Arusu or sometimes Mahou Shoujo Tai.)

• Diebuster: This has one epic moment and a lot of decent work in the rest of it. It's Gainax trying hard and actually succeeding; while not as epic as the original Gunbuster it is a worthy followup.

• Le Portrait de Petit Cossette: This is one of the few works of more or less horror that I actually like (or liked when I saw it). It's spooky and disturbing and more psychological than anything else.

  (It's possible that I'd rate this lower if I rewatched it.)

• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The original TV series that launched what has become more or less an epic (once you roll in the successor TV series, the movies, the multiple manga, and so on). Nanoha more or less pioneered the otaku-focused fighting magical girls show and created a number of archetypes in the process. It has all sorts of epic beam-spam fights, a reasonably affecting storyline, some number of laughs, decent characters that have become classics, a few bits of unpleasant brutality when a character gets whipped, and some pieces of fanservice that are more than a bit creepy if you pay much attention to them.

  (I'd like to give it points for raising issues like Nanoha's increasing isolation from her friends, but the show never really goes anywhere with these issues.)

• Rozen Maiden: Underneath the flash and fire and dolls fighting each other, the first season is an affecting portrait of a shut-in recovering his spirit and willingness to interact with other people and the world.

• Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase-: One part charming, one part potentially irritating, one part vaguely disturbing, okay, this show has a lot of parts. It has a bunch of good characters, an understated romance between some people in the background, and a decently good story.

  Oh, and it sort of marks the start of Shaft's and Shinbo's wacky style of art and directing. Don't worry, it's relatively toned down and sensible here.

Honorable mentions, sometimes sort of:

• Bleach: For a while, this was a great shonen fighting show with some excellent characters. I still have fond memories of most of first year or so of episodes (up to the infamous first filler arc).

• Elfen Lied: This is notoriously bloody, graphically violent, graphical in general, and brutal. Take those out and there's nothing particularly novel here, but with them in the series is extremely memorable.

• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: I feel sort of obliged to mention this somewhere even though I'm not really enthused about it in general. It's GitS, which means that it's pretty decent, and a GitS movie, which means that it looks amazing. It's a GitS movie by Oshii, which means that it's loaded with philosophy (some of it administered by blunt instruments).

• Gokusen: The granddaughter of a Yakuza boss becomes a teacher and of course is not at all bothered, scared, or impressed by the delinquents she winds up having as her students. This is basically a 'dedicated teacher' story (to steal the phrase from the Wikipedia entry) like eg GTO, but it's a well done and charming little series.

• Keroro Gunso aka Sgt. Frog: I gave up on this after a while, but it delivered both good entertainment and comedy that I actually liked. It understood that good comedy needs to be built around strong characters.

• Kurau Phantom Memory: This is a good science fiction show and character study that is somewhat marred by issues with the pacing. I remember it as well made and pretty exciting when it did action.

• 2x2 = Shinobuden: Funny and goofy and with a heart. One of the shows where the comedy works for me. Onsokumaru is a marvel who has to be heard to be appreciated; Norio Wakamoto really cuts loose and the result is glorious.

• This Ugly Yet Beautiful World: This was Gainax's 20th anniversary work and was theoretically supposed to be a showcase of them at their best. It didn't work out that way.

It looks like 2004 is the first year of the 00's where I can't spot anything obvious that I want to watch. Perhaps Sunabozu (aka Desert Punk), which I saw part of back in the days and which I've seen recommended since. I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet but I've heard mixed reviews of it and I want to read the original book first.

Oh, and there's Futari wa Precure aka the starting point of the Precure juggernaut (which is still speeding along ten years later). I saw an episode or two back in the days and it was decent but not exceptional. I'd kind of like to see some Precure, but these days I'm probably not going get through an old year long series of any genre.

(A number of shows from 2004 that I've seen don't make this list for the usual reasons. Yes, believe it or not, I'm trimmed this instead of saying something about everything from 2004 that I've seen.)

The problem with flashbacks

Aroduc famously dislikes flashbacks. I've never entirely understood that, because I have a more moderate view on them (as I do on most narrative devices); most of the time I just go with the flow, although I admit that some of the long ones in shonen fighting shows have gotten to me (Naruto's, say, where we might spend an episode or several in one). But recently, writing about Space Battleship Yamato 2199's episode 14 caused a little coherent light to go on in my head about the problem with flashbacks.

Put simply, flashbacks stop the current action in the show to divert us off sideways. We were in the present day with something interesting happening and now all of that gets put on hold while we traipse off to the past for a while, where we have to establish context and build up momentum to do stuff in the past-story. Then afterwards we come back to the present time and have to pick up the momentum of the action all over again (and to remind the viewers just what was going on in the present day before we dropped it for a while). At a minimum the show loses some of the impact from the present day action that was interrupted, because viewers just can't sustain that impact and momentum over the interruption; it falls out of our heads to be replaced by whatever's going on in the flashback. At the worst the show loses a major amount of energy as it thrashes back and forth between the past and the present.

(There are minor spoilers for Yamato 2199 episode 14 here.)

All of this points to why the 'flashbacks' in Yamato 2199's episode 14 work so well: they're actually part of the action in the present. While the flashbacks are of the past, they're being experienced by the characters in the current time. There is no diversion from the action because the characters going through these flashbacks and reacting to them in various ways is the action. The whole thing flows as an unbroken strand from the start of the episode right through to the end, with nothing to yank us out and dissipate the momentum.

I'm sure that there's a bunch of structural techniques that can do similar things, it's just that I haven't had them rubbed in my face so vividly. After all, flashbacks are in theory just one form of having multiple narrative threads running simultaneously as in eg Kyoukai no Kanata episode 10, where in fact one of the story threads was a flashback.

(All of this must be well known to people with actual experience in fiction writing, story structure, and so on. I'm a naif here, though, so I get to work this stuff out for myself when I stumble over it.)