Category: Anime

There’s something to be said about a short film that gets in, does what it sets out to do, and gets out. Negadon: The Monster From Mars does exactly that.

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Azur Lane is, basically, Ship Girl Tohou. World War II Warships from various navies are personified as cute girls, and they generally hang out at the bases of their respective factions and do cute things until the plot decides that they have to do combat in battles along the lines of shoot-em-up video games. It’s not quite at a danmaku level – but only because the game series is designed to be played on a cell phone, and you don’t have that level of control with a touchscreen.

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Considering that Fate/Grand Order is widely considered to be one of the most successful mobile games of all time, one would think that more of the game’s chapters had been previously adapted to the screen. You would be wrong – previously only the game’s prologue has received an adaptation. At long last, though, one of the game’s final chapters (at least before the current sequence), the Babylonia chapter, has finally been adapted to the screen.

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The members of Special 7

Special 7 is the last of the big anime series I’d watched in the Fall 2019 season that finished that season – Azur Lane was delayed, Blade of the Immortal, Fate/Grand Order, and My Hero Academia were two-cour series, and I dropped Babylon. It’s an interesting anime series that takes the concept of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and applies it in an urban fantasy context, but doesn’t quite have as much to say.

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The main cast of We Never Learn - Yuuki and his romantic interests.

The first season of We Never Learn ended with an announcement for a second season. With the manga being based around college preparation and studying for that, I did definitely have a sense that whether or not the manga was actually done at this point, whatever the second season ended on was going to have some degree of finality – with how the anime was paced, I couldn’t really see a way to wrap here without getting into graduation. Without too many spoilers before the cut, it does get to graduation, and in hindsight, I think the ending kind of works well.

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Juzo from "No Guns Life"

It’s kind of been a while since we got a major cyberpunk anime that was outside of the general orbit of Masamune Shirow. Season 2 of SAO, from the description of the arc, was something that I might describe as cyberpunk adjacent – but otherwise, I generally didn’t see much that didn’t have a connection to Shirow or one of the series he created in the listings. So, when No Guns Life came up in the Anime Chart, I figured it was worth checking out.

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Well, we have come to the end of the 2010s, a decade where I actually was much more on top of watching new anime each season – more or less – in part because the rise of streaming made it possible to actually do that in an affordable manner. This past decade also saw me get my Bachelor’s degree, and go to Worldcon for the first time, in a semi-vain attempt to get lit-SF fans to give anime the time of day.

So, I’m going to do a run-down of my favorite Anime of the 2010s that I’ve seen. I will be doing one series per year – and again, this is show’s I’ve seen. Just because a show is not included doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch it or didn’t like it. Additionally, I have a massive List of Shame, so just because a show didn’t make the list doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested.

I’m choosing one show per year, that I watched, and that I generally enjoyed. Each show will have links to where you can watch the series, and affiliate links to where you can buy it – buying anything through those links helps to support the site.

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Well, another year come and gone, so it’s time for me to give some thoughts on my favorite shows of 2019 that I’ve seen. The keyword here is that I’ve seen. There are plenty of great shows this year that I missed, whether because they’re sequels to earlier seasons (Symphogear), or they just slipped under my radar, so I’ll need to come back to them later. As with all of my lists, these are in no particular order, so don’t consider a lower spot in the list, nor an absence from the list, as a slight against that work.

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Sports Anime is something of a blind spot in my viewing habits. A lot of the top shows of the past few years (Kuroko’s Basketball, Haikyu, Yowamushi Petal) are on my to-watch list, and a few other shows (Giant Killing, Free, Princess Nine) I’ve never gotten around to finishing. So on a recommendation I decided to sit down and watch Scorching Ping-Pong Girls, on the one hand I found it an enjoyable and brisk watch – but on the other, it left me hanging.

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After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.

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