It’s #HeroWeek over at Crunchyroll, so I’m pitching in with a couple of essays on my two favorite superhero anime of the last few years—Gatchaman Crowds and Concrete Revolutio. Up first, Kenji Nakamura’s Gatchaman Crowds!
In my humble opinion, it’s always best the let the year sink in a little bit before making a list that declares the top anime of any given year. And so, that’s exactly what I’ve done—allowed my favorites of the year to pickle in an aging pot for a while before taking them out and shipping them off to be sold…err, sorry. Too much Harvest Moon these days. Anyways…
To see how things shook out during the year, check out my final rankings posts for each season.
Winter 2015 | Spring 2015 | Summer 2015 | Fall 2015
So, without further distraction, I present my top anime of 2015! Here’s the Best Girl of 2015 to kick things off!
Another season has passed. Despite being a rather slow season and mostly lacking in shows I would consider worthy of serious superlatives, I was generally amused, entertained, and engaged by the stuff I ended up watching all the way to the end. As always, there were some up weeks and some down weeks, but on the whole I’m pretty happy with the way this season ended up. It certainly won’t go down as one of the best in anime history—but when you come away from a season with an episode of a bubble dropping on Lelei’s head, how can you really complain?
The season is ending, the thrillingly nice weather of autumn is starting to hit the Midwest with consistency, I’ve moved back over to MAL, and it’s time to talk about this week’s anime. A couple of my shows have already ended, with the rest of them set to conclude between now and Saturday—then we get a shockingly short break and the new season will be upon us. But let’s not think about that yet. We’re still in summer…at least if you live by seasonal anime…
Okay, so if last week being down was the requisite condition for this week, I am so very okay with that—because these week was an absolute stunner. Three episodes of genuinely amazing romance, one triumphant episode of super heroes, one bleak and finely executed thriller, and a smattering of fun. This may sounds silly to some, but it’s weeks like these that make me feel I’m not wasting my life away watching a bunch of foreign cartoons. There’s beauty and meaning and goodness and truth in all of this.
As a counterpoint to last week’s gushing praise about watching only a handful of shows, and having them all be shows you like, this week’s anime seemed (especially early on) determined to remind me that the other side of this is that the week can seem kind of drab if a bunch of your shows decide to take an unfortunate week off all at the same time. Of course, it wasn’t everything that this happened to—it just seems like a lot more when you’ve only got eight show that you’re keeping up with.
Translation: Oh geez we have to wait another week before we can become canon?
Man, it sure is a good feeling when you get to the end of your anime week and not a single episode you watched let you down! Once again, it seems I’m experiencing the power of whittling down things to just what I’m really loving—and it’s exciting, fun, and refreshing. I swear I’m going to do this every season from here on out! And I know I said that after last season, but I mean it this time (spoilers: probably not ever going to happen because I’m too much of a sucker for shiny new things).
Hiatus: Over.
Yeah, that’s right—I’m back, and I’m going to make this all work, one way or another! Getting away from my normal routine for a solid 10 days and just doing something different than the regular grind was hugely beneficial, and I came up with some ideas about how I can keep things headed in a positive direction from here on out. So, yeah, let’s talk about some anime! The order they crop up in the post is most likely the order in which I caught up to them, so there’s a secret there about which shows I’ve heard the most good things about and became a high priority for me.
Good things: exhibit 1.
It’s week five, and things are just trucking along now. Pretty much all of my shows are away from the potential drop bubble at this point, leaving me with a bunch of stuff I’m really enjoying watching each week. Some shows are getting better by the week, others hitting some rough patches, but overall there’s nary a one among them that I’m not excited to watch each week. And that’s the way a weekly schedule should be.
This was the week the charms of newness started to wear off for a lot of shows. I always feel like early on in seasons, I’m kind of breezing through shows and liking them just because they’re new, but by the time they’re started to kick into their real stories in the fourth episode (note, the fourth, not the stupid third) is when they start to show their cracks or I start to tire of them. How much those two things are related…I’m not sure and I’m not enthused enough to think it through. Anyways!
Mage in a Barrel 