30 Day Anime Challenge #2 – My Favorite Anime (So Far)

Once I feel comfortable around someone, I usually start letting things slip about my anime-related activities. In my day-to-day life I’m usually preparing to attend or coming back from an anime convention or some anime-related event, so it’s difficult to avoid revealing the nature of my activities if someone happens to ask what I’m doing over the weekend or if I have any vacations coming up. Once I reveal myself, If they’re familiar with anime at all often times they’ll ask me what my favorite anime is.

Do you know how difficult it is for me to answer that question?

I’ve been in the anime fandom a long time – more than twenty years, at least. In that time I’ve watched all or part of more anime than I can count (and my MAL and Kitsu profiles are not complete or up-to-date, so don’t go looking there for answers). If my watch-list were smaller, it might be possible to narrow it down to one clear favorite. As it stands, though, there are so many anime out there that I love for different reasons and my feelings about them change and re-form as I continue to journey through life. Below are just a few of my top selections, as well as some reasons why I fell in love with them. I’ve linked to their streaming location when available, and to their ANN Encyclopedia entry if they’re not.

Nichijou: My Ordinary Life – Anime comedies are really hit-or-miss with me. I tend to like a little bit of physical comedy mixed with some absurdity, and I find that the majority of anime comedies are either straight-up slapstick, extremely culture-specific, or just downright mean-spirited or fanservice-y to the point where I feel too bad about how the characters are treated to laugh at the gags. It seems like my “best fit” anime comedies are slice-of-life series that have some element of humor, or comedies whose humor are based on their strangeness or comic timing. I was a big fan of Azumanga Daioh way back in the day (it was one of the first digital fansubs I sought out when I got a decent internet connection, as well as one of the first anime boxed-sets I bought when it became available officially), and for a long time it felt like it was really the pinnacle of the anime comedy genre for me. It didn’t help that it was one of the first shows to feature a group of high school girls doing nothing in particular and thus spawned a ton of inferior copycats in the years following. Despite some elements that, in hindsight, were really problematic (the creepy male teacher, in particular), I still held onto very fond memories of the show.

Nichijou showed up in 2011, and it was only then that I felt like Azumanga had been supplanted in my heart as my favorite anime comedy. The show hits all of my buttons in the best possible way. It’s got moments that are incredibly absurd – an early favorite that people might be familiar with through memes or fandom osmosis is when Yuuko witnesses the school principal wrestling a wayward deer in the courtyard and then decides that no one would possibly believe what she just saw. At its core, though, it’s also a very weird story of different people learning to celebrate their own eccentricities and develop friendships with people whose personalities are often at odds with their own. There are probably some people out there who would advise me not to take a comedy anime so seriously, but the series causes me to feel much more than just the urge to laugh or the desire to get pumped-up over the great animation. It’s the human part of the show that really makes it stand out.

Mononoke – I fell in love with Mononoke the first time I laid eyes on it, though at the time I couldn’t have explained just why. The series came out right around when I was starting to get really serious about my anime fandom, and with its unique look and very Japanese aesthetic, it felt like a serious piece of art. I had one very bad experience trying to share that art with some friends at the time, though, and not having the words to respond to their criticisms, I kept my love to myself for a long time. It wasn’t until I was poking around YouTube several years later and found someone’s review of the series that I finally realized what it was about the show that touched me so deeply. The review was quite critical, identifying that all of the stories in the show seemed to hinge on the women in them suffering. It then dawned on me that the reviewer was sort-of half correct in their assessment, but I was interpreting things from a drastically different angle.

The premise of Mononoke is that the main character, the Medicine Seller, travels across Japan and uses his mysterious powers to exorcise malignant spiritual presences. He can only do so, however, after identifying the creature’s origins – origins which are never as straightforward as they may seem. Through investigation (and often also interrogation), the Medicine Seller gets people to reveal the circumstances that likely caused the mononoke to manifest. In all cases, the hauntings are the result of some injustice being committed against a woman, and often while the woman has been acting in some role that society has forced her to perform.

I was having a conversation with someone about the series recently, and we both agreed that “Bakeneko,” the original story arc which was actually a part of another anthology series called Ayakashi – Samurai Horror Tales is probably the “best” out of the series; it’s a classic sort of he-said-she-said story in which the man imagines that the woman he brought home came somewhat willingly, when in reality she was kidnapped by him, raped, and then starved herself in captivity, thus releasing her anger as a mononoke. Other story arcs deal with forced abortions in a brother, men fighting over the right to marry a woman because of her connection to a powerful family heirloom, and a sister who sacrifices herself in place of her brother (and the brother who goes on to act as though he is somehow virtuous). My favorite story arc, however, is called “Noppera-Bou” or “Faceless One,” in which a woman, who is accused of murdering her husband and his family, spends her entire life denying her own sense of self so that she can marry into a rich family for the sake of her gold-digging, status-hungry mother. In that case, the mononoke is revealed to be the woman herself, who in actuality has only “murdered” her own identity. I didn’t realize it at the time I first watched it, exactly, but that story in particular ended up being almost too relateable to my own life – it’s no wonder it made me break down in tears every time. I love the show for its ability to capture those feelings through beautiful and profound imagery. I hope maybe that reviewer will be able to take a second look sometime.

Kaiba – It’s not a secret that I love director Masaaki Yuasa’s work, and honestly I could have put anything he’s directed on this list. But if not for Kaiba, I’m not sure I would have been aware that he existed, so that’s why I chose to feature it here.

Kaiba is from the same general time period as Mononoke, a time when I personally was searching for general uniqueness in my anime entertainment. I’m more aware now that just because something looks different doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good or special, but to be honest it often means that some amount of care and planning was put into making it stand out and appear original and in many cases that can translate into how good or cohesive the series feels as a whole package. Kaiba is definitely visually-unique from its anime contemporaries. It has the look of an old Osamu Tezuka property, with its sort of cutesy, cartoonish character designs. One thing I’ll never forget is that in the ANN forum discussion thread for the series, one *very intelligent person* (*cough*) remarked that they didn’t believe the series should be classified as an anime, since it didn’t “look like an anime.” Okay. As is Yuasa’s way, the look of the characters was intentional on his part, mainly to avoid the audience developing preconceived notions about the characters. This was in part because the moé craze was coming into full effect at that time, and defining character types by their specific looks was starting to become a nuisance (nowadays I think we’ve just accepted it as a thing that exists and are okay with characters being developed in their own ways, but back then it was very annoying to many people). The other reason really has to do with the core of the story, which deals with whether or not the shape of one’s body defines the essence of one’s self.

The show takes place in some distant future where people store their memories and personalities on little storage chips that can be moved from body to body; as long as the chips are intact, that person could be “alive” indefinitely. The main character is someone who’s had his memories erased and is left with very few clues as to his identity. The first half of the series is episodic and helps to build the world and define the “rules” surrounding what people can and cannot do with their memory essence. It also reveals that, as one would expect, there’s a sharp class divide between people who can afford to switch bodies as they want, and people who can’t afford to store them in the first place and are priced out of immortality. The antagonist of the series belongs to a cult that shuns body-swapping all together, but who is hiding the shame of having transferred himself from his sickly childhood body to a more robust one, all at the cost of his mother’s physical existence. That’s a lot to take in, but in addition to all that there’s also a very compelling love story to pull the various threads together. I’m not certain I’d call this series Yuasa’s “best,” as it has some problems with pacing near the end and a lot of things are easily-missed. But it opened the door for me to experience his other projects and I am definitely a better anime fan for it.

Revolutionary Girl Utena – It honestly wouldn’t be a list of my favorite anime without including Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I’ve had an extremely lucky anime fandom life. I’ve loved anime for a long time, but a problem I had in my earlier years was getting access to watch more than a little of it. We didn’t have Cartoon Network in our cable package during the early Toonami days, so I missed out on a lot of what other anime fans had seen during my high school days. I also didn’t get into the VHS fansub scene until that was starting to go out of style. I did, however, start college in the early 2000’s, and in doing so happened to discover the existence of the University’s anime club. The first semester I started attending the club, they were watching Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’d shown up three or four weeks into the semester, though, so I had literally no idea what was going on in this weird, ritualistic pseudo-magical-girl rose-covered drug trip. Luckily my mind was blown in the most wonderful of ways. Even luckier, a friend in my Japanese class owned the first set of DVDs and loaned them to me so I could catch up in time for the next meeting. Over the course of the rest of the year, I soaked up the show in any way I could. I suffered along with the rest of the anime club through a set of VHS fansubs of the Black Rose Arc that buzzed every couple of seconds. I stomped my feet with everyone to the beat of “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku.” And I gasped in shared shock at many of the revelations near the end of the series. Utena is profoundly unique in so many ways, and that first watch-through taught me that anime could be more than just fun and action-packed; it could also be art.

It wasn’t until later viewings that I began to realize just how much depth of meaning there was to the story, though. I’m not even talking about a lot of the visual symbolism throughout the series, though that too is worth the price of admission and will reveal to you a bit more insight into the show every time you watch it. What became clear to me, and what I (unfortunately?) related to much more on subsequent viewings, is how accurately the series portrays the situation of an assault and abuse survivor. I imagine that I’ll be talking a lot more about this show in particular as I plow through these daily topics, so I’ll refrain from going into much more detail than that. But for how much the show is lauded for its critical look at gender roles (as it should be), for me its story of a person leaving a life of sexual abuse is so resonant. There’s really nothing else like it in anime, as far as I have seen.

Den-noh Coil – I wanted to end this post with the series that I usually mention when someone presses me to pick just one anime series as my favorite. It’s not really the most artful series on this list, nor would I say it’s the “deepest.” It’s also got some pacing issues in its second half and an antagonist that I’ve never felt was developed very well. As a whole package, though, this series alone has managed to combine so many specific things that I love into one very wonderful, cohesive story, and so it’s always had a very special place in my heart despite its few flaws.

Den-noh Coil is still surprisingly timely, despite having come out more than ten years ago (and been in development for several years prior to that, from my understanding). In its near-future setting, the characters utilize special glasses that interface with an augmented-reality system. This system is used for many functional purposes, like sending emails or accessing the web, but is also used to interact with virtual pets and other items that don’t have any physical presence. The characters are mostly children whose lives are permeated by the activities they do within the virtual world. Much of the story revolves around the urban legends they have about supposed obsolete spaces and mythical objects that might exist there. There’s also the very haunting idea that bad things might happen when one’s virtual presence becomes de-synched with one’s physical body.

Besides the obvious comparison to the defunct “Google Glass” and the fact that augmented reality using smartphones is currently beginning to come into fashion, the show also sort of correctly speculates about the existence of self-navigating vehicle systems (in fact, a main plot point in the show is that one of these systems malfunctioned and there’s been a subsequent cover up because of the resulting accident), as well as the strong bonds that can be formed between human beings and non-physical entities. In this case those entities are cute virtual pets, one of the primary reasons why I think the series hit me, an animal lover, as deeply as it has. There’s a point in the series where one of the protagonists is left to mourn the “death” of her virtual pet, and her parent questions whether those feelings are real or worthwhile since the pet wasn’t “real” to begin with. I think my reaction to that speaks a lot to the time in which I came of age, because upon reaching that point in the series I realized that I’ve always had feelings for fictional characters (as in, I’ve related to their experiences and felt empathy for them), and those feelings are so incredibly real to me despite the fact that the characters are nothing more than people imagined in my mind from a book or viewed on a TV screen. I think it compliments how intense fandom culture has become that many people would tend to agree that those feelings are as valid as any others. Once I arrived there, that revelation moved me deeply and is a treasure that I continue to hold onto. Den-noh Coil is the rare series aimed at kids that actually seems to respect the fact that they have emotional and complicated internal lives. It’s something that I can recommend to most people without caveats, too. And, in a petty way, it’s a great series to have in my back pocket for responding to gatekeeping asshats – it’s a relatively obscure anime, so I can throw it out there and there’s a good chance they haven’t heard of it, and will then leave me alone!

There were so many other “runners-up” that I could have added to this list. Puella Magi Madoka Magica for its total reformulation of the magical girl genre. Princess Tutu for being a wonderful examination of fairy tales and a series that I came around to very late. From the New World for its harsh reflection on humanity’s ability to discriminate and hate, as well as its hopeful take on our ability to eventually learn the truth and try to do better. Natsume’s Book of Friends for its ability to demonstrate empathy and the bond between friends and family. There is so much wonderful anime out there that’s shaped my views as a person, that it’s literally impossible for me to pick just one above all others.

Does anyone else out there have this same issue, or do you have a clear favorite? Let me know in the comments, and I hope all of my praise might have gotten you interested in some of these great anime series!