My Favorite Anime of the Year – 2018 (Part 1)

Now is the time when many of my favorite anime bloggers are posting their picks for their favorite (and sometimes least favorite) anime of the year. While this is something I’ve always wanted to do, what’s prevented me from posting lists like this in the past is the fact that I tend not to finish watching the Autumn season shows in a timely manner, and so feel ill-equipped to participate. I also like to let the series I have finished watching settle for a while so that I can ensure that my opinions hold up over time; sometimes I may feel one way about an anime immediately after completing it, but after some further thought my opinion becomes more nuanced and even completely different.

My solution, then, is to operate on a slightly different time-table. For this list of favorites, I’ll be drawing from the anime I viewed from Autumn season 2017 through Summer season 2018 (basically October 2017 through the end of September 2018). While that will offset my picks a bit from others’, I feel like this is the best way to confidently represent how I feel about the anime I’ve completed.

This list is in no particular order, other than chronological based on time of broadcast. I’m terrible at assigning rankings to things, and would rather feature these different anime for their specific good traits rather than attempt to figure out which ones I liked more or less. I also hope that through this list I’m able to feature a few underrated gems that readers might want to give a second look.

This was getting lengthy, so I split it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the second half!

ETA: Check out Part 2 here!

Autumn 2017

Girls’ Last Tour

Post-apocalyptic stories by their very nature tend to have an air of melancholy. The thought that the human race may at some point embrace self-defeat is a disappointing one. And yet for all its sad implications, if I had to pick one word to describe Girls’ Last Tour, it would probably be “comforting.” The series is nothing more than the travelogue of two friends, whose relationship is partly a necessity brought on by their world’s dire circumstances. In other less capable hands this story could have devolved into nihilism or embraced its depressive nature; instead, I experienced a sense of wonder as the characters longed for simple luxuries and re-learned some of the activities that we currently take for granted. It’s a difficult balance that the series handled well.

The world that Chito and Yuuri travel is almost completely devoid of plants, animals and humans, and yet the characters’ discovery (or re-discovery) of humanity’s vast footprints of construction and culture provides the sense that, even if we someday disappear from the universe, there may be something of us that yet endures.

Land of the Lustrous

The story of Phosphophyllite, a hapless gemstone with a hardness level of 3.5, travels at a breakneck pace across 12 episodes of action-packed battles, quirky humor, and stunning moments of sheer body horror. It’s a series that doesn’t allow the viewer to catch their breath, each episode pivoting from one direction to another seemingly on a whim and ending far from where it began. In a lesser series this short attention span might be a plot criticism, but Land of the Lustrous maintains a narrative core that’s, for lack of a better term, rock-solid. It’s not only the story of a young person enduring life’s trials, learning its secrets, and maturing into a more world-wise being (scars and all), it’s also the tale of a relationship built on a promise, from one misfit to another, that there’s a place for them both in this strange, harsh world.

The series is one of the very few that’s been able to convince me that 3DCG anime-style animation might actually have a future, which as a traditional animation fan is no small feat. The portrayal of the different gem characters’ color and sparkle seems built for that medium. Even if the story were rendered in the most basic way, though, I still feel as though Phos’ quest to better themselves would still shine through, brightly and without occlusions.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride

When I talk about this series, I always feel obligated to preface it with all manner of content warnings. It’s a story of child abuse that morphs into one about an abusive (or at least highly unhealthy) relationship. There’s a distinct power imbalance between the two protagonists that lends their interactions a sinister and uncomfortable undertone. Parts of it are antithetical to many of the values I profess to hold, and yet the series continues to haunt me months after I experienced it (in one sitting, barely coming up for air).

I consider myself something of a Neo-Pagan, and this series managed to capture the feeling of old-world English magick as I have always imagined it. The specific combination of beauty, elegance, and sinister darkness is intoxicating, and perhaps this mood is best realized in the interactions between Chise and Elias; dangerous and inevitable, like a young maiden wandering into the fairy world never to be seen again. Watching this series allowed me to come to terms with the fact that sometimes we fall in love with things in spite of ourselves, and perhaps at times the only thing worth saying is “I know this might be dangerous, but I can’t help myself.” Luckily, in the end, a haunting story is just that – a safe space to confront our desires when doing so in reality might spell our own doom.

Winter 2018

Laid-Back Camp

Read my review here!

Are you a fan of the great outdoors? I didn’t think I was until I stumbled upon the adventures of Rin, Nadeshiko, and their group of novice campers. One thing I love about anime storytelling is its ability to take on almost any niche subject or activity – table tennis, downhill drift racing, mahjong – and build some sort of compelling, dramatic story around it. Camping was really a stretch for me, because sleeping on the ground and getting chewed up by mosquitoes doesn’t sound like an interesting activity no matter how you slice it.

As much as Laid-Back Camp is actually about learning how to camp during cold weather months, it’s more so focused on the less tangible appeal of camping – the freedom of exploring the world away from the crush of urban society, the beauty of nature in all of its phases, and the feeling of independence that comes with traveling somewhere alone, pitching a tent, and enjoying the fresh air and a good book without interruption. Camping is not so much about its physical trappings, but about its ability to allow us a way to mentally reset. While I still have yet to experience a night on the forest floor, it no longer feels like such a foreign concept to this city-dweller.

A Place Further than the Universe

The anime medium is full to the gills with series about cute teenage girls doing all sorts of things, both average and atypical. I don’t think I could be blamed for reading a synopsis about a group of high school girls taking an unlikely trip to Antarctica and having a cynical, exhausted reaction to the very idea. And yet, leave it to anime to prove me wrong once again by taking an over-the-top idea and cultivating and nurturing it with an eye towards character growth and emotional catharsis.

I think many of us reach a point in our lives where we question its direction; this might happen early on, in our teenage years, or at some point into adulthood, but when it hits, it hits hard. For me it was my mid-20’s where I began to feel as though my job had hit a dead-end and I wasn’t really utilizing my college degree (that I’d paid a lot of my own money to obtain!). My solution was to accept this as a challenge, and do my best to work hard and achieve as much as I could in my position, fighting upstream against my poor mental health and self-esteem; surely the other pieces would fall into place after an ordeal like that. In taking on the challenge I managed to mold my life into a certain image that I first learned to tolerate, then learned to embrace, and finally learned to appreciate and even love. After that came self-love and a sense of fulfillment. It’s still a work in progress, but one that now seems achievable.

While I wouldn’t expect my story to be a one-size-fits-all guidebook (not every kind of employment offers the same opportunities I was lucky to end up with, and people go there entire lives without having the opportunity to directly address their mental illnesses), because of my experiences I empathize a lot with characters who at some points feel directionless. That is probably the aspect of A Place Further than the Universe that I identify with the most; the characters’ journeys of self-discovery take them halfway across the world and back, and while we may not all travel the same physical distance to discover our own purpose, we each much tread a path of our own to reach that destination.

Devilman Crybaby

Human nature exists somewhere at the intersection of instinctual desires and lofty ideals, forever a balancing act between heaven and hell. Devilman has always been a story in which the human race believes itself to occupy some moral high ground, but instead proves itself as violent and destructive as the demons from which it tries to distance itself.

Devilman Crybaby is an extremely difficult watch, filled with images of violence, sexuality, violent sexuality, sexual violence… the type of material that typically turns me off of a series straight away without regrets or second thoughts. What kept me from walking away from this incarnation of the story was the involvement of my favorite direction, Masaaki Yuasa, whose command of allegory and vulgarity, movement and distortion, and powerful cyclical storytelling promised something more than just another blunt indictment of the human race as the “*dun dun dun* real monsters.” Though the story ends as it always has, with Satan alone among the artifacts of his own destructive impulses, what Yuasa offers in his version is a glimmer of hope, albeit slight, that Satan could one day be redeemed by accepting the hand of friendship that has been offered to him selflessly time and time again.

As the series comes to a close, Satan weeps for what he has lost, and in that moment I also wept – not only in empathy for the tragic sadness of his loss, but for the opportunity that his tears of genuine emotion might someday offer him, in another epoch, should he finally choose to grasp their meaning.

I hope you’ve been enjoying my list so far. I’ll be back soon with my favorites from the second half of the year!