Friday Favorites: Anime Series

I was getting ready to re-watch Soul Eater because it’s coming up on Halloween, and I have COVID again (BOO! as Malena said). And then it occurred to me I haven’t done any lists of favorite anime. I’ll do another one on movies, but here are my top 10 favorite series of all time (in no particular order):

• Surprise! Soul Eater: The animation is amazing—mixing an exaggeratedly cartoony style with a surprising deftness at creating spooky chills. Similarly, the series mixes a goofy setup—a Hogwarts-style academy for teenage Meisters and their Weapons whose job it is to thwart evil spirits and witches—and uses it as a metaphor for the ways in which trauma can haunt us and what it takes to exorcise it: love, loyalty, friendship, forgiveness, patience. Caveat spectator: some of the humor is juvenile and sexist, but it’s portrayed as exactly that, and there’s not so much of it that I’ve found it hard to watch around it. 51 episodes; based on the eponymous manga by Atsushi Ōkubo.
• Psycho-Pass: Inspired by Minority Report and Blade Runner, among a few other dystopian sci-fi movies, this series follows a pre-crime detective and her enforcer on their quest to take down a sociopath who has evaded the Sibyl System–a cybernetic AI that, through an implant called a Psycho-Pass, can sense your emotions and use them to rate your proclivity toward crime. Of course, sociopaths are completely sunny about murdering people; and, people with negative and violent thoughts–like Kogami, the “dog” who does the dirty work of law enforcement so his boss Tsunemori can keep her Psycho-Pass shiny and clean–aren’t necessarily going to act them out. And therein lie the paradoxes that drive the series forward. I use a couple of the episodes in my classes to teach some pretty heavy theory by Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault. It’s smart stuff. Caveat spectator: also plenty dark in spots, as you might expect given the subject matter. 22 episodes; written by Gen Urobuchi.
• Samurai Champloo: I could easily list Cowboy Bebop as well (they’re by the same director), but that one’s on everybody’s list, and I actually like SC a bit better. This one’s a classic chanbara (period samurai piece) with some hilarious anachronistic twists. Three unlikely companions–a cold, reserved ronin, a gonzo pirate, and a naive-seeming teahouse waitress with a dark secret or two stuffed in her pink kimono sleeves–band together on a journey down the Tokaido Road in 18th-century Japan, each seeking their own ends. I love the way the friendship develops and gives each person the confidence to let their guard down and stop overcompensating: Fuu by overeating, Mugen by starting fights, and Jin by pretending nothing ever bothers him. As you can probably tell, it’s an allegory about the ways people tend to drown their sorrows. With a side of Elvis, baseball, ramen, bucket hats, and West Coast rap. The animation design is exuberant and beautiful, and the music by the Nujabes really elevates the whole series. Caveat spectator: the sexism gets grating at times for me, but I have this same feeling about the rest of Watanabe’s work–and the work of many other anime directors in his generation. I’ve decided to note those cultural differences, set them to the side, and enjoy what I like about the series (described above). Your mileage may vary. 26 episodes; directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.
• Mushishi: An absolutely gorgeous, meditative, and haunting series about a supernaturally gifted investigator whose job it is to restore balance in situations in which various kinds of nature spirits have gotten out of bounds/balance and are causing disturbances in human society. A really engaging weaving of an episodic detective series into a larger argument about the waning of traditional religious culture in Japan and the effects that has on ecology. 26 episodes; based on the manga by Yuki Urushibara.
• Knights of Sidonia: Sort of a fascinating update of Macross Plus (the 1994 Watanabe classic) in which an ark of refugees from Earth is hurtling through space trying to survive a series of increasingly intense clashes with the Gauna, the overwhelming, incomprehensible alien beings who destroyed their planet. Things get complicated when the Gauna capture and kill/assimilate a Sidonian fighter pilot and then send her back to her ship as sort of a Gauna/human/machine hybrid that seems to be able to communicate between the two species. Is this an attempt to escalate or de-escalate the conflict? The animation style from Polygon Studios is unusual and stunning; everything is scratched, bleached-out, and dingy, as it would be if you’d spent a couple hundred years in space. Technically, I suppose it’s space horror, but it’s really about our fundamental ability to respect and understand anyone who’s not like us. 24 episodes; 2 seasons; based on the manga by Tsutomu Nihei.
• Attack on Titan! An intense and intensely political allegory about a walled city under attack by giant monsters that look like exhibits from BodyWorlds and can only be killed by the severing of their spinal column at the base of their gargantuan skulls. For this an elite task force called the Scout Regiment is engaged; they zip through the air with the aid of ingenious grappling-line guns and attack the Titans from above. The story follows a new member of the Scouts, Eren Jaeger, who watched his mother be eaten by a Titan and has sworn revenge. He develops close friendships with his fellow Scouts–and losing them in battle pushes him outside the city walls into Titan territory, where he learns that the stories he has been told about the Titans, their origins, and their reasons for attacking humankind are lies. Just like the rings of walls around the last human city, there are nested rings of meaning to the series: one ring is about classism; the second, about basic human xenophobia; the third, about the monster of transnational capitalism and how we created and feed it. Caveat spectator: perhaps predictably for a series about human-eating giants, it can get pretty gory at times. 4 seasons; based on the manga by Hajime Isayama.
• One-Punch Man. I don’t fully understand this anime, to be honest; it’s a satire on Japanese politics, which I know little about. But there are enough parallels to American politics to make it bite, and it’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny to boot. The story is about Saitama, a fighter who can defeat any opponent, and I mean any opponent, with one punch. Absolute power turns out to be pretty un-fun and isolating, though: Saitama’s dominance makes him unpopular in his Heroes Association, which grades him C-class when ironically he could beat every hero in the joint (with one…OK, you get it). The Association’s public mandate is to fight monsters. But as Saitama tries to work his way up to A-class and learns more about the politics involved, he uncovers some sinister facts about where the monsters really come from. I think the series was meant to run more than one season because it ends on a big cliffhanger, but that’s all we’ve got for the present. 26 episodes; based on the manga by One.
• Durarara!: The nonsense title should warn you that this series is not going to make a lot of sense in the big picture. It’s a coming-of-age story about a kid named Mikado who’s sent away from home to attend a selective high school in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo and falls in with the most random assortment of neighborhood characters: including a narcoleptic classmate, a gorgeous bartender with rage issues, his arch enemy–a charismatic and potentially evil fixer, a gang called the Dollars, and a headless motorcycle courier looking for her head (you read that right). Ostensibly there’s a plot involving a lab and a nefarious research experiment that all of these characters were somehow involved with. But really this is a story about Mikado deciding what kind of man he wants to be when he grows up, and about how magical and scary the grown-up world looks to a kid. The animation is moody and handsome and the voice-acting first-rate. 24 episodes; based on the manga by Ryōgo Narita.
• Bleach: Ichigo is a normal high school kid until the day he stumbles across a shinigami (grim reaper) losing a fight with an escaped Hollow or evil spirit. Rukia transfers her powers into Ichigo to prevent the Hollow from eating the soul of a little boy and thus unwittingly pulls him into her world–one full of harsh rules, treachery, competition, infighting, and secrets. As Ichigo struggles to save Rukia from execution for violating the shinigami code, he has to fight his way up the ranks, gaining friends and enemies he never expected, powers he didn’t know he had, and revelations of a conspiracy that threatens not just Rukia’s life but the boundary between life and afterlife itself. The characters and action of the series are compelling, the music is great, and there are so many good metaphors about identity, spiritual power, and destiny. Compulsively re-watchable. 366 episodes (I’ve only watched about 72); based on the manga by Tite Kubo.
• Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works: The Fate universe is really weird, and honestly most of it isn’t my jam. But I absolutely love this series. The overall gambit has to do with this battle royale that happens periodically called the Holy Grail War in which different magical Masters summon historical Heroes (e.g., Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great, etc., though they show up as all genders) in different roles (e.g., archer, lancer, assassin, etc.) to help them win the Grail and with it whatever their heart desires. Of course it turns out that it’s a trap, and the Grail is an evil entity that feeds off magicians’ souls, yadda yadda, but that doesn’t stop new generations of magicians from trying to get what they can out of it every time the War rolls around. The Unlimited Blade Works follows Shirou Emiya, who do to his frenemyship with the magical scion Rin Tōsaka gets sucked into the Fifth Grail War as a Master and draws King Arthur as his Hero (pronouns: she/her/her complete with cleavage and extra petticoats). As he makes it further in the competition than anyone expected, he encounters treachery from the other magical dynasties and discovers dark secrets about his own origins and fate. I watched this series at a pivotal time in which I was asking hard question about my own fate, and thus it really hit home–and opened up some pointed (stinging) truths for me about how toxic my ideals could be for me and those around me. Plus, I love me some Archer (Rin’s hero): he’s still the wallpaper on my laptop. 26 episodes; based on the visual novel from Type-Moon.