Spring is here in all its glory, and the spring anime season is here in—well, I don’t know if I’d say glory, but it’s definitely here.

This season the anime gods have bestowed upon us a stable of quite exciting sequels, which I’ll get into further down, as well as a heap of rather less exciting but still quite watchable new shows. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last few seasons, it’s that beggars can’t be choosers. As usual, I’ve watched a dizzying number of premieres and come to you, dear reader, with only the best: three new shows that you can start streaming right this moment. Oh and hey, did you know Attack on Titan is back?

Re:Creators

High school student Souta Mizushino (Daiki Yamashita) is stunned when he is transported into the world of his favorite anime, Elemental Symphony of Vogelchevalier. He’s quickly returned to modern Tokyo, but the protagonist of the show, a beautiful warrior named Selesia (Mikako Komatsu), comes with him. It turns out she’s not the only character to be yanked from her fictional universe: a mysterious woman wearing a military uniform and wielding far more swords than is strictly practical has used her power to bring all manner of anime and game characters into the real world, from cocky villains to magical girls. What will happen when these characters meet each other—and their creators—in our nonfictional world?

An anime-original project from director Ei Aoki (Fate/Zero, Aldnoah.Zero), this fantasy action show is just anime as hell. Obviously there’s the fact that it’s an anime about anime characters coming to life to meet an anime fan, but then there’s also the fact that the first episode features a girl who uses a sword to play an enormous gun like a violin. The show, produced at studio TROYCA (Aldnoah.Zero), looks pretty slick, and the characters are generally likeable, well-defined, and fun to pit against each other. Oh, and the whole thing is backed by a trademark bombastic Hiroyuki Sawano (Attack on Titan, Kill la Kill) soundtrack, which really adds gravitas to rogue magical girls destroying Tokyo skyscrapers with giant pink hearts. Re:Creators is no masterpiece, but it’s a well-executed not-masterpiece—the kind of show where if you don’t think too hard about the sort of dumb premise, you are almost guaranteed to enjoy yourself.

For fans of: Fate/Zero, The Devil is a Part-Timer!, GATE, Drifters

Watch it now on Anime Strike*

*I would like to take this moment to apologize for including two shows on this list that are exclusively available on Amazon’s Anime Strike. I’m not happy about it either, but here we are.

Sakura Quest

Yoshino Koharu (Ayaka Nanse) is a recent college grad looking for her first grown-up person job, with little success. After failing dozens of job interviews, her luck seems to turn when she gets a call from her old modeling agency. They inform her she’s been requested by the tourism board of a rural town, which is hoping to revitalize its faltering economy by hiring someone to drum up publicity as the honorary town “Queen.”

After the deserved success of Shirobako, animation studio PA Works (Shirobako, Hanasaku Iroha) comes out with another anime-original project about young adults trying to make it the workforce. This is a trend I can get behind, although so far Sakura Quest hasn’t totally sold me on this particular iteration. Our protagonist Yoshino is quite endearing—after flunking her interviews (hey, we’ve all been there), she’s making the best of her wacky accidental career, and watching her try to find her own little space as a semi-ridiculous town mascot is what makes the show worth tuning into every week. On the other hand, I’m not that attached to the supporting cast yet, and the overall objective of reviving this town is not one that Sakura Quest has managed to make me care about deeply in the first few episodes. A pleasant show featuring adults wearing hokey costumes.

For fans of: Shirobako, Hanasaku Iroha, Barakamon, Poco’s Udon World

Watch it now on Crunchyroll

Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul

Ten years have passed since the world narrowly avoided destruction at the hands (claws?) of the great dragon Bahamut. A powerful new ruler, King Charioce (Yuuichiro Umehara), has consolidated power, laying gods and angels low and enslaving demons to work in human cities. One masked vigilante, known only as the Rag Demon, causes chaos night after night by killing demon-oppressing humans and freeing their slaves. When the cheerful Nina Drango (Sumire Morohoshi) arrives in the capital, she hopes to make her living as a bounty hunter and odd-jobber but becomes accidentally embroiled in larger events whilst pursuing the infamous Rag Demon.

Okay yes, this is technically a sequel, but I think I can be excused for putting it on here because I’m fairly certain you can watch Virgin Soul without ever having seen Rage of Bahamut: Genesis. Virgin Soul dives right in with a fantasy racism/vigilante plot that, while less than nuanced, provides a compelling backdrop for both familiar and new characters. Nina is the most significant addition to the cast, and I’m really enjoying the chaotic energy she brings to the show (doubly welcome since we have yet to lay eyes on FAVAROOOO). While I do miss the more swashbuckling, lighthearted tone of the previous season, Virgin Soul is more than living up to what I thought another Bahamut anime would be. And it’s also managed to look pretty while doing it—polished art and animation from MAPPA (Yuri!!! On ICE) sets Bahamut apart visually from other moderately pleasant fantasy offerings tis season like Grimoire of Zero and SukaSuka.

For fans of: Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, Saga of Tanya the Evil, Coffin Princess Chaika, Maria the Virgin Witch, disembodied hands in overalls

Watch it now on Anime Strike (again I am so sorry)

Sequels Worth Waiting For

The highest quality goods this spring are all in the sequels department: besides Bahamut, which I have completely cheated by including above, we’ve got the long, long, long anticipated continuation of mega-hit Attack on Titan, though it’s apparently only with us for another twelve episodes. Superhero battle shonen My Hero Academia returns for a thrilling second season as well, and the consistently wonderful Natsume Yujin-cho graces us with its presence for a sixth season. Perhaps most exciting to me is the second season of The Eccentric Family, a lovely, richly complex show about a family of tanuki living in a modern Kyoto populated by flying tengu, trickster tanuki, and sorcerous young women.

So? What are you watching this season? Let us know what you’re loving (and hating) in the comments!

Kelly Quinn is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about picture books and manga on Twitter.

For this month’s Ghibli Rewatch I’m changing the format a bit. Rather than going through each film chronologically, I’ll be looking at the shared themes of two Ghibli classics, and discussing how the films changed the studio.

One film is Hayao Miyazaki’s ebullient My Neighbor Totoro; the other is Isao Takahata’s devastating Grave of the Fireflies. The two directors worked on their projects simultaneously, and the films were ultimately released in Japanese theaters in 1988 as a double feature. I have decided to try to watch them back-to-back, to recreate the experience of the unsuspecting Japanese audiences who were about to watch one of the most heartbreaking films of all time, and then meet a creature who would quickly become a new icon of Japanese childhood. Will I get through them both? Will I get emotional whiplash during a double feature? Read on to find out.

Historical Background

Studio Ghibli was officially founded after the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Its first film was an original creation of Hayao Miyazaki’s, Castle in the Sky. A few years after that film, Miyazaki and his friend and collaborator, Isao Takahata, decided they would each tackle a film to be released in the same year. Miyazaki was not yet the animation god that he is now, so when he told people that his next movie would be a highly personal, almost drama-free work about two little girls and forest spirit, bottom-line-minded business men didn’t see the appeal. Meanwhile, Takahata wanted to adapt a bleak short story: Akiyuki Nosaka’s Naoki Prize-winning Grave of the Fireflies, written in 1967.

Grave of the Fireflies follows a young brother and sister fighting for survival in Japan during the last months of World War II. It’s based on Nosaka’s own tragic childhood, particularly on the deaths of his two sisters, both of whom died of malnutrition during the war. The second sister died after their father’s death in the 1945 Kobe bombing left Nosaka her sole caretaker, and he wrote the story years later to try to cope with the guilt he felt. Takahata wanted to tackle the story as an animated film because he didn’t think live-action could work – where would a director find a four-year-old who could convincingly starve to death on camera? But Takahata thought it would make for a dramatic feature, one that would show the young studio’s range. There was also a connection to Takahata’s childhood that I’ll detail below.

Totoro also came from his creator’s childhood: Miyazaki would draw a rotund bear/cat hybrid as a boy, and in the 1970s began drawing the adventures of a young princess who lives in the woods with a similar, slightly-less-cuddly, beast. That princess was eventually divided into two characters—one version of the princess became even more feral, and evolved into Mononoke Hime, but the other became a six-year-old girl who met a softer version of Totoro—and who was later again divided into the characters of Mei and Satsuki as they appear in the finished film.

Miyazaki set the film in Tokorozawa City in Saitama Prefecture, which had once been lush farmland, but in the late 1980s was being swallowed by the sprawl of Tokyo. He set out to make a film about childhood innocence, where the only antagonist—the mother’s illness—was already being defeated, and where neighbors—whether human or forest god—took care of each other. The problem was that studio execs weren’t sure that a film about innocence, starring a big furry god that their director had just made up, would set the box office on fire.

Toshio Suzuki, the not-nearly-sung-enough genius producer, was the one who suggested a way to fund both of their films projects: Shinchosha, the publisher of Grave of the Fireflies wanted to break into the movie business. Perhaps they’d pay for a double bill? This would allow Takahata to adapt the story into a faithful, feature-length film without having to deal with the difficulties of live action, and Miyazaki would have backing to make his whimsical forest spirit movie. Plus, they argued that teachers would likely arrange school outings to show their charges the historically significant Grave of the Fireflies, thus guaranteeing that the double bill would have an audience.

This worked…to a point. The films were made and released together, but the studio quickly found that if they showed Totoro first, people fled from the sadness of GOTF. Even swapping the films didn’t exactly result in a hit. It was two years later that Studio Ghibli became the iconic studio we know, thanks to a merchandising decision that ensured their success, but more on that later. The films are both masterpieces of economy, and creating extraordinary emotional tapestries out of tiny details. I rewatched the two films in the correct double feature order to try to recreate the experience of those poor unsuspecting Japanese audiences of 1988.

Grave of the Fireflies, or, Abandon All Hope

I should start by mentioning that I swore a blood oath to myself that I would never watch Grave of the Fireflies again.

I watched it again for this post.

I started crying before the opening credits.

Now, I don’t cry. I know people who sob over movies, books, PMS, sports, The Iron Giant…I am not such a person. But this movie opens with the death of a child, and gets worse from there. So in all seriousness, and all hyperbole aside, the following paragraphs and images are going to be about the death of children, so please skip down to the Totoro synopsis if you need to. I’ll be talking about Grave again further down, and I’ll warn you there, too. In the meantime, here’s a gif of older brother Seita trying to amuse little sister Setsuko after their mother is injured in an air raid:

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.

Isao Takahata has never been lauded to the same extent as his colleague Miyazaki. He joined Toei Animation right out of university, and worked on television throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. He began working with Miyazaki on his feature directorial debut, Hols, Prince of the Sun, in 1968, but when the film underperformed he ended up back in TV. He and Miyazaki teamed up for an adaptation of Pippi Longstocking that never got off the ground, and for a successful series titled Heidi, Girl of the Alps. He came aboard Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as a producer, and then produced Studio Ghibli first feature, Castle in the Sky, before tackling what was only his second feature-length animation as a director, Grave of the Fireflies.

Takahata’s attachment to Grave stemmed largely from the events of his own childhood; as a nine-year-old boy, the future director lived through the horrific bombing of Okayama City, and drew on his own experience for the film. He and his ten-year-old sister were separated from the rest of their family, and fled through the city as it burned. “As I was running, more and more all around me, something would get hit, so the running would get more and more confusing. I’ll go this way, I’ll go that way, and then something was bursting into flames all around… there were places where they kept water to put out fires, and you’d pour it on yourself. But it would dry instantly. So what were we to do?” The two managed to reach the river, but along the way Takahata’s sister was wounded in an explosion, and Takahata’s feet were punctured by glass and asphalt that were melting in the heat.

This experience shows through in Grave, as the film’s early air raid sequence is one of the most harrowing events I’ve ever seen in on screen. In the last months of World War II, Seita and his little sister, Setsuko, are living an uncomfortable but manageable life with their mother. Seita believes the Japanese fleet is unstoppable, and his father is an Army Captain, so the family gets a decent ration of food and benefits from the military. This changes in an instant, however, when the children’s mother is grievously injured during an air raid. She dies from her wounds, but not before we get to see this:

Seita spends the next few months trying his best to care for Setsuko, always assuming that his father will be coming home. First, the two children go to live with a horrible abusive aunt, who starts off playing nice because she—like all the characters—thinks that Japan will win, and that the military will come home and those who supported them will be showered with rewards. As the weeks roll on, however, and Seita continues writing unanswered letters to his father, the money dries up, and so does the aunt’s tolerance. She begins needling Seita for going to the bomb shelter with the women and children, and for not working, despite the fact that there aren’t any jobs for him.

Seita finally decides to move into a lakeside bomb shelter with Setsuko. On paper this seems like a terrible decision, but Takahata uses perfectly escalating moments with the aunt to show just how bad life has become, until their escape to the shelter comes as a glorious relief. This makes it all the worse when the knife twists a few scenes later: Japan has begun to lose the war. Seita has money in the bank from his mother’s account, but no one is taking yen, and the kids have nothing to barter. He starts looting during air raids, but that means putting himself at risk, and leaving poor Setsuko alone for hours at a time. Finally he begins stealing. Throughout all of this Setsuko gets skinnier and skinnier, and breaks out in a rash.

No adults help. At all. Everyone is too concerned with their own survival. The one glimmer of “hope” comes when Seita is caught and beaten for stealing—the police officer takes his side and threatens to charge his captor with assault. But even here, the cop doesn’t take Seita home, or give him any food. Finally Seita goes into town, and is able to buy food, but while he’s there he learns that the Japanese have surrendered, and that the fleet has been lost. His father is dead. He and Setsuko are orphans.

But wait, there’s more!

He arrives home, and finds his sister hallucinating from hunger. He’s able to feed her a piece of watermelon, but she dies later that day. The film doesn’t specify how long Seita survives after that, but it seems like he’s given up. He spends the last of his mother’s money on Setsuko’s cremation, and finally dies at a train station just as the U.S. occupying forces are arriving.

So.

The one lighter element here is the film’s wraparound narrative. The movie opens with a child dying—Seita’s collapse in the train station. His body is found by a janitor, who also notices that he’s clutching a canister of fruit drop candy. In a genuinely weird touch, the janitor opts to throw the canister out into a field, by using a perfect baseball player’s wind-up and pitch motion. Is this a nod to the encroaching American culture? Because it creates a horrific jarring, callous moment. A child has died alone and unloved, but life is going on, this janitor is a baseball fan, and America is at the doorstep. As soon as the canister lands, Setsuko’s spirit comes out of it, and waits for her brother. He joins her a moment later, and the two travel together on the train (the normal Japanese subway, not like a spectral train or anything) and they go to a lovely hill above Kobe. The film checks in with the spirits a few times, and closes on them sitting together on a bench, watching over the city.

Again, the brightest spot in the film is the fact that you get to see the kids as happy-ish ghosts. Earlier, the sequence of their move into the bomb shelter is disarmingly lighthearted, at least at first. The kids catch fireflies and set them loose in their bedroom as lights, but of course by morning the insects have all died. When they reunite as spirits they’re surrounded by clouds of fireflies again—but are these living insects, lighting the ghosts way? Or are these spirits, too?

But even these fleeting moments of joy are brought back down by the ending. Seita and Setsuko have been reunited, and seemingly have an infinite supply of fruit candy to share, but they’re also doomed to sit on their bench watching life unfold without them. This creates an extraordinary feeling of weight. Like all modern countries, Japan’s glittering present was built on the bones of its wartime dead. The prosperous country that Takahata lived in, and the industry he worked in, both sprang from a post-war economy, with the loss of war forever hanging in the background.

As an American who was raised by her Dad to watch WWII-era classics, watching this movie a decade ago was my first time seeing an entirely Japanese perspective on the war. (I did have a mild Empire of the Sun obsession back in middle school, but even there, while Japanese culture is respected, the British and American POWs are clearly the heroes of the film.) And while I knew the statistics on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was still eye-opening to see Japanese civilians gunned down by fighter pilots, towns set on fire, children slowly starving to death from a lack of resources. While Takahata has said that he doesn’t intend the film to be “anti-war” it’s impossible to watch it and not see that whatever the ideologies at stake, it’s innocent children who suffer.

So in the name of innocent children, I’m going to move on to Totoro now, OK? I do think Grave of the Fireflies is an extraordinary achievement, and I think people should probably try to watch it once. I think it should be used to Ludovico world leaders before they authorize acts of war. But I also don’t like dwelling on it.

My Neighbor Totoro, or, Picking Up the Tattered Remains of Hope and Wrapping Them Around You Like a Warm Blanket On a Cold, Rainy Afternoon.

My Neighbor Totoro is set in the late 1950s, in an idyllic version of Miyazaki’s neighborhood. It’s possible that this film, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, takes place in a timeline where WWII was averted—if not, it’s barely a decade after the sad deaths of the children in Grave of the Fireflies, but it might as well be a different world. Here the sun shines, people live in quiet balance with nature, neighbors check in on each other, and elderly ladies happily care for a stranger’s children.

Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe move out to the country with their university professor father in order to be closer to their mother, who’s in the hospital with an unnamed illness. (She probably has tuberculosis—Miyazaki’s mother fought tuberculosis for years during the director’s childhood.) When we see her she seems OK—weak, but recovering. Both parents are loving and understanding, the neighbors are welcoming, and Nature, as we soon learn, is actively benevolent. This is that rare jewel—a story with no villain, no needless cruelty, and only a tiny hint of conflict.

The kids spend moving day rushing from room to room screaming with joy at literally everything they see. The meet Nanny, the elderly next-door neighbor, and chase Susuwatari—wandering soot or soot sprites (endearingly dubbed as “soot gremlins” in some versions of the film)—that have moved in since the house was empty. And here’s our introduction to the film’s philosophy: the kids see the soot sprites. They tell their father. Nanny and their father completely and unquestioningly accept the soot sprites’ existence. From here on we’re in a world with magic creeping in at the edges, in much the same way that the abject horror of GOTF crept in gradually, here a sort of healing magic seeps into the children’s lives. They’ve had a rough year. Their mother being hospitalized with an illness that’s often terminal, their father picking up the slack at work and at home, a move, and for Satsuki, an abrupt push from being Mei’s sister to being her caretaker. But here in the country, they’re surrounded by people who love them immediately, including the king of the forest.

Mei finds the small Totoro and pursues him into the forest. Like Alice before her, she falls down a hole, and finds herself in a strange world. Not a wonderland, however, simply the Totoro’s den. Everything about this scene is designed to feel safe. The snoring, the squishiness of the Totoro’s stomach, the whiskers, the button nose—you can feel his warmth radiating through the screen. OF COURSE Mei climbs up and falls asleep on him. OF COURSE he doesn’t mind. Like an old nanny dog who sits patiently while a baby tugs her ears, Totoro understands that the small loud pink thing means well.

And while this is a very sweet child’s story, where the film vaults into all-time classic status is when Mei tells Satsuki and her dad about Totoro. They think she’s dreamed him at first, and she gets upset. She thinks they’re accusing her of lying. And Miyazaki, being a filmic miracle worker, stops the film dead in order to let Mei’s anger and feeling of betrayal settle over everyone. This isn’t a film for grown-ups who can laugh away a child’s emotions, or wave their reactions away as tantrums or silliness. Mei is four years old, and she’s just told the people she loves most about an amazing adventure, and they don’t believe her. This is a tragedy. Maybe even a more concrete tragedy than her mother’s nebulous illness. And because Miyazaki is creating the world as it should be, Professor Kusakabe and Satsuki realize they’ve messed up.

They both reassure Mei that they believe her, and follow her to the base of the camphor tree that hides Totoro’s den. There’s a shrine there, and Professor Kusakabe leads the kids in bowing and honoring the gods of the shrine. This is the correct way to interact with Nature. Mei has been given a great gift—a direct encounter with the King of the Forest—and rather than ignoring the gift, or assuming it’s a hallucination, Professor Kusakabe makes this a special and solemn moment for the kids…and then races them back to the house for lunch, because kids can only stand so much solemnity. This becomes an ongoing theme in the film. My Neighbor Totoro would probably not be considered a “religious” children’s film in the Western sense the way, say, The Prince of Egypt would be. But Totoro is a forest god, and Miyazaki makes a point of stopping in at shrines around the countryside. Even the famous scene of Totoro waiting at the bus stop with the girls only comes after Mei decides she doesn’t want to wait in an Inari shrine.

At another point, when the girls are caught in a rainstorm they take shelter in a shrine dedicated to the boddhisatva Jizō (more on him below) but only after first asking permission. It’s one of the ways that Miyazaki builds the sense that the humans in the story are only one part of the natural and spiritual world around them.

One of the most striking things about this rewatch for me was that I went in remembering Totoro as a fundamentally sunny film, but in scene after scene the kids and their dad are stranded in torrential rains, or frightened by sudden, blustery winds. Nanny lectures the girls on farming techniques, and most of the neighbors spend their days working in the fields. These are people living a largely pre-industrial life, rising with the sun, working with the earth, growing and harvesting their own food, and sleeping in quiet rooms with only the sounds of frogs and crickets around them, rather than the buzz of radios or televisions. Though Miyazaki himself denies that the film is particularly religious, he did thread Shinto imagery throughout the film, and the Totoro family can be interpreted as tree spirits or kami. The tree is set off from the forest with a Torii, a traditional gateway, and wrapped in a Shimenawa—a rope used to mark a sacred area from a secular one. When Professor Kusakabe bows, he thanks the tree spirit for watching out for Mei—Totoro responds to the reverence later by rescuing her—and tells the girls about a time “when trees and people used to be friends.” Underneath that friendliness, though, is a healthy amount of awe. The children are at the mercy of Nature just as their mother is at the mercy of her illness. They are reverent toward Nature, and even when it comes in a cuddly form like a Totoro or a Catbus, it is still powerful and a little unsettling.

The only conflict comes in halfway through the film. Mrs. Kusakabe is finally well enough to come home for a weekend visit, and the girls are obviously ecstatic. They want to show their mother the new house, and tell her all about Totoro. When they get a telegram from the hospital Miyazaki again treats this through the eyes of the children. Telegrams are serious, only one family has a phone, Professor Kusakabe is at the university in the city. Each of these things build into a frightening moment for the children—has their mother relapsed? In this context it makes sense that Satsuki snaps at Mei. She’s shouldered a lot of the responsibility for her little sister, but she’s also a child missing her mom, and terrified that she’ll never see her again. So Mei, feeling completely rejected, fixates on the idea that her fresh corn will magically heal her mother and runs off to find the hospital. This goes about as well as you’d expect, and soon all the adults in the area are searching for Mei—with Nanny particularly terrified that Mei has drowned in a pond after she finds a little girl’s sandal.

Professor Kusakabe, en route to the hospital and thus unreachable in a pre-cellphone era, has no idea anything has happened to his children—he’s just rushing to his wife’s side to make sure she’s OK. Without the addition of magical Totoro this would be a horrifically tense moment. Is the children’s mother dying? Has Mei drowned? Has this family suffered two enormous losses in a single afternoon? But no, Satsuki, rather than relying on modern tech or asking an adult to take her to the hospital, falls back on her father’s respect for Nature. She calls on Totoro, who immediately helps her. Nature, rather than being a pretty background or a resource to exploit, is active, alive, and cares for the children.

Totoro was a decent hit, but it also had its share of issues coming to America. After a U.S. distributor made massive cuts to Nausicaä, Miyazaki decided that he wouldn’t allow his films to be edited for other markets. This led to two moments of cultural confusion that may have delayed the film’s arrival in America. First, the bathtub scene, where Professor, Satsuki, and Mei all soak in a tub together. According to Helen McCarthy’s study, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, many US companies were worried that this scene would be off-putting to American audiences, since it’s far less common for families to bathe together, particularly across gender. The other scene was a bit more innocuous. When Satsuki and Mei first explore their new home they yell and jump up and down on tatami mats. This would probably just look like kids blowing off steam to a US audience, but it’s considered a bit more disrespectful in Japan, particularly in the film’s 1950s setting. But after the issues with the U.S. edit of Nausicaa, Miyazaki refused to let anyone cut Studio Ghibli’s films. Ultimately, the first English dub was released in 1993 by Fox Video, with Disney producing a second English version in 2005.

Grave of the Fireflies, meanwhile, was distributed to the U.S. (also in 1993) through Central Park Media, and I found no evidence that anything was edited from the film in any of the releases, but the film has also never gained the cultural traction of its more family-friendly theatermate. The films were never shown together in the U.S., so while they were paired in Japanese consciousness, many U.S. anime fans don’t realize they’re connected. I think it’s is interesting though that a scene with a family bathing together was considered potentially offensive, but scenes of U.S. warplanes firing on Japanese children went unchallenged.

Are My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies in Conversation?

All cry/laughing aside, watching them as a double feature was a fascinating experience. Apparently when they planned the feature in Japan, they noticed that if they showed Totoro first, people would leave early on in Grave because it was too much to take after the joy of the other film. If they swapped them, Totoro could lighten the mood enough for people to experience both films. I recreated the latter experience, but what was weird was that watching Grave of the Fireflies first changed the way I saw Totoro.

First of all, the films have a lot of elements in common. Both feature a pair of young siblings—in Grave Seita is 14 and Setsuko is 4. This ten-year gap makes Seita unquestionably the adult figure to Setsuko, but he’s still too young to function as a young adult in society. His only aspiration seem to be to follow his dad into a career in the military, which the audience knows is an impossibility; Seita has no other skills, and his schooling has been interrupted by the war and their displacement. Even going in we know he can’t just find a job and raise Setsuko after the war. In Totoro Satsuki is 10, and Mei is 4. The gap isn’t so large…but, as in Grave, their parental figures are mostly absent. Their mother is in a hospital for tuberculosis, and their father, a professor, is absent-minded and clearly overwhelmed by life as a semi-single dad. Satsuki has taken over many of the domestic chores—not because her father is pushing her into the role, but because she wants to make her parents proud, and prove herself as a young adult rather than a child.

In both films the experiences are filtered entirely through the children’s point of view. Thus the young siblings trying to sing and play piano together, and capturing fireflies, despite the war raging around them; thus the utter stubbornness of a four-year-old who just wants her mom to come home from the hospital. On a more macro level, Grave portrays the destruction of Japanese cities during World War II, and how that destroys the innocence of two particular children. A decade later in Totoro, Japan has seemingly recovered from the war, and the film features lush fields and forests… but modern Japanese audiences know that this neighborhood (Miyazaki’s childhood neighborhood) has since been swallowed by Tokyo’s suburbs.

After the bleakness of Grave, I found the sweetness of Totoro both incredibly uplifting, and kind of suspect—and a bit eerie, as both films feature camphor trees, but we’ll get to that in a second.

The most heartbreaking moment of the double feature for me was the search for Mei. (Note: the following two paragraphs might ruin Totoro for you, so skip down if you need to.) Every other time I’ve watched the movie I’m emotionally invested, sure, but I know it turns out OK. After building the suspense around Mei’s disappearance, Miyazaki even includes a shot of her sitting with statues of the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha, known in Japan as Jizō, or Ojizō-sama, who is the guardian of children (and firefighters, but that doesn’t come up here) so an audience watching this film in Japan will recognize those deities, and will know that they’re watching over Mei. It was seemingly this shot that inspired the disturbing “Totoro is actually a god of death” legend from a few years ago. In addition to watching over living children, Jizō takes care of children who die before their parents, or who are miscarried or aborted. Since they aren’t able to cross into the afterlife, they would technically be required to stack stones on the bank of the Sanzu River, um, forever, which seems harsh. Jizō takes care of them and teaches them mantras until they’ve gained enough merit to cross over, and since he’s seen protecting Mei multiple times, it added to the idea that he and Totoro were ushering one or both of the children into death. Personally I reject this theory because I hate “main character was dead/dreaming/insane/in a coma the entire time narratives”—they’re almost always lazy, and simply undercut any emotional connection that the film or book has built with its audience.

Having said that, though, investing in Totoro immediately after Grave of the Fireflies cast a shadow over how I saw the film. Here the entire community pitches in to dredge the pond when they think Mei has fallen in. When one of the farmers thanks them all for their hard work, another replies, “It could have been any one of us.” I actually started to cry again, because all I could think of was the contrast between that sentiment and the way all the adults kept their heads down and ignored Seita and Setsuko in Grave. Even worse is the next sequence, when Satsuki asks for Totoro’s help. He calls the Catbus, which seems more friendly than creepy now, and he flies through the air and rescues Mei, who is still sitting with the Jizō statues. The sisters share an ecstatic hug, and then Catbus goes the extra mile and takes them to see their mother (who is just getting over a slight cold) before taking them back to Nanny. Everything’s fine. Except this time… Mei’s rescue felt too fantastical. Even though I’ve watched this movie many, many times, and I love it, I realized that a part of me was waiting for Satsuki to wake up from a dream sequence to learn that Mei had drowned in the pond, and that the happy ending was only in her imagination. Watching Totoro this time, in the shadow of Grave of the Fireflies, changed my emotional experience. I don’t recommend it.

So about that Camphor tree…In Grave, Seita lies to Setsuko about their mother’s death for a while, hoping to give her the news in a gentle way. She finds out anyway, and he tries to soften the blow by lying again, this time telling her that their mother is buried beneath a lovely Camphor tree, and that they’ll visit her after the war. (In reality, their mother’s ashes are in a box that Seita carries with him, and seems to lose, before the film ends.) Guess what kind of tree Totoro lives in? Yeah, it’s a Camphor. And Totoro just happens to be accompanied by a middle-sized Totoro, and a small Totoro. And the small Totoro just happens to be the one that attracts Mei’s attention in the first place.

So I’ve just decided that the Grave of the Fireflies characters were all reincarnated as Totoros. Big Totoro is Mother, the Middle Totoro, always the caretaker, forever collecting acorns for Baby, is clearly Seita, and Baby Totoro is Setsuko—the one who first befriends a little girl who’s the same age she was when she died.

And if I’ve just ruined My Neighbor Totoro for you I’m sorry, but how much better is Grave of the Fireflies now? If you watch the movie believing that they all get to be Totoros in the end, you might just get through it.

The Cuddliest God of the Forest and the Legacy of Studio Ghibli

I mentioned earlier that, even with the double feature, neither film did quite as well as the studio hoped. Studio Ghibli’s success wasn’t sealed until 1990, when the board grudgingly OK’d a line of plush toys based on Totoro. These toys proved to be a goddamn tractor beam to children across Japan, and sales from the toy division kept the studio fiscally sound while Miyazaki and Takahata were able to craft new stories rather than having to churn out product. (Those toys are still a tractor beam—I cannot count how many Totoro-themed things are in my house, and I may have clapped, loudly, when he appeared onscreen during Toy Story 3.) I think I’ve made it reasonably clear on this site that I have…reservations…about capitalism. I think society’s turn toward corporatization has had a negative impact on art, childhood, farming, youth culture, the working class, the environment, individual expression, end-of-life care, and the basic ideas of what makes us human.

But…

I mean…

Even I have my weak spots.

Now, perhaps you’re asking yourself “What of Grave of the Fireflies? Is there any merch I can purchase to commemorate my viewing of that classic film?” You might be shocked to learn this, but there is! Or, at least there was at one time. Both films are resolutely dedicated to presenting a child’s point of view. in Grave, Setsuko doesn’t understand a lot of what’s happening to her and her brother. She just knows that she’s hungry and scared, and responds the way a child would to any instance of being hungry and scared. Sometimes she tries to be stoic, but just as often she cries and throws tantrums that Seita, who knows the gravity of their situation, can barely tolerate. One of the saddest elements of the film is the way he carefully hoards their last symbol of life before wartime, a tin of Sakuma fruit drops.

The fruit drops have been made by the Sakuma Candy Company since 1908, and the tins, which are often released with limited edition artwork, have become collectors items. You’ve probably guess where this is going: yes, they have released Grave of the Fireflies-themed tins.

No bug spray yet, which, come on.

I think this is an interesting way to commemorate one of the small joys the kids have in the film, but I think I’ll stick with my Totoro plushie.

So, I made it! I rewatched Grave of the Fireflies, and while it certainly colored my viewing of Totoro, my love for the King of the Forest is undiminished. Both of these films would have been extraordinary achievements on their own, but paired they showed that Studio Ghibli, with only one feature under their collective belt, could create a range of stories from a gut-wrenching drama to one of the sweetest, most effervescent children’s movies ever made. Both films, while initially not that successful, have since been acknowledged as all-time classics of anime. Over the next thirty years, they tackled coming-of-age stories, romances, medieval epics, and fairy tales, and continued their dedication to complex female leads, environmental theme, and gorgeous animation. I can’t wait to dive into the next essay, when I discuss Studio Ghibli’s two very different coming-of-age tales: Kiki’s Delivery Service and Whisper of the Heart!

But I think I’m renewing my ban on movies about war orphans.

Leah Schnelbach has a new life goal: night gardening with Totoro. Come follow the seeds and you will find…not an adventure, but Twitter!

Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.

Today, to celebrate our 150^th post (and definitely not our 151^st), we’re covering Lovecraftian mecha anime Kishin Houkou Demonbane. The Original Video Animation, directed by Shintaro Inokawa, was released from ViewWorks in July 2004. The animated series, written by Yōsuke Kuroda and directed by Hidetoshi Yoshida, aired May-August 2006 on WOWOW. Spoilers ahead.

Both are based on a Nitroplus game first released in 2003, which neither of us has played, but which commenter RushThatSpeaks assures us is deeply NSFW. The game series has continued since, and there has also been a novel series running from 2003 through the present.

“A pure and foul ceremony is about to revive.”

Summary

Kurou Daijuji was a student of arcane lore at Miskatonic University, but dropped out before becoming a sorcerer. A private detective working the mean streets of Arkham City, he’s so poor he must frequent the mission of Sister Leica Crusade, where the sister’s orphans claim he “freeloads” his meals. Then Ruri Hadou, head of the Hadou Group, offers him a job: Find her a genuine grimoire, one with a soul of its own. What she doesn’t mention is that she needs the grimoire to power her grandfather’s battle mech, Demonbane.

Searching for a grimoire, Kurou stumbles across a bookshop he never knew existed. The red-eyed, curvaceous proprietor Nya tells him he’ll soon acquire the most powerful grimoire of all. She’s right—a violet-haired young girl literally falls on him from the sky and claims to be the personification of Al Azif, original version of the Necronomicon! Too bad she’s pursued by minions of the evil Black Lodge, including green-haired rocker/mad scientist Dr. West!

The two escape West long enough for some exposition. For hundreds of years Al Azif has made pacts with sorcerers to battle evil, and she happens to be looking for a new master, and, wait, Kurou might make a fine sorcerer after all! She kisses the bemused Kurou, mystically binding them. He gains the hero-avatar of a muscular white-haired man with mismatched eyes—the left is entirely suffused with red. (“Gains the hero avatar” = “can now do a magical girl transformation.” It’s a big improvement.)

West arrives in his giant battle robot. Grimoire Al summons Demonbane (remember, the Hadou Group’s battle mech?) which she and new partner Kurou can pilot together. They defeat West. At first Ruri Hadou is angry that she can’t pilot Demonbane herself, but before long all unite to fight the Black Lodge together!

Adventures ensue. Black Lodge Master Therion and his many sorcerous thugs (and their grimoires and battle mechs) lose no opportunity to wreak havoc on poor Arkham City. Our heroes’ vacation at the famous Innsmouth resort is spoiled by Deep Ones and Dagon. The Black Lodge summons Cthulhu. Nya(lathotep) watches over all with sardonic interest.

Meanwhile all the ladies nurse love, or at least lust, for Kurou, including Dr. West’s battle gynoid Elsa! Poor Kurou—he can’t even take a bath without feminine interference. Al finds herself viewing Kurou not as a tool, as she did other sorcerer masters, but as a love interest, and he’s kinda uneasily fond of her, too. Can they sort out their feelings and save all reality at the same time?

Time, and the twelfth episode, will tell.

What’s Cyclopean: This anime gets out all its irrepressible word-love in the names of spells: Atlantis Strike, Lemuria Impact, and of course the ever-reliable Abracadabra. Oh, and the robot Deus Machina, whose name (we’re assured) bears only a coincidental similarity to the trope of the Deus ex Machina.

The Degenerate Dutch: Kurou randomly freaks out at being dressed as a cute girl during an Innsmouth beach party. Perhaps relatedly, prehuman elder gods (or at least the Deep Ones who serve them) have gender preferences for their human sacrifices.

Mythos Making: Shoutouts to everyone from Nitocris to Barzai the Not-So-Wise, not known for wielding a scimitar but who cares. Plus guest appearances by Deep Ones, dead worm-things, and numerous elder gods.

Libronomicon: The Necronomicon is literally one of the main characters–opposed by, among others, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. She plays volleyball quite well.

Madness Takes Its Toll: DOC-TOR WEHHHST!!!!!

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Now this is what I’m looking for in a Lovecraftian anime. Surreal, frequently over-the-top, and with all the Easter eggs and fannish references you can shake a giant city-destroying stick at. The central conceit of personified grimoires is fun. Grimoires personified as full-fashion lolita girls is particularly entertaining. Although I quickly get distracted thinking about how we’d feed everyone if the volumes on my own numerous bookshelves suddenly came to life.

Also distracting, alas, are the badly animated attempts at fan-service. Fair warning: this anime contains things that are clearly trying to pass as breasts, but are probably some type of alien infiltrator, or possibly weirdly shaped brain canisters. Half the female characters are showing off the uncanny valley of mammary glands under their scanty costumes. Which is entirely irrelevant to anything else, except there are whole exchanges of dialogue I missed because I was too busy sputtering, “But gravity—wait—anatomy what?” (Though I guess Nyarlathotep of the thousand forms might, in fact, be going for precisely this reaction.)

I could also have done without half the mecha battle scenes. As far as I could tell, there was nothing wrong with them as mecha battles, but they could have been replaced with more snarky grimoires and exasperated princesses of Arkham, and made me much happier.

Or with hot bored villains. The bored villain redeems a great deal of mecha battle. The only problem is that I will basically always root for a bored villain, especially a bored villain with an adoring Yithian manuscript at his side, over a whiny detective-turned-magus. (This is also my problem with Sailor Moon.) Someone could probably save the world by giving him a really good game console. His problem is that he’s stuck brooding in a dramatic throne room with no good entertainment options. No wonder he waxes poetic about our whiny hero’s heat. Or that Etheldreda/The Pnakotic Manuscript (who, let us remember, is responsible for sinking Atlantis) is so delighted to see something pique his interest.

Bored Villain is an excellent counterpoint to the lesser threat of over-the-top Mad Scientist DOCTOR WEST!!!! Ahem. Given that West was originally meant to be satirical, it seems perfectly sensible to have him show up as a Frankensteinian monster creator/mecha pilot/rock musician. It’s the electric guitar, I think, that adds that last perfect bit of oomph. He reminds me of Immortan Joe’s personal soundtrack provider in Fury Road, a little bit of joy in the midst of post-apocalyptic wasteland. (And if the mecha pilots keep up at this rate, Arkham City will soon be reduced to such a wasteland and a necessary subgenre switch. Presumably this would please the grimoires and their dark deific masters.)

Actually, let’s talk more about Ethelreda and Al Azif and their grimoirian kin. Given the fan-servicey tropes, you might expect lots of scenes where submissive books snark at their brooding masters. Or alternatively, you might expect more on-screen support for Al Azif’s cynical claim: that masters and grimoires simply use each other. But all the pairs I’ve seen so far (up through the Innsmouth episode) have unmistakably distinct relationships. Horrible Undead Lizard Guy’s tome, De Vermis Mysteriis, isn’t even bothering to personify any more, and given his hobbies who can blame it? Big Bricklike Dude Who Sacrifices Deep Ones and The R’lyeh Texts are visible only for a brief scene–during which time he grabs her possessively, and she flinches, in a way that isn’t the least bit cute or titillating.

Ethelreda and Bored Villain, in contrast, seem like well-practiced partners, perfectly comfortable with each others’ foibles and perfectly confident in their ability to back each others’ plays. There’s a sense of contentment between them even as they both freely acknowledge that he also desperately needs a worthy opponent in his life. Al Azif and Kurou are the polar opposite of this security: even as she grows fonder of his weird tendency to treat her like a person, she’s jealous and angry and pushes and pulls and throws around large balls of energy. (And he, still the least interesting character in the whole show, whines and panics.) I also appreciate the way the anime emphasizes these dynamics with moments in which all the tropes and animated shorthand suddenly vanish. It’s these relationships, and the contrasts between them, that are likely to keep me coming back.

So Demonbane is fun and engaging and exasperating and deeply weird. How is it as actual weird fiction? The creators say right up front, in the Mythos description at the first episode’s end, that they’re more interested in Lovecraft’s creations as background flavor than anything else. It certainly shows, especially at the beginning—the traditional anime tropes, from mecha to the workings of relationships, tend to overwhelm any feel of cosmic horror that might otherwise make it through. Except that there are moments—more frequent as the show progresses—when Al Azif says something disturbing, or world-breaking spells spin out from an incongruous magical girl transformation dance… and hints of something deliciously darker spill through.

Anne’s Commentary

All right. Let’s say we wanted to personify the great tomes of the Lovecraft canon—actually give them living human avatars. My first thought would be to render them as their authors, perhaps with an eldritch modification or two. The Necronomicon, then, would look like a medieval Arab, male, garbed to journey deep into the great desert to commune with its ever-howling demons. Occasionally, just for fun, he might unfurl the sand-brown wings of a desert falcon and fly across the gibbous, leering moon.

The Pnakotic Manuscripts, which predate humanity by eons, could look like one of the original authors, a member of the Great Race of Yith in its first Terran incarnation. You know, cone-body, nippers, pen-manipulating tentacles. Or, if we insist on the humaniform, like a vaguely inhuman man or woman, shunned by family and friends for reasons beyond their naming.

I don’t know about you guys, but I would never have imagined the Necronomicon or its Arabic original Al Azif as a barely adolescent girl with violet-pink hair and aqua eyes, sporting a very short, very frilly white dress and lots of red ribbons. Nor would the Pnakotic Manuscripts be her Goth chick cousin, identical except for the sapphire-blue eyes, black hair, black dress and black ribbons. Which is how Al and PM are imagined in the anime series Demonbane.

Watching the first episode, for the first time, I’m all I can’t even. Especially when Al would morph into flying chibi form, or when Dr. West would essay another electric guitar riff just prior to wielding another of his quirky weapon-inventions, or MOST especially whenever a battle mech would lumber into action. Could never understand the Transformers craze. Couldn’t bother with Pacific Rim for all my Del Toro love.

Then I watched the first episode again, and before I knew it, I was on Episode Seven. What makes anime so sneakily addictive? It can’t just be the great big puppy dog eyes, can it? No, it must be something more profound, more amenable to academic discourse. Like the complex conventions and stylization, the epic storylines, the sly humor, the fraught relationships, the pervasive sexuality.

Or else the great big puppy dog eyes. And the boobs.

The boobs in this series intrigue me. Why are some female characters flat-chested while others are ridiculously busty? If Al and Pnakotic (aka Etheldreda) and the cat-girl Ennea are flat because barely adolescent, that raises another issue, and one explicitly addressed in the series. Seeing Kuzuo in a double hug with Al and Ennea, Dr. West (of all mad geniuses) chastises him as a pedophile and pervert. Sister Leica is shocked the first time she hears Al call Kuzuo “master.” Kuzuo himself is hyperaware of the problem—although Al is hundreds of years older than he is, she does present as a girl too young for him. And there is the mortifying incident in Episode Five, when a strange violet gas removes Kurou’s inhibitions, whereupon he gropes Al until she gives him a well-deserved whupping.

Not that he isn’t equally interested in the grown women and their ample assets. Like Sister Leica in her bikini (what else would a nun wear at the Innsmouth Ocean Resort?) Like Ruri Hadou’s maids (who double as mech engineers because that way the engineers can wear maid uniforms.) Particularly like Nya the bookstore owner and one of Nyarlathotep’s most fetching avatars. I guess if you’re an Outer God in female form in anime, you might as well go for the GGG cups. Anime experts, explain breast size trope.

Yeah, boobs. One thing I don’t remember Lovecraft ever addressing. Stuff Lovecraft did address is liberally strewn through Demonbane, often with an amusing twist. I like the concept of sorcerers bonding with their grimoires, and that the grimoires gain so much mystical power they develop souls of their own. Throwing in additional bonds to battle mechs, Deus machina or god machines, nah, doesn’t strike me as a great subgenre-mashup. The mechs looked too much alike to me, had too many gimmicky weapons and attacks, made way too much of a mess.

Specifically they mess up Arkham City, which looks nothing like Lovecraft’s Arkham. Much more like a cartoon New York—or Gotham City, in fact. Why it has a bridge that looked like the Golden Gate or a pentagonal fortress that looked like, well, the Pentagon, don’t know. Miskatonic University is supposed to be there somewhere, but I haven’t seen anything like it yet. Not that urban renewal will ever be a problem here. More like a continual necessity, given how the mechs are always leveling whole neighborhoods with a single pounce. Innsmouth got far less damage, as the battles in that episode were out of town. Phew, no damage to the tourist industry!

One of the coolest things happened in Innsmouth—the summoned Dagon-monster looked like it was based on Burgess Shale apex predator, Anomalocaris! The same circular port of a mouth, the same spiky caudal feelers! I also enjoyed the simultaneous summoning of Cthugha and Ithaqua (fire and ice) that saves Al and Kurou’s butts in the Dagon battle. Later the elemental powers of Cthugha and Ithaqua get translated into Kurou’s handguns, via the introduction of the Powder of Ibn Ghazi into their gunpowder. Don’t ask me, ask Al Azif—she’s the one who figured out how that worked.

In a final example of how Mythos-allusive details can delight, Al is often shown lounging on a one-eyed yellow blob that occasionally emits a mild Tekeli-li. Who knew shoggoths made such accommodating house pets?

I’ve cheated and read ahead in Web summaries of Demonbane. Things seem to get progressively more cosmic in the later episodes. Deep space, deep time, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep revealed, all that good stuff.

So, yeah, I’ll have to endure the clunking mechs to see the adventure through to the end. Damn you, Demonbane! Long live the girl-shaped grimoires!

Your friendly hostesses have, perhaps foolishly, volunteered to join a panel on Lovecraft’s collaborations at Necronomicon in August. This makes an excellent excuse to cover C.M. Eddy, Lovecraft’s one major collaborator who hasn’t yet received the reread treatment. Next week, “The Loved Dead,” which you can find in the collaborative collection The Horror in the Museum.

Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” is now available from Macmillan’s Tor.com imprint. The sequel, Deep Roots, will be out in July 2018. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Dreamwidth, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

Something is happening in the anime fandom, and anime fans aren’t pleased.

If you’re someone who likes to watch anime, you may have been hearing the backlash against Amazon’s new channel, Anime Strike. The service has angered fans by snapping up exclusive licenses to many of the most anticipated shows and putting them behind a steep paywall. Meanwhile, this season sees Netflix continue its practice of exclusively licensing shows, then locking them away until they can release a season at time—long after the show has already finished airing in Japan.

Why does this matter? Both strategies effectively remove a show from popular conversation, and thus from the notice of a large portion of viewers. It’s a frustrating reversal of the increasing accessibility and reach that anime has enjoyed in the last few years under services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Daisuki. Rather than opening up the market, Amazon and Netflix appear to be shutting the door on old fans and new viewers alike. This is a trend I very much don’t love, especially since my most anticipated show of the season—Welcome to the Ballroom—is a victim of this new distribution regime.

With my Anime Strike tirade out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. As always, I have watched as many of the summer season’s new offerings as I can stand, and picked just five of the best new shows worth your time. Yes, unfortunately many of them are on Anime Strike. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying what this season has to offer—a big helping of of fantasy adventure, a sweet romance, and, of course, ballroom dancing.

Welcome to the Ballroom

Tatara Fujita’s plan to get through school consists of keeping his head down and not giving bullies any reason to hit him. When he’s saved from a back-alley beating by a motorcycle-riding ballroom dance champion, Tatara is reluctantly roped into a trial class at the nearby studio. What starts as polite interest becomes a fascination—for the first time, Tatara finds something he wants to be good at, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get to the top.

Continuing the trend of anime about unusual sports (ice skating, anyone?), this sports show—yes, ballroom is a sport in this context—is this season’s must-watch title. Adapting a popular manga by Tomo Takeuchi, Ballroom has everything one might want in a sports show: a plucky underdog, an aloof rival, grueling training, and an incredibly infectious enthusiasm for its subject. The greatest challenge with this adaptation was always going to be the dancing, and so far the animation team at Production I.G. has done a stellar job with it. I really, really love this manga, and I encourage anyone who can stomach giving money to Amazon to check it out.

For fans of: Yuri!!! On Ice, Haikyuu!!, Yowamushi Pedal

Watch it now on Anime Strike

Tsuredure Children

Love is hard, especially when you’re a teenager. Tsuredure Children tells the loosely intertwined stories of young love, from the unrequited crush of a girl on her upperclassman to an unlikely connection between a school delinquent and the straight-laced student council president.

This warm, funny little romance show has been easily the most pleasant surprise of the season for me. An adaptation of Toshiya Wakabayashi’s 4-koma manga (that’s a four-panel comic, sort of like the manga version of a comic strip), Tsuredure Children is a half-length show, but twelve minutes is kind of the perfect dose of these quirky interactions. Not much more needs to be said here—the charms of the show speak for itself. Check it out when you want to feel warm and fuzzy.

For fans of: Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, Horimiya, Tanaka-kun Is Always Listless, Daily Lives of High School Boys

Watch it now on Crunchyroll (thank goodness)

Made in Abyss

Riko is training to be a Cave Raider, a group of elite explorers that probe the depths of the mysterious and dangerous Abyss. No one knows how the Abyss came to be, but expeditions have revealed rare magical artifacts and creatures unlike anything on the surface. After Riko’s life is saved by a strange mechanical boy in the upper levels of the Abyss, she is more determined than ever to descend deeper into the chasm. There, she hopes to find not just treasure, but also clues about her mother, a legendary explorer who went missing over a decade ago.

This fantasy adventure (based on a web manga by Akihito Tsukushi) has an old-school quality about it, feeling more akin to Nausicaa, Dennou Coil, or Hunter x Hunter than recent isekai offerings that ape JRPG-style fantasy worlds. It is already obvious that the strength of Made in Abyss lies in its worldbuilding—right off the bat, we are offered a magical, immersive, and lethal world begging to be explored. The first two episodes also reveal this to be a polished production, with an almost cinematic atmosphere and great attention put into small details and large, scary monsters alike. Abyss has definitely caught my interest, but proceed with caution—manga readers warn that the childlike character designs belie much darker content later in the series.

For fans of: Hunter x Hunter, From the New World/Shin Sekai Yori, Suisei no Gargantia, Patema Inverted

Watch it now on Anime Strike

Altair: A Record of Battles

Mahmut is a military and political prodigy, one of the youngest pasha in Turkiye’s storied history. When the powerful Balt-Rhein Empire accuses Turkiye of assassinating one of their foreign ministers, war between the two powerful nations seems inevitable. Mahmut is willing to do anything to prevent the conflict. But even if he can discover the truth behind the assassination, can he get the council of generals to believe him?

This historical fantasy, based on a gorgeous manga by Kotono Kato, mushes up 16th century Mediterranean history to create a rich world predicated on savvy political maneuvering and the constant threat of multinational war. As a fan of the manga, I am hopeful but not entirely sold on this adaptation so far. The first episode gets bogged down in flashbacks and passes over opportunities to streamline initial story arcs. The second episode, however, is much stronger, and I’m hoping that the show will hit its stride as the plot picks up. I am keeping an eye on Altair, and you should too—it’s not often that we get such an intricate fantasy set in this region of the world.

For fans of: The Heroic Legend of Arslan, Yona of the Dawn, Kingdom, Magi

Watch it now on (you guessed it) Anime Strike

Little Witch Academia

Ever since Akko saw a magical performance from celebrity witch Shiny Chariot as a child, she has dreamed of doing magic. When she’s admitted into Luna Nova Magical Academy, an all-girls school for young witches, Akko thinks she’s one step closer to her idol. But magic school isn’t as easy as it looks. Besides being the only student from a non-magical family, which makes her stick out like a sore thumb, Akko just can’t quite seem to get any of her spells right—or manage to stay out of trouble—no matter how hard she tries.

FINALLY, right? Netflix has at last released Little Witch Academia (well, at least the first half) from its holding pen and made it bingeable to the wider world. I’ve described this show previously as Harry Potter meets Saturday morning cartoons, and I still think that’s a pretty apt description. The colorful, witchy cast plus Studio Trigger’s madcap visual humor and taste for splashy action makes this a fun watch for all ages. This TV version gives us more plot and characters than did either of two shorts (Little Witch Academia and Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade), so buckle up for a bit more substance and lot more goofy magical adventures.

For fans of: The other two Little Witch Academia anime, I guess.

Watch it now on Netflix

Watch are you watching this season? Tell us in the comments!

Kelly Quinn is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about excellent fiction and manga on Twitter.

Studio Ghibli is known for making coming-of-age films, and for films with complex female characters, but there are two in particular, made 6 years apart, exemplify these traits better than any of their other work. One is considered an all-time classic, while the other is a lesser known gem. One gives us an alternate world full of magic and flight, while the other stays purely grounded in this world. But taken together, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Whisper of the Heart celebrate the single-minded passion of the artist, and the need for young women especially to ignore societal pressures in order to create their own destinies.

Historical Background

Kiki began life as a children’s book written by Eiko Kadono, a much simpler, picaresque adventure story compared to the film, which stresses Kiki’s emotional growth and existential crises. When Miyazaki chose to adapt it he also added Kiki’s struggles with her loss of magic, and then wrote a dramatic blimp accident to supply the film’s climax. Trust Miyazaki to find a way to stick an airship into a story about witches…

When Kadono wrote the story, she titled Kiki’s service “takkyubin” which literally means “express home delivery” or “door-to-door service”. This phrase had been used and popularized by the Yamato Transport Company—whose logo, a mother cat carrying her kitten, bears a resemblance to Kiki’s familiar, Jiji. Yamato’s logo is so popular that the company is often colloquially called “kuroneko” – black cat. Miyazaki’s partner Isao Takahata approached the company when they began the adaptation, and the transport company eventually agreed to co-sponsor the movie, thus smoothing over any copyright worries.

Kiki was a big hit, and was the highest-grossing movie movie at the Japanese box office in 1989—the film’s success inspired Kadono to write a series of sequels to Kiki’s original adventure. It was also one of the first Ghibli films available in the US, when Disney released an English-language dub on VHS in 1998. (And, if you’d like to read a completely obsolete sentence, according to Wikipedia: “Disney’s VHS release became the 8th-most-rented title at Blockbuster stores during its first week of availability.”) The dub featured Kirsten Dunst as Kiki, Janeane Garofalo as Ursula, and the late Phil Hartman as the acerbic  Jiji—a prominent cast for a fairly early foray into Disney’s attempts at marketing anime.

Whisper of the Heart was based on a manga by Aoi Hiiragi. The film, released in 1995, was the directorial debut of Yoshifumi Kondo, a veteran Ghibli animator (including on Kiki’s Delivery Service), who was seen as the obvious heir to Miyazaki. The film was a success, and two years later, following the blockbuster of Mononoke Hime, Miyazaki announced his retirement, seemingly with the idea that Kondo would become the studio’s primary director, while Takahata would continue turning out masterpieces at his slower rate. But, as Helen McCarthy’s history of Studio Ghibli relates, mere days after Miyazaki’s farewell party, Kondo died suddenly of an Aortic dissection. This obviously threw the studio into disarray, and led to Miyazaki coming back to work, but at a much slower pace, as many in the industry felt that Kondo’s tragic death was a result of overwork. With his one directorial effort, Kondo proved that he was a delicate, sensitive craftsman with an eye for the tiny details that imbue every day life with magic.

Whisper of the Heart was a hit in Japan, earning 1.85 billion yen, and garnering strong reviews. But it didn’t get anywhere near the traction in the US that some of Ghibli’s other films did. It’s about kids in mid-90s Tokyo, with very little of the fantastical element that people had already come to expect from Ghibli, and it’s also a deceptively simple story, as I’ll discuss below.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

Kiki is a young witch, and since she’s turning 13, it’s time for her to follow the witch tradition of setting out on her own and establishing herself in a witchless town. She leaves her mother and father and flies toward the sea—but since this is Ghibli the burst of freedom is tempered by responsibility. Kiki can only take her cat, Jiji, with her, and she has to dress in a regimented black dress so everyone will know she’s a witch. From now on her own desires have to take a backseat to the needs of her town, as she’s essentially a public servant.

She finds an idyllic city near the sea, establishes that they don’t have a witch already, and lands on the street to take stock. She immediately attracts the attention of a group of young girls of the town, who look at her like an odd zoo animal—her freedom is inextricably bound to her otherness.

In short order she finds a homey bakery in need of a delivery girl, and agrees to exchange her work for an apartment behind the shop. The bakery’s sales go up once they start advertising their magical broom-based delivery service, and Kiki gains a new set of parental figures in Osono and Fukuo, the husband-and-wife bakers—but they’re also her employers. They check on her when she’s sick, and encourage her to take time off, but they also expect her to work hard, and they treat her as a young adult rather than a little girl.

She does make one friend her own age: a boy named Tombo. Tombo resembles a younger version of Kiki’s dad, and he’s awkward and nerdy and completely enamored of her witchiness, just as her father seemed to have been enraptured by her mother years before. Tombo loves flight, and part of his interest in Kiki is sparked by seeing how much she loves it, too. The tentative friendship turns on their conversations about flying, with Kiki supporting Tombo’s ridiculous attempts to build flying machines, but since her confidence has taken a hit since she left home, she’s also apt to run away when she’s faced with Tombo’s friends. It’s just too much to take.

Kiki’s Delivery Service becomes a success, but it also means that Kiki can’t practice any other witch skills. (I could say something about how even in a children’s fantasy movie the realities of capitalism constrain magic…but that’s a whole other article.) This radiates through the film in a surprising way. During a delivery, Kiki is attacked by birds and drops the toy she’s carrying to a country manor.

She finds it in a cabin, but more importantly she meets an artist named Ursula, who kindly fixes the damaged toy, allowing Kiki to finish her job. A few weeks later she’s commissioned to deliver a fish pie to an elderly lady’s granddaughter, but has a rough flight. Soaked and bedraggled, she learns that the pie is for one of the snotty girls who gawked at her on her first day in the city. The girl is dismissive toward both Kiki and the pie, and haughtily sends the girl back into the storm. For a moment Kiki has a glimpse of the life other girls her age are living: birthday parties, time with friends and family, pretty clothes and gifts. Between her depression and the chilling weather, she ends up with a fever…but far worse, she has a crisis of confidence that robs her of her ability to fly, her broom breaks in a crash, and maybe worst of all she realizes that she can no longer understand Jiji.

She has no other talents to fall back on. She’s never learned potions or healing magic or divination. So the witch ends up as a shopgirl, answering phones for Osono, knowing that she’s not really earning her keep, with no idea whether she’ll ever get her powers back. Will she have to go home in disgrace? Is she even a real witch?

Luckily Ursula shows up.

The older woman recognizes the thousand-yard-stare of an artist who has lost her way, and chooses to do the generous thing: she invites Kiki to take a damn vacation already and come back to the cabin with her. For me, this is the heart of the film. Ursula removes Kiki from her ordinary life to give her a new perspective, the two women discuss the similarities of art and magic, and for the first time the young witch is able to see her life from a distance. The next day Ursula reveals her work in progress, and Kiki realizes that she’s inspired her friend to create a beautiful work of art:

Seeing herself through her friend’s eyes makes her realize that she’s more than just the town witch.

She visits Madame, her elderly friend, who makes her a version of the pie that her jerk granddaughter rejected. And then a crisis hits: Tombo is involved in that zeppelin crash that I mentioned earlier. Kiki rushes to help, borrows a streetsweeper’s broom, and rescues him. The film ends with Kiki able to fly again and restarting her delivery service, but more importantly, it ends with her knowledge that she’s a whole person, not just a function. Her magic is an art that will grow with her. Best of all she knows she’s not alone. She’s part of Tombo’s group, she’s part of Osono’s family, she has Ursula, Madame, and Madame’s maid—adulthood doesn’t mean going it alone without her parents, it means building a new community. Plus Jiji has started a family with the cat next door.

Whisper of the Heart

I’ll begin by saying that Whisper of the Heart, while one of my favorite-ever Ghibli film, features more renditions of John Denver’s 1971 hit “Take Me Home, Country Roads” than any film should have—including a cover by Olivia Newton-John. The movie opens over Tokyo—bustling sidewalks, commuter trains, office windows still lit long into the night. We join our heroine Shizuku as she steps out of the corner market, dodges neighborhood traffic, and finally steps into her family’s tiny, cluttered Tokyo apartment. Her father works at the family’s computer in the one large room, as her mother works on a paper at the dining table. The room is dilapidated, dishes piling next to the sink, books and papers sliding from shelves. Shizuku’s older sister, a college student, also lives at home.

The details build gradually—the washing machine is in the shower room, separated from the main room by a curtain. The two sisters have bunk beds, each with their own lamp and a curtain, so they can essentially retreat into their own space and block some of the light and sound out. We never see the parents’ room, because the girls have no reason to go in there, but I think it’s safe to assume that it is as Spartan-yet-cluttered as the rest of the house.

We’ve met Shizuku at a crossroads in her life: she’s in the waning days of her summer vacation, and when school resumes, she’ll be taking her high school entrance exams. These exams will determine her future, and it’s all anyone at school talks about. Things are changing at home too—father is a librarian at the large county library, and they’re switching from card catalogues to digital records (father and daughter agree that this is not a good change); mother has started classes at the local university, with plans to start a new career after graduation, which has required Shizuku and her sister to help with the housework; older sister is juggling college and part-time work, and planning to move out on her own. Shizuku is trying to hold onto the last scraps of her childhood—sleeping in, reading fairytales—as her family tries to push her into adult responsibility and her friends try to push her into romance. The plot is whisper thin, but also not the point.

Shizuku notices that each time she check out a book for her project, the name Seiji Amasawa appears on the card above hers. She starts researching the Amasawa family to try to learn more about this mystery reader. Later, she sees a cat on the train, follows it at random, and discovers an antique shop run by a loving elderly caretaker who just happens to be Seiji Amsawa’s grandfather. Shizuku visits the store and becomes entranced by a particular antique, a cat figurine called The Baron.

She spends time with Seiji while struggling to keep up with her studies, and the film seems to be a sweet YA anime. But the whole film shifts abruptly when Seiji announces he’s going to Cremona, Italy to learn to make violins. This doesn’t happen until about the 45-minute mark, but suddenly the story snaps into focus: talking with her best friend Yuuko, Shizuku realizes that what she really wants is to write a story like the ones she loves. She decides to spend the two months that Seiji is gone testing herself by writing an entire short story. Seiji’s grandfather agrees to let her use the Baron as her main character, on the condition that he gets to be the first person to read the story.

It becomes extremely clear that Kondo has been lulling us with a comfortable coming-of-age movie for nearly an hour, when he was actually creating the origin story of an artist. We’ve been passively watching Shizuku’s ordinary life, just as she was content to read for hours at a time, but now she is actively challenging herself. She spends hours in the library doing research for her story, and we get to see snippets of it—a lovely fantasy of a cat who must rescue his lover with the help of a young girl and a magical jewel. We see traces of stories like Peter Pan and Pinocchio, but also some moments of real originality.

Her grades fall, her sister freaks out, her parents worry, and she doesn’t sleep much, but she meets her deadline. As promised, she shows the finished story to Grandfather Nishi, before having a slight breakdown from all the stress. And then she returns to normal life, but it’s clear that she’s a changed girl. She treats her romance with Seiji as the beginning of an artistic partnership. and makes it clear she plans to make her own way in the world. Even her decision to recommit to school is framed as an artistic choice, when she says she needs college in order to become a better writer.

The Perfect Pairing

So last time on the Ghibli Rewatch, I talked about how watching My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies together was not exactly a fun experience. I’m happy to report that Kiki and Shizuku make for a perfect pair. In fact, if I had access to a daughter and her friends? I would suggest that this is the best slumber movie marathon ever created by human hands. There are two elements that I think make these among the most important of Ghibli’s movies…

The Power of Female Friendship!

Whisper of the Heart is slightly weaker on this. Shizuku has a tight-knit group of friends who are supportive of her artistic tendencies, including encouraging her English to Japanese translation of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, but they’re not in the film that often. While I personally find Shizuku’s sister insufferable, she is trying to be helpful, and thinks that bullying her kid sis into better grades and more chores will make her stronger. I don’t agree with her methods, but I do think her heart is in the right place. The other two women in Shizuku’s life are more significant. Shizuku’s mother mostly leaves her daughter alone to work (which is probably as much a result of the mom’s own studies as any attempt to encourage independence) but when Shizuku faces her parents and tells them of her need to test herself with her writing project (more on the below), her mother doesn’t just tell her to go ahead and try—she also goes out of her way to tell Shizuku that she, too, has had times when she needed to test herself against deadlines and challenges. She makes herself, and her hard work and sacrifice, a model for her daughter to follow. And then she nudges the girl and tells her she still has to come to dinner with the family. Finally we come to Shizuku’s best friend, Yuuko. Yuuko doesn’t have a terribly large role, but her friendship is pivotal. Shizuko first decides to test her writing through a conversation with Yuuko, not Seiji. It would have been easy for the film to give Seiji that scene, since he’s the other character with a real artistic passion. Instead the film shows us the more emotionally resonant path of placing that decision in a conversation between two best girlfriends.

This theme is much stronger in Kiki. The generosity of all the characters is incredibly touching. Kiki is part of a matrilineal line of witches. When she leaves the safety of her mother, she is taken in by Osono, and befriended by Ursula, Madame, and Madame’s maid. She does have to deal with a few mean girls, but Tombo’s female friends actually seem cool—it’s Kiki who freaks out and runs away from them, but by the end of the film it’s clear that they’re completely accepting of her. The film subtly shows us different phases of a woman’s life, all presented to Kiki as potential choices: she meets a snooty witch, and then a group of girls who represent the typical teenager girlhood she’s leaving behind for a life of witchery; Osono is hugely pregnant, so Kiki also gets an immediate, non-parental model of marriage and new motherhood; Madame provides an example of loving, dignified old age.

Best of all, though, is Ursula. Ursula is a young painter, in her early 20s, working to make it as an artist. She lives alone in a cabin, and is entirely, gloriously self-sufficient. She gives no fucks about social mores, feminine beauty standards, corporate ladders—all that matters to her is her art. When she sees that Kiki needs her she steps into a mentorship role, with no expectation of reward beyond a sketching session.

She is perfect.

The Life of the Artist

I will admit that there was a time in my life (college) when I watched Kiki at least once a week. I didn’t really have the time to spare, but I felt so adrift and unsure of what I wanted to do with myself that losing myself in Kiki’s story of failure and rebirth became my own sort of reset button. Each week I’d watch this girl prove herself, fall and get back up. I watched it in the hope that the story would rewrite my own synapses, make it possible that failure was a temporary condition, that I, too, would get my magic back. While Mononoke Hime was my first Ghibli film, and Porco Rosso my favorite, I think Kiki was the most important to me. It’s so rare to see a story of an artist in which failure is treated as natural, inevitable, and part of the process. Of course her magic fails—she’s killing herself with too much responsibility, and she isn’t allowing herself to enjoy flight anymore. When flying stops being fun, you need to take a break and reevaluate.

It’s a perfect metaphor, and the fact that Ursula is the one who steps in to help just makes it all the more resonant. No matter what art or craft you practice,  you have to refill your tank occasionally.

Where Kiki has adulthood thrust upon her at the age of 13, Shizuko actively chooses to try living as an adult, full-time writer for two months, to see if she can produce a real story like the ones she loves reading. No one would blame her if she gave up and lived as a regular student for a few more years before heading off to college—her family would actually prefer it. And she isn’t doing it to impress Seiji, as he isn’t even there to see how hard she’s working, and at that point she thinks he’s staying in Italy for several more years. This is purely for her—to test her own mind and resolve against a blank page.

The film goes from being a fun piece of YA to a great look at the artistic life by treating this completely realistically. Shizuku doesn’t just sit and scribble words down—she goes to the library repeatedly to do serious research for her story, which is the thing ironically that finally gets her to focus rather than passively reading storybooks constantly. She pours herself into her work with a dedication that is far beyond her work on exams, and has stacks of books around her so she can cross-reference. We see her re-reading, editing, swapping words out. She’s trying to craft a real, publishable story. You don’t get to sit down and manically write your way through a montage that ends with a perfect, polished story that magically flies through the New Yorker’s slushpile. You stay up late, you get up early, you drink an unhealthy amount of coffee, you hear a lot of voices (all of them louder than the whisper of your heart, and many of them your own) telling you your project is foolish, and at the end of the whole process you collapse in tears from stress and exhaustion as one person tells you the story’s pretty cool. (And hell, Shizuku’s lucky—at least one person liked the story. Plenty of people write stories for years before anyone likes them…)

The film doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulty of the creative process, and it also doesn’t try to turn Shizuku into a cute kid who’s doing her best. She wants the story to be great, and she falls short of her own standards: “I forced myself to write it, but I was so scared!” When Grandfather Nishi tells her he likes her story, he also tells her “you can’t expect perfection when you’re just starting” and makes it clear that this isn’t a masterpiece, it’s only a beginning. Writing, like all endeavors, requires work and practice. It requires failure. Most adult films about writers never capture this kind of work, so seeing it here made me ecstatic.

Maybe the absolute best part of all, though? Once her parents notice her obsession they sit down and talk with her, seriously, about why she’s pursuing writing. In what may be my favorite-ever Ghibli moment they tell her to go ahead with it. Her father says, “There’s more than one way to live your life,” but follows up by saying that she’ll need to live with the consequences if her writing project tanks her chances of going to a top high school. And as she learns in working on the story, she’s going to need proper research skills and strong discipline to make it as a professional writer, so she’s going to have to be serious about studying. After Grandfather Nishi reads her first story the two eat ramen together and he shares a little of his life story. She goes home and tells her mother that she’s going back to being a regular student…at least for now. And even when the film ties the romantic plot together, and makes it clear that she and Seiji are going to embark on a romance, both of them frame it as a creative partnership rather than just two kids dating.

These two films are so good at showing what it means to try to follow a creative path in life—whether it’s writing or painting or craft beer brewing or hairstyling. Any time you try to express yourself creatively there is going to be an undercurrent of terror that people might not get it, might reject you, might mock you. Your work might not live up to your own standards. But Studio Ghibli was brave enough to give us two films, neaarly a decade apart, assuring young girls that failure was just part of growing up, and that when you found something you were truly passionate about, you should pursue it with your whole being.

One of the most surprising, and gratifying, things that has happened since I started my blog, Tim Maughan Books, is the positive feedback I’ve had for the anime reviews—especially from people I know are far from being massive fanboys like myself. It’s gratifying because its part of the reason I started writing them—to try and introduce the medium to people who had never really indulged in it all, at least not past perhaps watching Spirited Away with their kids. The problem is, once you’ve had your first taste, where do you go next? Type ‘anime’ into Google and the results are bewildering, and without a little bit of guidance and a quality filter finding something to watch can be a daunting task. So, here is my list of 10 ‘mature’ anime films you really should see. They are in no particular order, the term ‘mature’ is kind of loose, seeing as at least two are really kids’ films, and this is purely personal opinion. If you disagree, see you in the comments section.

Akira (1988)

For many of us in the west, this is the one that started it all. Up until we first saw Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, our only exposure to Japanese animation had been kiddies’ Saturday morning shows like Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets, but I can still remember vividly sitting in a run-down arthouse cinema at the age of 17 with my jaw resting on the sticky floor as the opening scenes flashed in front of me. Two hours later I was a complete convert. Otomo heavily edited and re-wrote his own epic manga about rival motorbike gangs and genetically enhanced children to create this futuristic thriller, and it blew away critics and audiences in the west while breaking box office records back home in Japan. It also opened the floodgates for anime into the US and Europe, but unfortunately with a lot of what was opportunistically exported (distributors looking for visually similar/violent material instead of quality) simply not being up to the same standard many potential new fans were turned off as quickly as they’d been turned on. Essential viewing.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

One of the most influential anime films of all time, Mamoru Oshii‘s Ghost in the Shell changed not only the look and feel of animated sci-fi but also had an impact on Hollywood; most notably in the distinct visual style of the Matrix movies. While some hardcore fans of Masamune Shirow‘s original action-packed and often light hearted manga still complain about the adaption; Oshii’s decision to turn it into a dark, brooding, beautifully paced drama ensured its place as a science fiction classic. It is without doubt the definitive visual depiction of the cyberpunk movement, and the closest there is to date of a filmic version of William Gibson’s classic Sprawl Trilogy novels. Not just a huge worldwide hit, it also spawned a huge franchise including a sequel, a Hollywood adaptation, two 26 part TV series, various novels, toys and video games, as well as the controversial Ghost in the Shell 2.0 special edition.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

I’ve talked at length elsewhere about how personally important My Neighbor Totoro is to me, so here I’ll try not to gush too much. There’s so many reasons as to why Hayao Miyazaki‘s masterpiece is such an enduring and perfect film; the way he captures the energy and personalities of its two child protagonists, and his never ending attention to detail combined with a beautifully simple score and Kazuo Oga‘s immaculate and breath-taking background paintings make it a joy to watch over and over again. A fact I’ve been re-assured of by friends with young children that insist on watching it on a near daily basis. And that’s probably Totoro’s strongest point—the fact that it is family film that appeals to both children and adults alike without pandering to either with slapstick or ‘knowing’ humor. If you haven’t seen it yet then you must—it is quite possibly the greatest animated film ever made.

Porco Rosso (1992)

I’ve already got one Miyazaki movie in this list, and it’s hard to limit it to just two. Picking a second one is even harder. My opinion changes on a near daily basis, or depending on the last one I happened to watch. But I’ll always have a soft spot for Porco Rosso; the tale of a WWI fighter ace turned bounty-hunter, cursed with the head of a pig and on the run for going AWOL from the Italian air force. In many ways it must have been one of Miyazaki’s most enjoyable projects to create, another fantastic family film that somehow manages to combine his obsession with aeronautic design and his personal politics. The elaborate, lived in aircraft designs remain one of my favourite cinematic images of all time, while we learn that the reason Rosso is fleeing the Italian authorities is his disdain for the fascism that’s steadily taking grip of Europe. Oh, and he also manages to take a gentle swipe at US bravado along the way. A perfect film.

Voices of a Distant Star (2002)

Perhaps Voices of a Distant Star doesn’t really belong here. For a start its only 25 minutes long, and was first released on DVD, technically making it an OVA. Well, rules are made to be broken, plus it earns its place on this list for truly being a film you must see before you die. Astonishing enough that it was single-handedly written, directed and animated by the now legendary Makoto Shinkai on his Mac at home, it is also one of the most touching, beautiful and exhilarating examples of animation produced in recent history. The story of a long distant, text message relationship between a teenage mecha-pilot and her boyfriend back on earth, it combines gentle, slow-paced scenes with snatches of frantic sci-fi action, and has become the thematic and stylistic basis for Shinkai’s subsequent large-budget productions. It’s probably available for stupidly cheap on DVD now, so you really have no excuse for not picking this mini-masterpiece up.

Royal Space Force: The Wings Of Honneamise (1987)

The feature film debut of the then still young—but now legendary—studio Gainax, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise is an unusual, compelling and skillfully crafted film. Both a coming of age story and detailed analysis of the role of the space race in the Cold War, RSF tells the story of an alternate reality Earth, where two rival superpowers are locked in a constant propaganda and military stalemate, while a small team of underfunded scientists, engineers and pilots attempt to launch the first man into space. While the film is beautifully animated with some fantastically detailed background art, it is also has substantial depth in terms of its philosophical themes and characterisation. As such it’s not one for the whole family, but an unmissable and enthralling watch for anyone with an interest in what animation can truly achieve.

Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993)

The history of the Patlabor franchise is a long and complex one, but put simply under the guidance of Mamoru Oshii it developed (in a way similar to how he remolded Ghost in The Shell) from a light hearted but realistic police-mecha drama to a bleak, deeply political and philosophical thriller by the time he directed Patlabor 2: The Movie. While the first movie is just as enthralling, thoughtful and arguably more accessible, the sequel just steals the crown due to its uncompromising approach to its political themes and its breathless, stark cinematic beauty. It deals with Oshii’s recurring theme of the hypocrisy of peace in the developed world, and in particular is a devastating attack on the foreign policy of a pacifist Japan that profits from the fates of distant waring nations. Although over 15 years old now, its portrayal of terrorism consists of some disturbingly prophetic imagery. Possibly the closest anime has come to producing something to rival the large canvas, cinematic styles of the likes of Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott, it is an unmissable, if challenging, work.

Perfect Blue (1997)

The directorial debut of anime auteur Satoshi Kon, Perfect Blue’s story about a J-Pop idol turned actress being stalked by a obsessive fan was originally meant to be a live action drama, only scrapped due to the 1995 Kobe earthquake. At first its contemporary setting and often mundane situations are certainly reminiscent of a well-shot J-Horror movie, but in Kon’s skilled hands the script slowly changes into something that could only be depicted by animation. As a starting point for his re-occurring themes of disconnected realities and psychological fantasy it is subtler than his later works including Paranoia Agent and Paprika, and as a result somehow creepier. Certainly its most famous scene—where we apparently see the central character being raped, only discovering she is just acting when the off camera director shouts ‘cut’—is one that permanently sticks in the mind, as does the film’s shocking, final revelation.

Memories (1995)

Produced by Katsuhiro Otomo, and based on some of his short manga stories, Memories is an anthology of three films. Although all science fiction they cover a wide range of styles, from the romantic, twisted reality of the Satoshi Kon scripted Magnetic Rose and the ludicrous bio-warfare black comedy Stink Bomb to the Orwellian, Brazil like dystopia of Cannon Fodder—the only one of the three directed by Otomo himself. It is arguably the most compelling of the three, with its Oshii-esque story of a war obsessed and controlled society and its unique, steampunkesque visuals. Despite the diverging themes and differing visual styles of the three chapters, there is an undeniably high standard of production throughout. It’s another film that can be easily and cheaply picked up on DVD at the moment, I can’t hesitate in recommending that you buy it on sight.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

Loosely based on a popular Japanese novel, Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time tells the story of schoolgirl Makoto Konno, who discovers she has the ability to—literally—time leap; that is to jump back in time to change situations and remake important decisions. What starts as an enjoyable, funny and charming teenage drama slowly reveals itself to have a classic, well crafted science fiction story at its heart, offering another, stylish but gentle, take on the conundrums and paradoxes thrown up by the idea of time-travel. It’s partly in this list to represent the talent of more recent directors and studios, but mainly because it’s a warm, accessible, exciting and lovingly made film that will be held in high esteem for many, many years to come.

So what have I missed out? Where have I gone wrong? Well for a start I notice straight away that although there’s two Studio Ghibli films, there’s nothing by Isao Takahata—No Grave of the Fireflies or Only Yesterday—which can’t be right, surely? I guess it’s a good sign for anime’s heritage that compiling such a list and limiting it to just ten means so many great works are missing, but I’m sure some of you will be upset that I’ve left out your favourite personal masterpiece. If so, hit the comments below and let it all out.

This article was originally published in May 2011.

Tim Maughan lives in Bristol in the UK and has been writing about anime and manga for nearly four years, and consuming both for close to twenty. He also writes science fiction, and his debut book Paintwork is out this June. He also tweets way too much.

There’s a moment in Hayao Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro that’s stuck with me since I first watched it a decade ago. Satsuki Kusakabe is searching for her missing sister, Mei. Looking for help, she sprints towards the huge camphor tree where the magical creature Totoro lives. She pauses for a moment at the entrance to a Shinto shrine that houses Totoro’s tree, as if considering praying there for Totoro’s help. But then she runs back to her house and finds her way to Totoro’s abode through the tunnel of bushes where Mei first encountered him. Totoro summons the Catbus, which whisks Satsuki away to where Mei is sitting, beside a lonely country road lined with small statues of Jizo, the patron bodhisattva of children.

It’s Satsuki’s hesitation in front of the shrine’s entrance that sticks with me, and what it says about the nature of spirits and religion in the film. We don’t really think of the movies of Hayao Miyazaki as religious or even spiritual, despite their abundant magic, but some of his most famous works are full of Shinto and Buddhist iconography—like those Jizo statues, or the sacred Shimenawa ropes shown tied around Totoro’s tree and marking off the river god’s bath in Spirited Away. Miyazaki is no evangelist: the gods and spirits in his movies don’t follow or abide by the rituals of religion. But the relationship between humans and gods remains paramount.

Miyazaki’s gods and spirits aren’t explicitly based on any recognizable Japanese “kami” (a word that designates a range of supernatural beings, from the sun goddess Amaterasu to the minor spirits of sacred rocks and trees). In fact, whether Totoro is a Shinto spirit or not is a mystery. He lives in a sacred tree on the grounds of a Shinto shrine. The girls’ father even takes them there to thank Totoro for watching over Mei early in the film. But Satsuki calls Totoro an “obake,” a word usually translated as “ghost” or “monster.” Miyazaki himself has insisted that Totoro is a woodland creature who eats acorns. Is he a Shinto spirit? A monster? An animal? A figment of the girls’ imaginations? The film—delightfully—not only doesn’t answer the question, it doesn’t particularly care to even ask it.

It’s a refreshing contrast to many American children’s movies, where bringing skeptical adults around to believing in some supernatural entity is often the hinge of the plot. The adults in Miyazaki’s movies either know the spirits are real (Princess Mononoke) or don’t question their children when they tell them fantastical stories (Totoro and Ponyo). The only adults who express doubts are Chihiro’s parents in Spirited Away, and they get turned into pigs. Believe in the spirits or not; they abide.

A lot of them abide in, or at least patronize, Yubaba’s bathhouse in Spirited Away. Many of the kami that appear in Spirited Away are wonderfully strange, like huge chicks and a giant radish spirit. But a few resemble traditional Japanese gods, like Haku and the “stink spirit,” who are both river dragons (unlike their fiery Western counterparts, Japanese dragons are typically associated with water). Both have been deeply injured by humans: Haku’s river has been filled in and paved over to make way for apartment buildings; the “stink spirit” is polluted with human garbage and waste, from a fishing line to an old bicycle. The gods seem more vulnerable to the whims of humans than the other way around. No wonder Lin and the other bathhouse workers are so terrified of Chihiro when they discover she’s human.

The tension between humans and spirits escalates into full-out war in Princess Mononoke, in which Lady Eboshi battles against the gods of the forest so that she can expand her iron-mining operation. Mononoke’s kami are woodland creatures: wolves, wild boars, and deer. They’re just as fuzzy as Totoro, but a lot less cuddly. Like the wilderness itself, they are elemental, powerful, dangerous, and sources of life and death. But they are also vulnerable. Mankind’s pollution and violence can corrupt nature and the spirits—one of Eboshi’s bullets turns a wild boar-god into a rampaging demon—but that damage rebounds back on mankind, particularly affecting the most vulnerable among us (much the same way poor nations and communities are currently bearing the brunt of climate change). It’s not Eboshi who ends up cursed by the boar-demon, after all; it’s Ashitaka, a member of the indigenous Emishi people. And when Eboshi manages to kill the Great Forest Spirit with her gun at the film’s climax, it sends a literal flood of death over the entire landscape.

Miyazaki doesn’t paint in black and white, though. Lady Eboshi may be a god-killer, but she’s also enormously sympathetic and even admirable. She’s a woman who’s carved out a seat of power in feudal Japan, and she uses that power to give shelter and jobs to marginalized members of society, including lepers, prostitutes, and Ashitaka himself. If deforestation and industrialization put mankind in conflict with the environment and even the gods, it can also be the only opportunity for the poor and outcast to survive. The only real villains in Mononoke are the local samurai—portrayed as violent goons—and Jikobo, a Buddhist monk in the Emperor’s service looking to collect the Great Forest Spirit’s head. The Emperor wants the godhead because possessing it will supposedly grant immortality.

The unnamed Emperor’s desire for a god’s severed head is a perversion of Japanese religious ritual. Rather than making offerings to them and beseeching the gods for favor for his people, this fictional Emperor wants to murder a god to gain eternal life for himself. It’s a small but fairly radical plot point, given that in the era the film takes place, the Emperor was himself considered a kami and a direct descendant of the sun goddess. Miyazaki isn’t indicting the Chrysanthemum Throne, though, but rather the selfish lust for personal gain by the powerful. Gods can be corrupted into curse-bearing demons, and so can those—like the monk Jikobo and the Emperor—who are supposed to serve as their intermediaries.

But while the relationships between kami and humans can be fraught and even lethal, they can also be intimate and positive. Satsuki and Mei give Totoro an umbrella and he gives them a bundle of seeds. The wolf goddess Moro raises San as her own child, and when she grows up, San fights for the forest against Eboshi. Haku rescues toddler-Chihiro from drowning, and she in turn risks her life to save his and free him from Yubaba’s service.

That intimacy is most apparent in Ponyo, about the love between a little boy named Sosuke and a goldfish who turns herself into a girl thanks to a drop of Sosuke’s blood and some powerful magical potions. While set in Japan like Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, Ponyo’s supernatural world is a mythological melange. Ponyo is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, but it also echoes the Japanese folktale of Urashima Taro, about a young fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded with a visit to the undersea palace of the kami Otohime. Ponyo’s birth name is Brunhilde, a nod to the Valkyrie daughter of Wotan in the Germanic Nibelungenlied. And her mother is Gran Mamare, a sea goddess with a Latinish name, but who one Japanese sailor calls Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. More than anything, she seems to be the ocean itself, ancient and immeasurably powerful. Our religious myths and folktales, Ponyo suggests, are mere approximations for the true nature of the earth and its spirits.

In all Miyazaki’s movies, it’s children who best grasp that nature. Sosuke and Ponyo love each other; so do Chihiro and Haku. No adult ever even sees Totoro or the Catbus, though they may feel their presence in the lilt of strange music on the air or a gust of wind (this may even extend to viewers; I’d seen Totoro countless times, but it was my 3-year-old son Liam who pointed out to me that the gust of wind that blows the firewood out of Satsuki’s hands near the beginning of the film is likely the invisible Catbus running by).

It’s not that children are pure and innocent and unquestioning—Miyazaki’s young protagonists are thoroughly human and flawed. It’s that they’re open to the spirits in ways adults are not. They don’t mediate their experience of nature and the world through the rituals of religion or calcified worldviews. Mr. Kusakabe may need to visit the camphor tree shrine to speak to Totoro, but Satsuki and Mei don’t—they can find their way to him from their own yard. Adults see what they expect to see. Children have few expectations for what is and isn’t lurking out there in the world; they’re the ones who glimpse shadows moving in the gloom of an abandoned amusement park, a goldfish returned in the shape of a girl, or a small white spirit walking through the grass.

Miyazaki’s films don’t invite us to any particular faith or even belief in the supernatural, but they do invite us to see the unexpected, and to respect the spirits of trees and woods, rivers and seas. Like Totoro and Gran Mamare, their true nature and reasoning are beyond our comprehension. Call them kami, or gods, or spirits, or woodland creatures, or Mother Nature, or the environment. They are there if we know where to look, and their gifts for us are ready if we know how to ask. We have only to approach them as a child would—like Satsuki, Mei, Chihiro, and Sosuke—with open eyes and open hearts.

Austin Gilkeson formerly served as The Toast‘s Tolkien Correspondent, and his writing has also appeared at Catapult and Cast of Wonders. He lives outside Chicago with his wife and son.

J.J. Abrams is teaming up with Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer to adapt Your Name, the beloved anime about a boy and a girl who mysteriously swap bodies. Abrams will produce the live-action adaptation through Bad Robot, working with Paramount Pictures. Genki Kawamura, producer of the original 2016 film, will also serve as a producer on the adaptation.

The film centers on two teenagers: Mitsuha, living in the mountainous Hida region of Japan; and Taki, a high schooler in Tokyo. When they begin mysteriously switching bodies, they begin searching for one another across space and time, in the hopes not only of meeting but also preventing a looming disaster. According to The Verge, Your Name was the highest grossing anime film at the worldwide box office last year.

“Just like in the film it feels like a dream,” Kawamura said in a press release. “Mr. Abrams and his team have captivated audiences in their masterful reinvention of known properties. And Mitsuha and Taki have found a perfect narrator, Mr. Heisserer, to tell their sci-fi infused love story, which gave the film such drive. The meetings so far have been creatively stimulating with fantastic ideas that no doubt will make for a great movie. I am greatly honored to work with these incredible creators in bringing to audiences the Hollywood live-action version of Your Name.”

Makoto Shinkai, who wrote and directed the original, said, “Your Name is a film created with the innate imaginations of a Japanese team and put together in a domestic medium. When such a work is imbued with Hollywood filmmaking, we may see new possibilities that we had been completely unaware of. I am looking forward to the live-action film with excited anticipation.”

Watch the trailer for the original, which looks pretty stunning:

Every three months, Japan graces us with a new batch of shiny new cartoons. But with more than forty shows airing this season, who has the time to watch them all? Decisions must be made. We’ve hit the three-episode mark of most shows this week, and it’s time to separate the winners from the losers. With offerings this season ranging from slick reboots of old classics to sentient battling jewel people, here are four shows that you can jump into right now, personally vetted by yours truly.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride

The Ancient Magus’ Bride is the show I’m personally most excited about this season, having been a fan of Kore Yamazaki’s lovely manga for a long time. In this Western-style fantasy, Chise (Atsumi Tanezaki), a young woman of exceptional but untapped power, is bought (as in purchased with money) by a powerful magus (Ryouta Takeuchi), who intends to make the girl his apprentice.

Yamazaki’s Celtic-inspired world is rich in wondrous and dangerous magic—this is the type of fantasy where the fairies drag you off for untold years if you step in the wrong stone circle, not the type where they flit about sprinkling pixie dust. Wit Studio (Attack on Titan, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress) and director Norihiro Naganuma (making his debut as a TV anime director here) are thus far doing a gorgeous job with the adaptation, and the care put into production is obvious from the first notes of the perfectly chosen opening song. Slow, deep, fantasy for fans of Icelandic dragons and ancient curses.

For fans of: Flying Witch, xxxHOLiC, Natsume Yuujinchou

Watch now on Crunchyroll.

Land of the Lustrous

Adapted from a manga by Haruko Ichikawa, this fantasy battle show is set in a world in which crystalline inhabitants must constantly guard against raids from their planet’s six moons. If caught, the gem people will be shattered by the Lunarians, their pieces used as glittering ornaments on the distant moons.

The main draw of Land of the Lustrous, at least for me, is mangaka Ichikawa’s distinctive aesthetic: long-limbed, androgynous characters clash in highly stylized combat across an austere landscape of cliff and sea. The announcement that the show would be produced by Orange, a 3DCG studio known for their work on mecha shows, had me skeptical—but after three episodes, this might be the first fully CG show I actually finish. The character animation, usually CG’s Achilles’ heel, is expressive, particularly on the volatile Phosphophyllite, and the gem-like qualities of the Lustrous are rendered quite effectively in CG. Is it perfect? No, and I still worry that the CG adds an additional layer of distance in a show that already struggles to create emotional engagement with its alien characters. But it’s definitely worth a look. A fantasy battle show set a in a jewel box world for those who enjoy unique worldbuilding and surreal visuals.

For fans of: Sailor Moon, Casshern Sins

Watch it now on Anime Strike (sorry).

Kino’s Journey -The Beautiful World- the Animated Series

Kino, a traveller, and her talking motorcycle Hermes (yes he talks, don’t question it; no one in the series does) journey through a series of countries with strange customs and habits—a country on wheels constantly on the move, a country where murder is legal, etc. Each country Kino visits presents some kind of philosophical allegory or thought experiment, with Kino playing the role of observer, or less often, catalyst.

This new adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series is a complete remake, covering some chapters adapted in the original 2003 show (a whopping fourteen years ago now) and others that are completely new. The 2003 series is a classic, but to be honest, the visuals haven’t held up especially well over the years. The new adaptation has the same quiet, meditative tone I remember, and it seems to me that even voice actors Aoi Yuuki (Kino) and Soma Saito (Hermes) are hewing very close to the 2003 cast in their performances. If you’ve not experienced Kino’s Journey, the show is well worth your time. The narrative follows patterns of parable more than realism, but the morals are anything but pat, and the show is content to let viewers feel discomfort with the stories presented. A thoughtful anime well worth a watch for both old fans and new viewers.

For fans of: Mushishi, Haibane Renmei, Sound of the Sky, Spice & Wolf

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

Juni Taisen: ZODIAC WAR

In absolute contrast to the thoughtful and contemplative Kino’s Journey, consider this show about animal-themed mercenaries killing each other in an elaborate death game. Based on a light novel by NisiOisin (of Bakemonogatari fame), Juni Taisen pits twelve warriors, each taking the name of a sign in the Chinese zodiac, against each other in a deadly tournament that will grant the winner one wish—basically Fate/Zero, but with people dressed as chickens and snakes instead of legendary heroes.

Unapologetically pulpy and gleefully grim, Juni Taisen takes itself seriously enough to create suspense while being entirely unselfconscious about presenting the Ox character in a matador outfit or Rabbit in, well, whatever this is. Although it cultivates a veneer of edgy darkness, it doesn’t really make an earnest attempt to get you to sympathize with the characters, and that seems like the right move—they’re all terrible people, and the lurid fun is watching them betray and outsmart each other in a violence-fueled spectacle for twelve episodes. Excellent turn-your-brain-off entertainment with refreshingly little attempt at depth.

For fans of: Fate/Zero, Mirai Nikki, Death Parade

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

Sequels

Though I usually try to focus on new anime in these posts, this is also an exceptionally good season for sequels:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond is the must-watch sequel of the season if you like dark comedy, cool fight scenes, and friendly alien New Yorkers.
• Osomatsu-san continues to be a hilarious show about terrible people being awful to each other with a dose of absurdist humor and general weirdness.
• Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma returns to make me hungry with the very fun Moon Festival arc, and offers a far more pleasant shonen alternative to the ear-destroying Black Clover.
• March Comes in Like a Lion is still extremely good and terribly underrated, please watch this show.
• Hozuki’s Coolheadedness 2 is hiding on HIDIVE and has a new director and studio, but remains a strange and funny show about your favorite bureaucrat from Buddhist hell.

Watch are you watching this season? Tell us in the comments!

Kelly Quinn Chiu is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about manga and comics on Twitter.

This year has been a strange one for me with anime (2017 has been a strange year in general, but let’s set that aside for now). I found my watch schedule dominated by sequels and second seasons, while some of my more highly anticipated shows (Welcome to the Ballroom, ACCA, Little Witch Academia) left me a bit cold, and other shows I initially enjoyed took a sharp nosedive (hey there, Rage of Bahamut). This list definitely reflects that, being split equally between sequels and nonsequels. That said, there was plenty this year for every kind of anime viewer (perhaps minus mecha fans) to enjoy—dragon maids, food-themed coup d’etats, dramatic sword boys, steampunk assassins, and small-town tourism, just to name a few.

But enough with the chatter—keep reading to see my favorite ten anime of 2017.

KONOSUBA -God’s blessing on this wonderful world! 2

My first sequel spot must go to KonoSuba, the fantasy comedy about an awful human being that gets reincarnated into an RPG-style fantasy world and does absolutely nothing of worth there. This show is just plain stupid and fun, making it easily my favorite entry in the burgeoning isekai genre. The characters are what make this show entertaining—Kazuma is a total POS and the show knows it, and Aqua deserves every single thing she gets. This show has a similar appeal for me as Osomatsu-san (the second season of which is continuing into 2018)—there’s something fantastic about watching terrible people get slapped in the face by karma.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie

I didn’t think this meet cute between two thirty-ish video game nerds would be in my top ten this year, but here we are. Moriko Morioka is a thirty-year-old NEET by choice—she’s quit her soul-sucking corporate job and spends her days playing a fantasy MMO, where her handsome, sword-wielding hero makes an instant connection with a cute healer whose player is closer than she thinks. The main couple in this show are a pair of adorable dorks with the sweetest, most pure intentions, and the rest of the cast is full of supportive, wholesome characters. This is a feel-good show about good people getting to be happy—it made my heart feel squishy.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju

This was one of my favorite shows last year, and the second season stuck the thematic landing that the first season set up. If offering less of a sweeping romance than the first season, its narrative of Yakumo’s attempt to drag rakugo with him to a bitter grave was just as compelling. Mangaka Haruko Kumota’s characters are complicated, interesting people that inspire hate and contempt as easily as love and affection. A fitting close to a prestige project that we were lucky to see this year—and don’t forget to support the manga!

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond

Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond carries on the story of Leonardo Watch, a member of a secret organization protecting the peace of Hellsalem’s Lot from extra-dimensional threats and general supernatural weirdness. I was a bit skeptical about this season because of the loss of director Rie Matsumoto, but this sequel has been heaps of good fun. Although it lacks the thematic and visual strength of the first season, the more episodic format and madcap adventures make the most of Yasuhiro Nightow’s crazy cast and worldbuilding in a way the first season didn’t quite manage. And while some characters, like Zapp, have been reduced to comic relief, others, like K.K., were revealed to have unexpected depths.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

Kino’s Journey -the Beautiful World- the Animated Series

I’ve immensely enjoyed this reboot of a beloved franchise, that, as far as I’m concerned, more than does justice to the original. Kino’s Journey is an enigmatic title, more a series of fables than a cohesive show—the characters often act like allegorical constructs rather than human beings, and the logic of the world molds itself around the narrative, not the other way around. While this can be a little strange, the show pulls it off with a quiet dignity that makes credulity the price of admission. What I like most about Kino’s Journey is how uncomfortable some of the “morals” can be—it’s not willing to offer up answers to all the questions it raises, and that’s perfectly fine.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

The Eccentric Family 2

Here’s a sequel I never thought we’d be lucky enough to see, but I’m so very glad we did. Carrying on from the events of the first season, The Eccentric Family 2 follows a family of tanuki living in a modern Kyoto with a supernatural underbelly of transforming tanuki, flying tengu, and magical and non-magical humans. It was a pleasure to be a part of this world again, and this season had tons of little (and big) good things—sweetly awkward romance, plenty of musings about family, a brief but eventful trip to hell, and the satisfaction of someone finally knocking the grin of Benten’s smug face for five minutes.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

My Hero Academia Season 2

If you’ve been living under a rock, this blockbuster show is Weekly Shonen Jump’s answer to superheroes, following Izuku “Deku” Midoriya on his journey to become the number one hero like his idol, All Might. Although I of course loved the first season, this one got much more into the meat of the series and is vastly better for it. Animation studio Bones’s adaptation of this manga more than does it justice; they nailed every arc they took on this season, and did it with the polish and energy that this fantastic manga deserves. My Hero Academia is everything a shonen battle anime should be…and luckily we won’t have to wait long for the continuation.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

Land of the Lustrous

I don’t know that I can say I predicted a show about androgynous CG gem people becoming such a hit, but I’m so pleased Land of the Lustrous has taken off in such a big way. My greatest hesitation going in was that that Orange’s 3DCG approach was going to further distance viewers from characters that were already difficult to connect with emotionally—but I couldn’t possibly have been more wrong. Though the anime never quite attains the incredible composition of the striking manga art, it renders Haruko Ichikawa’s surreal vision with great life and pathos. Land of the Lustrous is gorgeous, absorbing, surprising emotionally resonant—not to be missed this year.

Missed it? Catch it on Anime Strike.

Made in Abyss

This dark fantasy, following two children on a near-suicidal adventure to reach the bottom of a vast and dangerous abyss, managed to make quite the splash this year despite its exile on Anime Strike. Almost cinematic in tone, Made in Abyss draws viewers in with a combination of high-stakes adventure, fascinating (and merciless) worldbuilding, and questionably-motivated characters. Engrossing, thoughtful, and emotionally exhausting—I am looking forward to (but also dreading) seeing more from this world.

Missed it? Catch it on Anime Strike.

March comes in like a lion

This much-asked-for adaptation of Chica Umino’s critically acclaimed shogi manga came out to perhaps a more quiet reception than one might expect, possibly because considerable fan energy was spent arguing over choice of studio to adapt it. Whether you love Shaft’s creative liberties or hate them (I am more in the love camp), the quality of source material came shining through. March comes in like a lion deals sensitively with Rei’s loneliness and depression, the difficulty he has opening up to the Kawamoto family, and his anxiety and paralysis surrounding his relationship with shogi. A moving, sometimes painful, but very worthwhile story that earned the spot as my favorite anime this year.

Missed it? Catch it on Crunchyroll.

And that’s it, folks! Didn’t see your favorite show from 2017 on here? Tell us your favorites from the year in the comments—or better yet, what you’re looking forward to in 2018!

Kelly Quinn Chiu is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about manga and comics on Twitter.

Welcome to the winter 2018 anime season, where all your dreams can come true—babysit cute kids, travel to Antarctica, tease your crush, collect Sanrio merchandise, go camping, be an idol, pilot an anthropomorphic robot girl, ride a bicycle, merge with a demon. With several highly-anticipated premieres, the return/reboot of some classics, and a few pleasant surprises, winter’s got a little something for everyone. Read on to get the details on six shows worth watching right now—plus, did I mention Anime Strike is dead? Go watch Made in Abyss and Land of the Lustrous.

DEVILMAN crybaby

Akira Fudo’s (Kouki Uchiyama) life is turned upside down when his best friend, Ryo Asuka (Ayumu Murase), informs him that demons are not only real, they’re coming to reclaim the Earth from humanity. The only way to go toe to toe with the oncoming demon army, explains Ryo, is to merge with one and use its demon strength against its own race. Becoming a Devilman—a creature with the body of a demon but the heart of a human—will mean risking his very soul…but if Akira succeeds, it will only be the beginning of his battle.

First, some context: the Devilman manga is a property more than forty years old, revived this year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of creator Go Nagai’s legendary career. But Go Nagai isn’t the only unique voice here—the manga is adapted by director Masaaki Yuasa, known for surreal visuals and weighty themes in works like Kaiba, The Tatami Galaxy, and Ping Pong the Animation (he directed an episode of Adventure Time once too, it was weird).

Yuasa’s update to this classic property is powerful, but not for the faint of heart. The graphic on-screen depictions of sex and violence have already made this show notorious in the few weeks since it hit Netflix, but Yuasa brings more to Devilman than yellow blood and more gyrating bodies than even Go Nagai envisioned. His adaptation injects emotion into scenes that could easily be overblown, garish, or just plain bizarre to a 2018 audience, while retaining and amplifying much of what made Devilman so influential in its day (not to mention adding a killer soundtrack). Devilman is carnal, unsubtle, and at times horrifying and disheartening—but ultimately humane and, I think, hopeful. Highly recommended, with a content warning.

For fans of: Berserk, Evangelion, Parasyte, Kemonozume, Shiki

Watch it now on Netflix.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card

Sakura Kinomoto (Sakura Tange) was an ordinary elementary schooler until she opened a mysterious book in her basement, accidentally loosing dozens of magical Clow Cards into her town. With the help of Keroberos, the guardian of the cards, as well as friends Tomoyo (Junko Iwao) and Syaoran (Motoko Kumai), Sakura was able to gather all the cards. Sakura thinks her adventure is over until she has a strange dream, and wakes up to find a book full of cards that have turned clear as glass.

Twenty years after the debut of the original TV series, Cardcaptor Sakura is back with a brand new arc. Based on a new manga by CLAMP that began in 2016, Clear Card picks up where the original CCS left off, following Sakura and her friends into middle school. The new show feels incredibly nostalgic—the original cast is back, and so are the frilly magical girl costumes (though sadly not the rollerblades), with the designs freshened up just enough to give the series a modern lift. If you loved CCS back then, you will be happy to dive into Clear Card now. If you never watched CCS, what are you waiting for?

For fans of: Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon, Princess Tutu, Little Witch Academia

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

DARLING in the FRANXX

In a bleak and distant future, humanity is protected from giant monsters known as klaxosaurs by human pilots who operate mecha called Franxx in male-female pairs. Hiro (Yuuto Uemura), also known as Code:016, has failed out of the training program with his partner. But his fate takes a turn when he meets a mysterious horned girl named Zero Two (Tomatsu Haruka), a pilot who is rumored to kill her partners—and who might be Hiro’s only chance to remain a Franxx pilot.

This heavily hyped collaboration between Trigger and A-1 studios has a slew of big-name talents at the helm (Atsushi Nishigori, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and Masayoshi Tanaka, to name a few), and it shows. Darlifra is an extremely polished production, and the creative staff here is playing to their strengths, with shadowy futuristic organizations, angsting teen pilots, and flashy robots fighting giant glowing monsters. The show is slick for sure, but a little soulless at the moment—none of the characters are making a huge impression on me at this point, and Darlifra has yet to distinguish itself from other mecha shows about sad teen boys fighting overwhelming odds. Check this one out for unique mecha designs, aggressively heterosexual flower metaphors, and cool action, and hope that the show develops more sticking power over time.

For fans of: Star Driver, Gurren Lagann, Diebuster, Eureka Seven, Xam’d, Aquarion EVOL

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

School Babysitters

High-schooler Ryuichi (Kotaro Nishiyama) and his young brother Kotaro are left orphans when their parents are killed in a plane crash. With no living family, they are taken in by the chairwoman of a private school whose son and daughter-in-law died in the same crash. But she’s not planning to take them on for free—Ryuichi is to spend his free time helping care for his little brother and a handful of other toddlers in the school’s “babysitter club,” an on-site daycare center for the teachers’ children.

If you are in need of a pure shot of shojo cuteness, this is your show for the season. Most of the appeal here is obviously the spectacle of cute boys watching over painfully adorable toddlers, but all the fluff is built around an emotional core that’s impossible to miss. The scene in the premiere in which Ryu thoughtlessly picks up the phone to call his father (and realizes that he, of course, cannot) hit me particularly hard, and made the concerns of the show abundantly clear. Come for the burbling babies, stay for a potentially sensitive treatment of loss and family. Plus: Pair with Sanrio Boys for a surprisingly charming lineup of boys bucking gender stereotypes.

For fans of: Shonen Maid, Sweetness and Lightning

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

After the Rain

High school student Akira Tachibana (Sayumi Watabe) is a reserved girl, keeping to herself both at school and at her part-time job as a waitress in a family restaurant. Ever since an injury caused her to resign from her school’s track team, she’s withdrawn even more into herself. But she does have a soft spot for one person: Masami Kondo (Hiroaki Hirata), the kind middle-aged manager at her job.

I’m on the fence about this seinen manga adaptation because honestly, the premise feels a bit squicky—a twenty-eight year age gap with a teen isn’t exactly a winning romance angle for me. But so far, at least, I’m not running for the hills. From the first episode, Tachibana’s crush feels like teen infatuation (and what teenager hasn’t fallen for an out-of-reach adult), and Kondo is a kindly, trod-upon dad type who is the opposite of predatory or even suave. Tachibana’s awkwardness and isolation is skillfully drawn out in a series of small moments, and the show’s quiet atmosphere and delicate, pretty visuals are appealing. I can see myself coming to like this show if it uses Tachibana and Kondo’s relationship, such as it is, to lift Tachibana out of her self-imposed solitude. But beware—I’m not ruling out the possibility that we have another Bunny Drop on our hands.

For fans of: Sweetness and Lightning, Garden of Words, Working

Watch it now on Amazon Video (R.I.P. Anime Strike)

Violet Evergarden (if you can get it)

After four years of brutal war, Violet Evergarden (Yui Ishikawa), a girl raised as a tool of the military, is released back into civilian life. With no home and no family to return to, she is given a job at a private postal service. There, she becomes fixated on the work of Auto Memories Dolls, a group of women who transcribe their clients’ thoughts and emotions into letters which convey their feelings to the recipient.

Violet Evergarden is probably the show causing the second most agony this season, but unlike DEVILMAN crybaby, it’s not because of the content. Netflix has seen fit to simulcast this one in several territories worldwide, including the UK and Canada, but will reportedly not be releasing it for US audiences until spring. If you are in one of the lucky regions, Violet Evergarden is a highly-anticipated, by all accounts gorgeously-made production from Kyoto Animation. For everyone else—we wait.

For fans of: Hyouka, The Ancient Magus Bride, Spice and Wolf

Watch it (if you’re lucky) on Netflix

Watch are you watching this season? Tell us in the comments!

Kelly Quinn Chiu is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about manga and comics on Twitter.

With Star Wars: Rebels having ended earlier this year, Lucasfilm has announced a new animated series that will explore another “untold moment” of the Star Wars universe: Star Wars Resistance, the “anime-inspired” prequel of sorts to The Force Awakens.

Dave Filoni, who wrote for Star Wars: The Clone Wars and created Star Wars: Rebels, will helm the new series. According to Lucasfilm’s description, the series follows “Kazuda Xiono, a young pilot recruited by the Resistance and tasked with a top-secret mission to spy on the growing threat of the First Order.” But there will also be familiar faces (and, er, shapes) in the form of BB-8, Poe Dameron (voiced by Oscar Isaac), and Captain Phasma (ditto Gwendoline Christie)! Not to mention the ace pilots recruited alongside Kazuda to join the ranks of General Leia’s growing Resistance.

“The idea for Star Wars Resistance came out of my interest in World War II aircraft and fighter pilots,” Filoni said in a statement. “My grandfather was a pilot and my uncle flew and restored planes, so that’s been a big influence on me. There’s a long history of high-speed racing in Star Wars, and I think we’ve captured that sense of excitement in an anime-inspired style, which is something the entire team has been wanting to do for a long time.”

Marc Buhaj, senior VP of programming and general manager at Disney XD, added, “Our colleagues at Lucasfilm have created a compelling narrative for an untold moment in the Star Wars galaxy, and we are excited to partner with them again on this new original series. Star Wars Resistance will bring viewers across generations an engaging story with heart, humor and both new and familiar characters.”

Those characters will be voiced by a cast including Christopher Sean (Days of Our Lives), Suzie McGrath (East Enders), Scott Lawrence (Legion), Myrna Velasco (Elena of Avalor), Josh Brener (Silicon Valley), Donald Faison (Scrubs), Bobby Moynihan (DuckTales), Jim Rash (Community), and Rachel Butera (Tammy’s Tiny Tea Time).

Star Wars Resistance will premiere in fall 2018 on Disney Channel, then on Disney XD and around the world. And let’s not forget that Jon Favreau also has a Star Wars TV series in the works, albeit a live-action one.

What (or who) do you want to see in Star Wars Resistance?

Spring is here, the cherry blossoms are blooming, and anime renews itself once again with a brand new lineup of shows for your enjoyment. Along with the return of some favorites like My Hero Academia, Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, a new Gundam Build Fighters anime, and Full Metal Panic (what year is it???), spring has got some fresh new cartoons, at least one of which involves punching bears in the face. Oh, and you can now watch Violet Evergarden on Netflix if you live in the U.S.

Ready for bear-punching? Check out these five new shows you can watch right along with audiences in Japan.

Golden Kamuy

The year is 1904, and Saichi Sugimoto (Chikahiro Kobayashi), known to his fellow soldiers as the Immortal Sugimoto (possibly the badassest of monikers), has been discharged from service in Hokkaido at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Sugimoto is hard up for cash, so when he hears a strange tale about a man who stole a dragon’s hoard of gold from the native Ainu people, he’s intrigued. Even more intriguing? The man tattooed the map to his stolen treasure on the backs of twenty-four escaped convicts.

This Meiji-era treasure hunt adapts a popular, award-winning seinen manga by Satoru Noda. The manga is seriously good, and really all this adaption needs to do to be a success is not screw up a great thing. So far, they have managed that—while the anime isn’t particularly slick (minus the CG brown bear in the room), it’s perfectly serviceable. I don’t expect Golden Kamuy to have a lot of visual bells and whistles, but the story is very, very worth sticking with: look forward to wilderness adventures, extinct animals, cooking, and more cuckoo characters than you can shake a bayonet at.

For fans of: Gintama, Rurouni Kenshin, Sword of the Stranger

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for an Otaku

When Narumi Momose (Arisa Date), closet fujoshi, starts her new job, she doesn’t expect to reconnect with her childhood friend, hardcore gamer Hirotaka Nifuji (Itou Kento). Coming off a bad split with her ex-boyfriend, who broke up with her after her office found out she was an otaku (what a jerk), Momose is ready to swear off dating. That is, until Hirotaka proposes a brilliant idea—why not date a fellow otaku? Like, for instance…him? Thus begins this cute office romcom about nerds in love.

Adapting a manga by Fujita, Wotakoi has a fair few things to recommend it. For one thing, it’s nice to see a romance featuring working adults instead of teenagers blushing all over each other (don’t worry, I’ll recommend one of those down below). For another, as an adult geek between the ages of 25 and 35 myself, I find the characters in Wotakoi intensely relatable. Like Golden Kamuy, while the production is not especially strong, the material carries the show: this one is very much worth your time if you are an otaku, gamer, fujoshi, cosplayer, etc. coping with adult life and in the mood for a lighthearted, dorky slice of life.

For fans of: Recovery of an MMO Junkie, Servant x Service, Kiss Him Not Me

Watch it now on Amazon Video.

MEGALOBOX

In a near-future world, the violent sport du jour is Megalo Boxing, which is like regular boxing except that the fighters wear exoskeletons that pack extra punch. Junk Dog (Yoshimasa Hosoya) is a boxer with immense talent, but is stuck participating in fixed underground matches in order to scrape by in the slums. When an enormous Megalo Boxing competition is announced with a fabulous grand prize, Junk Dog may finally get his chance to prove he has what it takes.

This original anime is actually a 50th anniversary project for classic boxing manga Ashita no Joe, but don’t let that scare you away—aside from a few nods (and the fact that it’s about, you know, boxing), MEGALOBOX is a standalone story. Although it’s an homage to a manga from the ’60s, the anime has the texture and aesthetics of ’90s cel-animated classics like Trigun or Cowboy Bebop. So far this show is balancing tone quite well: it’s gritty but not grim, and takes itself very seriously but feels authentic rather than pretentious. With a promising underdog story and touch of cyberpunk flair, MEGALOBOX is a compelling watch for boxing fans and non-fans alike.

For fans of: Ashita no Joe, Tiger Mask W, Hajime no Ippo, Cowboy Bebop

Watch it on Crunchyroll.

Tada Never Falls in Love / Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai

Mitsuyoshi Tada (Yuichi Nakamura) is a boy who has never been in love. A chance encounter with a mysterious girl visiting from Europe, however, looks to change all that. Rescuing the hapless Teresa Wagner (Manaka Iwami), who has been separated from her traveling companion and caught in the rain, Tada-kun takes her home to his grandfather’s cozy cafe, where she becomes involved with his quirky family and friends. Could this be the beginning of love?

This lively high school romcom is an original anime from staff that worked together on one of my favorite shows in recent years, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun. Tada and his fellow cast members are a charming bunch, and the care put into their character animation and personal quirks definitely adds to their appeal. The plot doesn’t seem like it’s going to particularly full of surprises, but the show’s got an infectious, bouncy energy and refreshing lack of cynicism that should make it a fun watch for the romance-inclined this season.

For fans of: Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, Ouran High School Host Club, The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior

Watch it now on HIDIVE.

Hinamatsuri

Nitta Yoshifumi (Yoshiki Nakajima) is a hard-boiled yakuza member going about his tough yakuza life when a package inexplicably falls into his living room. The package contains a weird deadpan girl with psychokinetic powers (Takako Tanaka), who calls herself Hina and quickly starts making demands. Nitta, under some duress (in particular, the threat of Hina using her mind-powers to destroy his entire apartment), takes the girl in, and their strange life together begins.

I must say this odd found-family comedy, based on a manga by Masao Otake, charmed me despite myself. Hinamatsuri’s well-timed comedy and quick gags are supported by considerable polish in the animation department—here is a case where the material is undoubtedly elevated by production. The show is funny with some genuinely touching moments, and so far neither of the main characters are quite what one would expect. I’m hoping this one continues to pleasantly surprise.

For fans of: Mob Psycho 100, Alice to Zouroku

Watch it now on Crunchyroll.

What are you watching this season?

Kelly Quinn Chiu is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about manga and comics on Twitter, and on her podcast, One Panel Later.

It’s that time of year again, when the shops are awash in holiday garland, the houses draped with festive lights, and the blogs festooned with “Best of 2015” lists. Looking back through this year at the good, the bad, the ultimately disappointing, and the thankfully forgettable (goodbye forever, Chaos Dragon), it was surprisingly hard to narrow this list down to ten shows, and I’ve certainly left out some worthy contenders. Yet, for the sake of the season, it must be done. Without further ado then, the best ten TV anime of 2015.

The Seven Deadly Sins / Nanatsu no Taizai

The tenth spot on the list this year goes to The Seven Deadly Sins for sheer entertainment value. Set in a vaguely medieval swords and sorcery world reminiscent of retro classics like Slayers, this shounen fantasy adventure follows the exploits of Princess Elizabeth and Meliodas, the leader of an infamous group of warriors called the Seven Deadly Sins. Although this show doesn’t bring anything especially new to the table, using many existing fantasy tropes and plot staples, the execution, not the premise, is where The Seven Deadly Sins shines. It’s hard not to get attached to the the colorful characters, especially the Sins themselves, and flashy action set pieces and brisk pacing keeps this show humming along towards its high-stakes climax. I’ll be looking forward to the second season for this one in 2016.

Missed it? Watch it now on Netflix

Yurikuma Arashi

If The Seven Deadly Sins makes the list as a high-spirited crowd pleaser, Yurikuma Arashi represents basically its exact opposite. The latest entry from auteur director and endless staircase expert Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum), Yurikuma Arashi is, at heart, a rather simple tale about finding love and defending it in the face of disapproval, hate, and prejudice. Of course, Ikuhara being Ikuhara, this “simple” story is densely packed with social commentary, multivalent symbolism, and references to historical events, literature, and even films such as Suspiria and Psycho. While the short length seemed at times to pose some difficulty for the creators, with certain events lacking sufficient set up and characters feeling a bit thin for large parts of the story, the concise twelve-episode format ultimately worked in the show’s favor, making Yurikuma Arashi possibly Ikuhara’s most comprehensible and straightforward show to date. Combining Ikuhara’s signature artistry with surprising emotional force in the last third of the show, Yurikuma Arashi was one of the most interesting—and satisfying—shows of the year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma

Shokugeki no Soma happens to combine two things I dearly love: battle shounen and gourmet cooking. Following the journey of Soma Yukihira, a student at the highly competitive Totsuki Culinary Academy, this show never failed to entertain with its lively cast, Iron Chef-like epicurean competition, and, of course, its infamous reaction scenes. Shokugeki knows how to make the most of its ridiculous premise but also takes itself seriously when it counts—a quality that leads you to giggle over world-renowned chefs transforming into magical girls one minute, and to worry very earnestly about a character’s fate in the next. And, a particular win in my book, it nails the culinary details, from techniques to food trends. Although J.C. Staff’s adaptation was merely competent and didn’t add a tremendous amount of value to the source material, the staff got it right where it mattered and made Shokugeki no Soma one of the most purely fun shows I watched this year—hopefully, the second season continues to deliver in 2016.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

My Love Story! / Ore Monogatari

My Love Story! makes it onto this list by virtue of being sweet, fluffy, and endlessly heartwarming. While shoujo romance adaptations seem to get a bit thinner every year, My Love Story! (as well as shows like the lovely Akagami no Shirayukihime—which, before you ask, doesn’t qualify this year) remind us how good they can be in the right hands. My Love Story!, which distinguishes itself with a distinctly un-shoujo protagonist in the beefy Gouda Takeo, quickly eschews the typical will-they-won’t-they rollercoaster in favor of a story about how relationships (and friendships) grow over time. The story was matched with a fitting team at Madhouse (many of whom worked on the excellent Chihayafuru), which brought the manga source material to life with soft colors and enough shoujo sparkles to deck out the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Though the copious pastel bubbles and sweeter-than-sweet antics of Takeo and Rinko might plausibly make this show too saccharine for some tastes, My Love Story!’s slow romance and earnest optimism made it a treat for me this year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Blood Blockade Battlefront / Kekkai Sensen

With a setting that combines the grungy bustle of Manhattan with the alien squalor of the Mos Eisley Cantina and characters that range from vampires and magic wielders to diner waitresses and mushroom-shaped aliens, Blood Blockade Battlefront is a wonderful—but only semi-penetrable—spectacle. Revolving around the adventures of Leonardo Watch, a young man who has acquired a great power in rather unfortunate circumstances, Blood Blockade Battlefront showcases the amazing visual creativity of young director Matsumoto Rie, not to mention an incredible staff and cast. Like Matsumoto’s previous directorial effort, Kyousougiga, Blood Blockade Battlefront suffered from somewhat convoluted storytelling, and was further bogged down by scheduling issues that delayed the final episode for several months. Despite it all, however, this show was still one of the most imaginative airing this year, and certainly earned its spot here in the top ten.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Death Parade

That Death Parade exists at all feels like a small piece of good fortune, as I don’t think anyone quite expected to see the artsy Anime Mirai short Death Billiards expanded into a full length TV show. Set in a moody, atmospheric bar where hapless mortals come to be judged after death, Death Parade made good on the promise of the OVA, fleshing out its intriguing setting and equally intriguing cast through a series of tense encounters with the human souls passing through each week. Given the episodic nature of the show, dramatic payoff varied from story to story, and some were more effective than others. Yet this variety was also one of the strengths of Death Parade, allowing it to tell stories that ranged in tone from humorous and sweet to deeply dark and troubling. Death Parade represents the kind of evocative psychological drama that we aren’t treated to terribly often, and, in addition to exploring some interesting (and possibly quite pessimistic) ideas about the afterlife, contained some of the most lovely and poignant moments in anime this year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Parasyte -the maxim-

For various reasons, including a lapsed Hollywood film option, the TV anime adaption of 90s sci-fi manga Parasyte was a long time coming—and when we finally got it this year, it was pretty darn good. Parasyte’s primary strengths lie in its story, which mixes the anxieties of young adulthood with the threat of a sinister alien invasion (and some healthy rumination about the nature of humanity), but most especially in its characters: the strange but touching relationship between Shinichi and Migi, host and parasite. Although the adaption certainly had its pitfalls—visuals were not always the most polished, the soundtrack never worked well for me, and the pace seemed to slow to a crawl every time Shinichi’s love interest got extended screen time—Parasyte has a certain timeless quality that makes it quite a compelling story in any format, as effective in 2015 as it was in 1995.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Yona of the Dawn / Akatsuki no Yona

In comparison to the shows that bracket Yona of the Dawn on this list, I realize that Yona seems the odd one out—certainly it didn’t make as much of a splash as either Parasyte or One Punch Man. Nevertheless, this historical fantasy, following an exiled princess in a pseudo-historical Korea, was handily one of my favorite shows this year. Yona’s well-developed cast supports a thrilling and nuanced plot of political intrigue, action, and romance…also did I mention there are dragons? Director Kazuhiro Yoneda and Studio Pierrot’s polished and deliberately paced adaptation of Mizuho Kusanagi’s manga is about as faithful as any fan could ask for, and while the anime only makes it through what amounts to a prologue for the larger story, Yona of the Dawn is still very much worth the watch for those that haven’t discovered it yet.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

One Punch Man

This superhero gag comedy was one of the most anticipated shows this fall, and boy did it deliver. Following the exploits of the unflappable Saitama, a “hero for fun,” as well as his loyal student Genos and a slew of other eccentric heroes and villains, One Punch Man finds a winning formula in its mix of humorous absurdity with adrenaline-fueled action sequences that make your inner twelve year old cheer. In many ways, One Punch Man succeeds almost entirely on the strength of the love poured into it from everyone involved, from Yusuke Murata’s painstakingly detailed art in the manga to director Natsume Shingo and the rest of the staff’s amazing and passionate work bringing that art to life (more on this here). The only thing I have to complain about is that we only got twelve episodes—one can only hope that we’ll see another season of this incredibly fun show.

Missed it? Watch it now on Daisuki or Hulu

Shirobako

I’d like to say I had a difficult time deciding to put Shirobako at the top of my list this year, but the truth is that it wasn’t hard at all. This show could have been the most forgettable piece of fluff about cute girls making cute anime, but instead we got a surprisingly realistic show about the nitty gritty details of anime production. There are so many things to like about Shirobako: the lovable, large (but somehow never unwieldy) cast that made you want to cheer for their successes and cry at their failures; the winking references to real industry companies and people; the buoyant tone that kept things from getting melodramatic even when the going got tough for our heroes; the lively pacing that kept the show moving along rather too swiftly through its two cours. Plainly put, Shirobako is an anime that makes you love anime—and I don’t think I could do any better than that for my top anime of 2015.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Didn’t see your favorite show from 2015 on here? Tell us your favorites from the year in the comments—or better yet, what you’re looking forward to in 2016!

NB: To qualify for this list, the titles were required to:

• End in 2015 (split-cour shows were counted as one season)
• Be legally available in English
• Not be a movie
• Not be a sequel

Kelly Quinn is sorry your favorite anime isn’t on this list. You can tell her how bad her taste is on Twitter.

Have you ever been walking along and felt the creepy, unsettling feeling that something was watching you? You met Betobeto-san, an invisible yōkai, or folklore creature, who follows along behind people on paths and roads, especially at night. To get rid of the creepy feeling, simply step aside and say, “Betobeto-san, please, go on ahead,” and he will politely go on his way.

What we know of Betobeto-san and hundreds of other fantastic creatures of Japan’s folklore tradition, we know largely thanks to the anthropological efforts of historian, biographer and folklorist, Shigeru Mizuki, one of the pillars of Japan’s post-WWII manga boom, who passed away yesterday at the age of 93. A magnificent storyteller, Mizuki recorded, for the first time, hundreds of tales of ghosts and demons from Japan’s endangered rural folklore tradition, and with them one very special tale: his own experience of growing up in Japan in the 1920s through 1940s, when parades of water sprites and sparkling fox spirits gave way to parades of tanks and warships.

Shigeru Mizuki’s illustration of Betobeto-san, “Graphic World of Japanese Phantoms” 講談社, 1985

Trickster-fox Kitsune, dangerous water-dwelling Kappa, playful raccoon-like Tanuki, and savage horned Oni are only the most famous of Japan’s vast menagerie of folklore monsters, whose more obscure characters range from the beautiful tentacle-haired Futakuchi Onna, to Tsukumogami, household objects like umbrellas and sandals that come alive on their 100^th birthdays, and tease their owners by hopping away in time of need. Such yōkai stories have their roots in Japan’s unique religious background, whose hybrid of Buddhism with Shinto animism adds a unique moral and storytelling logic to these tales, present in no other folklore tradition, whose twists and turns—unexpected within Western horror conventions—are much of why fans of the weird, creepy and horrific find such extraordinary power in the creations of Japan. Most accounts of yōkai and Japanese ghosts are regional tales passed down at festivals and storytelling events in rural parts of Japan—and, like many oral traditions, they dwindled substantially over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of cities, and of centralized and city-dominated entertainments provided by cheap printing, radio, film and television.

Shigeru Misuki spent decades collecting these stories from all corners of Japan, and setting them down in comic book form, so they could be shared and enjoyed by children and parents across Japan and around the world, as he had enjoyed them in his childhood. While most of Japan’s 20^th century manga masters had urban roots, Mizuki grew up in the small, coastal town of Sakaiminato, delighting in local legends told to him by a woman he describes in the memoir he titled after her, Nononba (the first Japanese work ever to win grand prize at the world famous Angoulême International Comics Festival.) Mizuki’s father was deeply interested in international culture, especially film, and even acquired the town’s first movie projector, hoping to connect his family and neighbors to the new arena of the silver screen. This childhood exposure to both local and global storytelling cultures combined to make him eager to present the wealth of Japan’s folklore on the world stage.

“Umibozu” illustration by Shigeru Mizuki, “Graphic World of Japanese Phantoms” 講談社, 1985.

Mizuki’s most beloved work Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro, also called GeGeGe no Kitaro) debuted in 1960, and follows the morbid but adorable zombie-like Kitaro, last survivor of a race of undead beings, who travels Japan accompanied by yōkai friends and the talking eyeball of his dead father. In different towns and villages, Kitaro meets humans who have run-ins with Japan’s spirits, ghosts and underworld creatures. Sometimes Kitaro helps the humans, but he often helps the spirits, or just sits back to watch and mock the humans’ ignorance of the netherworld with his signature creepy laugh “Ge… ge… ge…” Kitaro’s adventures also chronicle the social history of 20^th century Japan, as the yōkai themselves struggle to adapt to cultural changes and economic doldrums, which lead to the closing of shrines, dwindling of offerings, and destruction of supernatural habitat. Adapted into dozens of animated series, movies and games, the popularity of Kitaro made yōkai tales a major genre, but Shigeru Mizuki’s signature remained his commitment to chronicling the rarest and most obscure stories of Japan’s remote villages, from the Oboroguruma, a living ox-cart with a monstrous face, reported in the town of Kamo near Kyoto, to the thundering Hizama spirit of the remote island of Okinoerabu. In fact, when a new animated movie of Kitaro was released in 2008, it screened in six different versions to feature the local folklore creatures of different regions of Japan. In addition to Hakaba Kitaro, Mizuki wrote books on folklore, and encyclopedias of Japanese ghosts and yōkai.

Young Shigeru Mizuki visiting a shrine, fom “Nononba”, Drawn & Quarterly edition.

Mixuki was also one of the most vivid chroniclers—and fiery critics—of the great trauma of Japan’s 20^th century, the Second World War. Drafted into the imperial army in 1942, Mizuki experienced the worst of the Pacific front. His memoir Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths (whose English translation won a 2012 Eisner award) describes his experience: unwilling soldiers, starving and disease-ridden, sent on suicide runs by officers who punished even slight reluctance with vicious beatings. In fact Mizuki’s entire squad was ordered on a suicide march with explicitly no purpose except honorable death. Mizuki alone survived, but lost his arm, gaining in return a lifelong commitment to further the cause of peace and international cooperation. In earlier works—published when criticism of war was still unwelcome and dangerous in Japan—Mizuki voiced his critique obliquely, through depictions of Japan’s economic degeneration, and through his folklore creatures, which, in his tales, are only visible in times of peace, and are driven out and starved by war and violent hearts. Later he wrote more freely, battling historical revisionism and attempts to valorize the war, through works like his biography Adolph Hitler (now in English), and the unforgettable War and Japan, published in 1991 in the educational youth magazine The Sixth Grader, which confronted its young readers the realities of atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army in China and Korea.

“Gegege no Kitaro” vol. 1, Japanese edition.

Mizuki’s magnificent 1988-9 history Showa (recently released in English translation) is a meticulous chronicle of Japanese culture and politics in the decades leading to and through the war. It shows the baby steps of a nation’s self-betrayal, how nationalism, cultural anxiety, partisan interests, and crisis-based fear-mongering caused Japan to make a hundred tiny decisions, each reasonable-seeming in the moment, which added up over time to a poisonous militarism which saturated the culture from the highest political circles all the way down to children’s schoolyard games. Its release in English is absolutely timely. If the dystopias which have so dominated recent media are tools for discussing the bad sides of our present, doomsday ‘what if’ scenarios where our social evils are cranked up to a hundred, Showa is the birth process of a real dystopia, the meticulously-researched step-by-step of how social evils did crank up to a hundred in real life, and the how the consequences wracked the world. Phrases like “slippery slope” are easy to apply in retrospect, but Showa paints the on-the-ground experience of being in the middle of the process of a nation going mad, making it possible to look with new, informed eyes at our present crisis and the small steps our peoples and governments are taking.

Shigeru Mizuki’s contributions to art, culture and humanitarianism have been recognized around the world, by the Kodansha Manga Award and Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, the Eisner Award and Angoulême festival, the Japanese Minister of Education award, Person of Cultural Merit award, and a special exhibit of his work for the 1995 Annual Tokyo Peace Day. His works have long been available in French, Italian and many other languages, but, despite Mizuki’s eager engagement with English-speaking fans and his eagerness to share his message with the world’s vast English-reading audiences, his works were slow to come out in English because his old-fashioned “cartoony” art style—much like that of his peer and fellow peace advocate “God of Comics” Osamu Tezuka—does not fit the tastes of American fans, accustomed to the later, flashier styles of contemporary anime. In Mizuki’s last years, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Montreal-based publisher Drawn and Quarterly, he finally oversaw the long-awaited English language release of his memoirs and histories, along with the Kitaro series (more volumes still coming out), which Drawn and Quarterly aptly describes as “the single most important manga you’ve never heard of, even if you happen to be a manga fan.”

Shigeru Mizuki, with his Eisner Award (2012)

One of Japan’s most delightful folklore traditions is Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, a gathering of one hundred supernatural stories. A hundred candles are lit, and participants stay up all night telling tales of ghosts and spirits, extinguishing one candle at the end of each tale, so the room grows darker and darker, and the spirits—attracted by the invocation of their stories—draw near. A Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai is rarely finished, since few gatherings can supply a full hundred stories, and, as the dark draws in, most participants grow too frightened to snuff the last candle. But the millions touched by works of Shigeru Mizuki are well prepared to finish, armed with well over 100 stories, and with a powerful sense of the vigilance and hard work necessary if we want to welcome peaceful yōkai back to a more peaceful world.

“Graphic World of Japanese Phantoms” 講談社, 1985.

It was so far ahead of its time that merely watching it now makes you wonder how the heck it actually got on TV.

Before the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. Before Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Voltron: Legendary Defender, before The Expanse, there was one space opera show that was ambitious and groundbreaking in scope, both because of source material and out of necessity (more on that later). There were major character deaths, romance, a massive cast, deep world building, a serialized plot that forced the viewer to pay attention, lead characters that played with gender dynamics, interracial romance, and unflinching violence that showed the horrors of war.

Somehow, that all wound up being sold into 1985 afterschool TV as a kid’s cartoon. That show, whose legacy stands today, was Robotech.

A multi-generational sci-fi epic, Robotech was unlike anything American audiences had seen. Stitched together from three completely separate anime series by screenwriter Carl Macek, the show was completely rewritten but not dumbed down for the afterschool crowd; in fact, the final version is more complex than the source material. By evolving the core series into an interwoven narrative, Robotech’s story offers greater world building, stronger character depth, and more compelling reasons for various protagonists and antagonists to pursue the macguffin of protoculture, an energy source that can power space-warp travel, genetic engineering, and transformational technology.

In today’s TV world, this type of complexity and drama is welcomed. There’s a reason why Dave Filoni (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels) isn’t shy about the influence of Robotech on his work. But while Robotech maintains a cult following, these days it seems like more people know of it than have actually seen it. And with good reason too, given that the property’s core screen material has remained relatively stagnant since its original run. Outside of a few failed continuation attempts, further story remains outside firmly the property of comics and novels—in fact, Titan Comics has its own reboot series with its own modernized continuity.

The dearth of new material is a situation as unique as the shows origins, from an ongoing legal battle embroiling franchise owner Harmony Gold over the Macross license to the perpetual development hell of a live-action movie to a seemingly cursed string of attempted sequels. “I think for as valiant an attempt as it is for Harmony Gold to keep trying to make Robotech: Shadow Rising a thing, it really needs to give up and focus their attention on a reboot. That’s where the money is and that’s where a whole new fanbase can be found,” says Den of Geek’s Shamus Kelley. Kelley should know—he co-hosts the Roboskull podcast, which reviews each Robotech episode from both a fan (Kelley) and a newbie (podcaster Nick Cochran) perspective. “Trying to appeal to a very small set of hardcore fans isn’t going to pay off in the long run.”

Harmony Gold President of Animation Tommy Yune doesn’t think a reboot is out of the question, but won’t put a timeline on it. “My opinion is that (a reboot) is inevitable. Robotech is one of those franchises where it’s grown and lasted so long that it’s going to be retold again and again,” he told Den of Geek in late 2016. “Fans will want to hold onto their original continuity and that will be great. That’ll be there for them. But a whole new generation of fans will be able to enjoy Robotech in a new way.”

Beyond pure finances, the appetite for reboots seems to have only grown since Yune’s comment. Simply put, they’re all over TV, and while some fall flat on their face, others like Voltron: Legendary Defender are wildly successful from both a creative and viewership perspective. Harmony Gold may be uncertain about such a thing, but given the current state of sci-fi, animation, and legacy geekdom, the time is right for a Robotech reboot.

Robotech Fits Perfectly with Modern Storytelling Styles

Perhaps it’s ironic properties like Voltron and Thundercats are getting reboots that ditch the episodic monster-of-the-day lighter fare to add backstory, world, and a more mature tone. Their contemporary Robotech had them all along. “Robotech was already at a modern level of storytelling back in the ’80s. Robotech set a blueprint for the kinds of high-quality animated series we’re all enjoying now,” says Kelley. But the complexity of Robotech is multifaceted—not just in its overarching plot, but in its character relationships and the way they grew and evolved. “Even thirty years later these characters feel like real people. They all have moments that are so incredibly human, even against the backdrop of an alien war. The animation may not be what viewers expect today but the characters emotions? Those are timeless.”

With nostalgia reboots at an all time high, Robotech makes sense from another perspective: fandom. While the show enjoyed a cult following since its launch in 1985, it hasn’t experienced anything like the rabid nature of modern fandom. And yet, the show’s core principles of character, story, and cool designs make the perfect combination for modern fan culture. “These days the things hardcore fans gravitate towards the most are the characters,” says Kelley. “It’s not just because people love to dress up (although that’s a big part of it) but it’s because they love the characters they’re cosplaying as. An emphasis on character is essential in modern storytelling if you want to connect with your audience.

A New Series Could Fix the Structural Problems of the Original

The fact that Robotech exists and works as well as it does is impressive in itself. On the other hand, the producers relied on a bit of a cheat to band-aid cracks in the storytelling together: a narrator. “Adaptation is an underappreciated art form, especially when it comes to anime, but it does take a lot of control out of the writers’ hands and no amount of creativity can fix every issue,” says Kelley. “You end up having to band-aid over a lot of it either with voice over or a ton of info dumps, which Robotech is very guilty of.”

The Robotech narrator was used for all sorts of info dumping, not just setting the scene. This was critical from a storytelling perspective as footage was recontextualized to serve a much bigger purpose. In the Macross Saga (the first series), it’s used to some degree but rarely becomes as invasive as in the Masters Saga. As the middle act of Robotech, the Masters had to do massive amounts of legwork to connect what came before and what came after. Achieving that often created square-peg syndrome, and the result created some scenes that nearly collapsed under the weight of its own expository technobabble.

“At times it is a bit much, but I feel over all that without the narrator the show would not even work,” says Cochran, the newbie half of RoboSkull’s team. “You have to have an overall plot that is wholly original somehow work with only an omnipresent voice telling you that ‘no, this works, I swear’ to tie it all together, otherwise it would probably fall apart.”

A reboot, then, allows this narrative to properly breathe without the constraints of the source footage. Not only that, but with the benefit of hindsight and time, the tiniest of world elements could be expanded upon to create a more cohesive and unified whole.

30+ Years Later, the Core Story Holds Up

Even the team behind Voltron’s reboot acknowledged the relatively thin depth behind the original. It was up to them to take the core concept, find what really withstood the test of time, and pull that into the modern era. With Robotech, that problem doesn’t exist. The show, despite its production hiccups and sometimes dated elements, still holds up. The biggest testimony to this lies in the RoboSkull podcast and the fact that one half of the team is watching the series completely cold (and avoiding spoilers for the long haul). Cochran’s reactions and feelings simply aren’t tinted by nostalgia, yet he considers himself a fan now, warts and all. It’s a testament to the writing and world-building done by Macek and his team.

“The quality of the writing is something I do enjoy, all the characters feel real and like they exist, exploding off the screen and into my heart and imagination,” says Cochran. “The show is about the characters and the journey, the love stories and the friendships. When a show treats itself with respect, and the kids watching it with respect, then people will respect it. People will love it.”

Kelley, RoboSkull’s veteran fan, agreed. “I think if modern audiences who enjoy series like Voltron: Legendary Defender or Star Wars: Rebels gave it a chance? They’d find a lot to love. Even thirty years later these characters feel like real people. The animation may not be what viewers expect today but the characters emotions? Those are timeless.”

Reboot or Relaunch? Or Both?

Given all that, why hasn’t a studio picked up Robotech for a Voltron-esque reboot? The answer lies less in the ashes of failed sequels and more in the legal red tape tying up the Macross license. As most people associate Robotech with its first series, the battle over Macross would render the franchise without its most popular component. (Characters and designs for the other segments were used for new footage in various projects such as the aborted Robotech II: The Sentinels project without any legal issues.) The result would either be a reboot that would radically altered the first segment as a means of distancing itself or omitting it to background exposition.

The former is most likely the basis of the development-hell live action movie. The latter would be franchise suicide.

Or would it? Kelley thinks otherwise. In fact, he sees rebooting the Masters Saga as a way to both course-correct continuity issues and introduce it to a modern audience. “I’ve proposed,” Kelley says, “because of the legal quagmire around the Macross rights, that you could actually keep the Macross saga as is but start the reboot from Masters.”

This idea, first described during episode 30 of the RoboSkull podcast, achieves both a continuation and modern reboot in one project, and in many cases, it creates the best of both worlds: it acts simultaneously as a generational continuation of the original Macross story like Star Trek: The Next Generation or Blade Runner 2049 while also being a reboot with the flexibility of modern storytelling like Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica.

For viewers who had only heard of the franchise, they could come in cold or familiarize themselves with Macross through the original animation (easily available on Netflix and Amazon). For fans who’ve casually known the show but only really associated it with Macross, this would provide a new experience while still tying into the old continuity, all with familiar characters. For die-hard fans, it would be a bit of a reward for their patience, as Robotech’s middle child suffered the most from adaptation and original plot problems due to its truncated Japanese production.

Buy it Now

Such a series would also leave the next step wide open. Continue the modern reboot by redoing the New Generation chapter? Pick up the aborted Shadow Rising project? Follow the Masters’ protagonist Dana Sterling on her post-series adventures (completely undocumented in the franchise’s primary canon and only touched upon briefly in deep-canon comics)? Or do something completely new?

Of course, the first step is to actually have anything new hit screens in the near future. Considering the only new completed projects the franchise has seen since 1985 were the mildly successful Shadow Chronicles and the glorified clip show Love Live Alive, the fact that people are still talking about Robotech is somewhat remarkable. But that’s even more of a testament to the universe Carl Macek built in the face of 1980s TV syndication requirements. Perhaps Macross Saga hero Roy Fokker probably put it best: “This Robotech stuff, it just gets in your blood or something.”

For a generation of fans, that remains true. For those that discovered the groundbreaking series through DVDs and streaming services, that also remains true. Now it’s up to Harmony Gold to actually take the next step and give Robotech the reboot it badly deserves.

Mike Chen has covered geek and pop culture for a number of popular outlets, including The Mary Sue and The Portalist. A former national sportswriter, his debut time-travel novel Here and Now and Then releases in early 2019 from MIRA Books. Visit his website or follow him on Twitter for geekery discussion, Doctor Who gifs, and many curse words.

The summer season is upon us, and as usual, that means ice cream, overworked A/C units, and new anime. This season’s got a variety of summer-ready shows, from anime about beach volleyball and a college diving club to the return of our favorite swimming anime. If you’re not in the mood for the beach, there’s also quiet mysteries, madcap school comedies, quirky action shows, extremely intense badminton, and a gritty crime drama that’s not to be missed.

With so many simulcasts at our fingertips, there’s no reason to wait to catch these shows—escape the heat this summer with these five shows you can watch right now.

Banana Fish

On the streets of New York, a young gang leader named Ash Lynx (Yuuma Uchida) witnesses the last moments of a dying man, who hands him a mysterious vial and whispers the words “Banana Fish” before bleeding out on the pavement. Meanwhile, a young assistant photographer, Eiji Okumura (Kenji Nojima), has arrived from Japan with his mentor to research a story on street gangs in the city. Amidst an unspooling conspiracy involving Iraq war veterans, corrupt police, and an organized crime leader who’s got Ash under his thumb, Ash and Eiji are driven together to solve a mystery that could cost both their lives: What is Banana Fish?

Adapted from a shojo manga written in the ’80s and ’90s by Akimi Yoshida, Banana Fish is a hard-boiled crime drama set in the city that never sleeps. To the disappointment of those who enjoy Ray-Bans and Miami Vice, Director Hiroko Utsumi (Free!) and her team at MAPPA (Yuri!!! On Ice) have brought the story into a modern day setting, but don’t be fooled—while the fashion and iPhones say “2018,” the storyline is still a pulpy 80s crime drama. A word of caution: there is some tough subject matter here, especially surrounding issues of sexual violence and abuse, and while these topics are for the most part handled respectfully by the manga, the large role they play in the plot may be too much for some viewers. That said, Banana Fish is an incredibly compelling, emotionally complex story that is richly deserving of the adaptation it’s finally getting. The show is off to a running start and will likely continue at full steam for its entire 24 episode run—if there’s one anime you should be paying attention to this season, this is it.

For fans of: Monster, Erased, Gangsta, 91 Days

Watch it on Amazon Video

Revue Starlight

Karen Aijo (Momoyo Koyama) attends a prestigious girls academy known for turning out once-in-a-generation theatrical talents. When fate reunites her with Hikari Kagura (Suzuko Mimori), a girl she made a childhood promise with, the two, along with other members of their class, will compete in a mysterious and magical audition process for the privilege of being the Stage Girl chosen for a starring role in the legendary show “Starlight.”

This colorful addition to summer is a multi-media project that began life, as far as I can tell, as a stage musical, and is now beginning the second phase of its life as an anime project. This series in one part Love Live, one part Star Driver, and one part Revolutionary Girl Utena—and if that sounds like your ideal combo, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed here. The show, produced at Kinema Citrus (Made in Abyss), is quite polished and sure of itself (any show that features a talking giraffe voiced by Kenjiro Tsuda would have to be), and the Stage Girl audition scenes are particularly visually spectacular. Come for dance class, stay for Ikuhara-inspired magical stage fighting and fated rivalries.

For fans of: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu, Star Driver, Love Live, Magic-Kyun! Renaissance, Mawaru Penguindrum

Watch it now on HIDIVE

Cells at Work!

Running a body is hard work! The human body becomes a complex city populated by anthropomorphized red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, killer T cells, and more in this adaptation of an unusual manga by Akane Shimizu.

I can only describe the experience of watching Cells at Work! as a bit like watching The Magic School Bus as a shonen anime. The show is literally about how cells work in our body, and it feels very educational while somehow also managing to be surprisingly entertaining. Red Blood Cell (Kana Hanazawa) is a well-meaning but bumbling newbie trying to deliver her packages of oxygen to the lungs, platelets are adorable elementary schoolers wearing galoshes, and White Blood Cell (Tomoaki Maeno) is a no-nonsense tough guy who gleefully (and messily) dismantles invading streptococcus bare-handed. This is a fun show if you want to try something a little different, with the added bonus of possibly learning what a dendrite is.

For fans of: Moyashimon, Delicious in Dungeon, Servant x Service

Watch it now on Crunchyroll

Planet With

High schooler Souya Kuroi (Abe Atsushi) has an unusual life. He lives with a girl dressed as a maid and a giant cat that devours whole cabbages for breakfast. He also can’t remember anything about his past up to two weeks ago, though he has strange dreams of super-powered people fighting desperately against an unknown threat. When enormous UFOs that look like stuffed animals designed by a lunatic appear all over the world, a group of heroes assembles to defeat them. Souya, too, receives a call: he is to join the fight—but not on the side of the heroes.

This strange show is the brainchild of Satoshi Mizukami, mangaka of Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, Spirit Circle, and others. His work has been pretty criminally overlooked for anime adaptations, and as such, his fans are rightly excited about this original anime project. I’m just going to be real here: Planet With is weird, and it’s almost certainly going to get weirder—but the chances that it’s going to take us somewhere interesting along the way to further weirdness are high. Those familiar with Mizukami’s work will recognize in Planet With his interest in the tension between heroes and villains, and in particular how good people can be thrust into the role of the villain. For those who like action shows with a twist, this is definitely one to keep a close eye on this season.

For fans of: Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, Assassination Classroom, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Captain Earth

Watch it now on Crunchyroll

Free! Dive to the Future

Haruka and Makoto, former members of the Iwatobi High School swim team now attending college in Tokyo, reunite with members of their middle school swim team. But are their former teammates friends or rivals?

There are quite a few sequels and continuing series this season—My Hero Academia, Overlord, and Gintama, to name a few—but it feels appropriate to bring some attention to the latest season of Free!, a series that first took the world by storm in 2013 (that’s right; before the ice skating anime, there was the swimming anime). This season of Free! brings us back to the boys as they are entering college, and introduces a slew of new characters from episode one. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series’ sports-meets-slice-of-life vibe transitions to a college setting, which often doesn’t get a lot of attention in anime. Expect some college life, hot-blooded swimming, destined rivals, and, of course, glistening male torsos.

For fans of: Haikyu!!, Yuri!!! On Ice, Kuroko’s Basketball, Yowamushi Pedal

Watch it now on Crunchyroll

What are you watching this season? Let us know in the comments!

Kelly Quinn Chiu is a children’s librarian and professional anime watcher. You can find her talking about books and manga on Twitter, and on her podcast, One Panel Later.

It’s that time of year again, when the shops are awash in holiday garland, the houses draped with festive lights, and the blogs festooned with “Best of 2015” lists. Looking back through this year at the good, the bad, the ultimately disappointing, and the thankfully forgettable (goodbye forever, Chaos Dragon), it was surprisingly hard to narrow this list down to ten shows, and I’ve certainly left out some worthy contenders. Yet, for the sake of the season, it must be done. Without further ado then, the best ten TV anime of 2015.

The Seven Deadly Sins / Nanatsu no Taizai

The tenth spot on the list this year goes to The Seven Deadly Sins for sheer entertainment value. Set in a vaguely medieval swords and sorcery world reminiscent of retro classics like Slayers, this shounen fantasy adventure follows the exploits of Princess Elizabeth and Meliodas, the leader of an infamous group of warriors called the Seven Deadly Sins. Although this show doesn’t bring anything especially new to the table, using many existing fantasy tropes and plot staples, the execution, not the premise, is where The Seven Deadly Sins shines. It’s hard not to get attached to the the colorful characters, especially the Sins themselves, and flashy action set pieces and brisk pacing keeps this show humming along towards its high-stakes climax. I’ll be looking forward to the second season for this one in 2016.

Missed it? Watch it now on Netflix

Yurikuma Arashi

If The Seven Deadly Sins makes the list as a high-spirited crowd pleaser, Yurikuma Arashi represents basically its exact opposite. The latest entry from auteur director and endless staircase expert Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum), Yurikuma Arashi is, at heart, a rather simple tale about finding love and defending it in the face of disapproval, hate, and prejudice. Of course, Ikuhara being Ikuhara, this “simple” story is densely packed with social commentary, multivalent symbolism, and references to historical events, literature, and even films such as Suspiria and Psycho. While the short length seemed at times to pose some difficulty for the creators, with certain events lacking sufficient set up and characters feeling a bit thin for large parts of the story, the concise twelve-episode format ultimately worked in the show’s favor, making Yurikuma Arashi possibly Ikuhara’s most comprehensible and straightforward show to date. Combining Ikuhara’s signature artistry with surprising emotional force in the last third of the show, Yurikuma Arashi was one of the most interesting—and satisfying—shows of the year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma

Shokugeki no Soma happens to combine two things I dearly love: battle shounen and gourmet cooking. Following the journey of Soma Yukihira, a student at the highly competitive Totsuki Culinary Academy, this show never failed to entertain with its lively cast, Iron Chef-like epicurean competition, and, of course, its infamous reaction scenes. Shokugeki knows how to make the most of its ridiculous premise but also takes itself seriously when it counts—a quality that leads you to giggle over world-renowned chefs transforming into magical girls one minute, and to worry very earnestly about a character’s fate in the next. And, a particular win in my book, it nails the culinary details, from techniques to food trends. Although J.C. Staff’s adaptation was merely competent and didn’t add a tremendous amount of value to the source material, the staff got it right where it mattered and made Shokugeki no Soma one of the most purely fun shows I watched this year—hopefully, the second season continues to deliver in 2016.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

My Love Story! / Ore Monogatari

My Love Story! makes it onto this list by virtue of being sweet, fluffy, and endlessly heartwarming. While shoujo romance adaptations seem to get a bit thinner every year, My Love Story! (as well as shows like the lovely Akagami no Shirayukihime—which, before you ask, doesn’t qualify this year) remind us how good they can be in the right hands. My Love Story!, which distinguishes itself with a distinctly un-shoujo protagonist in the beefy Gouda Takeo, quickly eschews the typical will-they-won’t-they rollercoaster in favor of a story about how relationships (and friendships) grow over time. The story was matched with a fitting team at Madhouse (many of whom worked on the excellent Chihayafuru), which brought the manga source material to life with soft colors and enough shoujo sparkles to deck out the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Though the copious pastel bubbles and sweeter-than-sweet antics of Takeo and Rinko might plausibly make this show too saccharine for some tastes, My Love Story!’s slow romance and earnest optimism made it a treat for me this year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Blood Blockade Battlefront / Kekkai Sensen

With a setting that combines the grungy bustle of Manhattan with the alien squalor of the Mos Eisley Cantina and characters that range from vampires and magic wielders to diner waitresses and mushroom-shaped aliens, Blood Blockade Battlefront is a wonderful—but only semi-penetrable—spectacle. Revolving around the adventures of Leonardo Watch, a young man who has acquired a great power in rather unfortunate circumstances, Blood Blockade Battlefront showcases the amazing visual creativity of young director Matsumoto Rie, not to mention an incredible staff and cast. Like Matsumoto’s previous directorial effort, Kyousougiga, Blood Blockade Battlefront suffered from somewhat convoluted storytelling, and was further bogged down by scheduling issues that delayed the final episode for several months. Despite it all, however, this show was still one of the most imaginative airing this year, and certainly earned its spot here in the top ten.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Death Parade

That Death Parade exists at all feels like a small piece of good fortune, as I don’t think anyone quite expected to see the artsy Anime Mirai short Death Billiards expanded into a full length TV show. Set in a moody, atmospheric bar where hapless mortals come to be judged after death, Death Parade made good on the promise of the OVA, fleshing out its intriguing setting and equally intriguing cast through a series of tense encounters with the human souls passing through each week. Given the episodic nature of the show, dramatic payoff varied from story to story, and some were more effective than others. Yet this variety was also one of the strengths of Death Parade, allowing it to tell stories that ranged in tone from humorous and sweet to deeply dark and troubling. Death Parade represents the kind of evocative psychological drama that we aren’t treated to terribly often, and, in addition to exploring some interesting (and possibly quite pessimistic) ideas about the afterlife, contained some of the most lovely and poignant moments in anime this year.

Missed it? Watch it now on Hulu

Parasyte -the maxim-

For various reasons, including a lapsed Hollywood film option, the TV anime adaption of 90s sci-fi manga Parasyte was a long time coming—and when we finally got it this year, it was pretty darn good. Parasyte’s primary strengths lie in its story, which mixes the anxieties of young adulthood with the threat of a sinister alien invasion (and some healthy rumination about the nature of humanity), but most especially in its characters: the strange but touching relationship between Shinichi and Migi, host and parasite. Although the adaption certainly had its pitfalls—visuals were not always the most polished, the soundtrack never worked well for me, and the pace seemed to slow to a crawl every time Shinichi’s love interest got extended screen time—Parasyte has a certain timeless quality that makes it quite a compelling story in any format, as effective in 2015 as it was in 1995.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Yona of the Dawn / Akatsuki no Yona

In comparison to the shows that bracket Yona of the Dawn on this list, I realize that Yona seems the odd one out—certainly it didn’t make as much of a splash as either Parasyte or One Punch Man. Nevertheless, this historical fantasy, following an exiled princess in a pseudo-historical Korea, was handily one of my favorite shows this year. Yona’s well-developed cast supports a thrilling and nuanced plot of political intrigue, action, and romance…also did I mention there are dragons? Director Kazuhiro Yoneda and Studio Pierrot’s polished and deliberately paced adaptation of Mizuho Kusanagi’s manga is about as faithful as any fan could ask for, and while the anime only makes it through what amounts to a prologue for the larger story, Yona of the Dawn is still very much worth the watch for those that haven’t discovered it yet.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

One Punch Man

This superhero gag comedy was one of the most anticipated shows this fall, and boy did it deliver. Following the exploits of the unflappable Saitama, a “hero for fun,” as well as his loyal student Genos and a slew of other eccentric heroes and villains, One Punch Man finds a winning formula in its mix of humorous absurdity with adrenaline-fueled action sequences that make your inner twelve year old cheer. In many ways, One Punch Man succeeds almost entirely on the strength of the love poured into it from everyone involved, from Yusuke Murata’s painstakingly detailed art in the manga to director Natsume Shingo and the rest of the staff’s amazing and passionate work bringing that art to life (more on this here). The only thing I have to complain about is that we only got twelve episodes—one can only hope that we’ll see another season of this incredibly fun show.

Missed it? Watch it now on Daisuki or Hulu

Shirobako

I’d like to say I had a difficult time deciding to put Shirobako at the top of my list this year, but the truth is that it wasn’t hard at all. This show could have been the most forgettable piece of fluff about cute girls making cute anime, but instead we got a surprisingly realistic show about the nitty gritty details of anime production. There are so many things to like about Shirobako: the lovable, large (but somehow never unwieldy) cast that made you want to cheer for their successes and cry at their failures; the winking references to real industry companies and people; the buoyant tone that kept things from getting melodramatic even when the going got tough for our heroes; the lively pacing that kept the show moving along rather too swiftly through its two cours. Plainly put, Shirobako is an anime that makes you love anime—and I don’t think I could do any better than that for my top anime of 2015.

Missed it? Watch it now on Crunchyroll or Hulu

Didn’t see your favorite show from 2015 on here? Tell us your favorites from the year in the comments—or better yet, what you’re looking forward to in 2016!

NB: To qualify for this list, the titles were required to:

• End in 2015 (split-cour shows were counted as one season)
• Be legally available in English
• Not be a movie
• Not be a sequel

Kelly Quinn is sorry your favorite anime isn’t on this list. You can tell her how bad her taste is on Twitter.

As a long-time fan of both speculative fiction and anime, one common thread I’ve noticed in both media is the enduring presence of The School Story. Plenty of fantasy readers make their grand entrance to the genre via a school fantasy story; for teens, who spend more time at school than at home, what other setting could tie the fantastic world to mundane reality?

Here are four anime to watch based on the book series you love—or, if you came here looking for books, four book series to read based on your favorite anime!

Read Harry Potter, Watch Little Witch Academia

The Harry Potter series doesn’t need much introduction, but I’ll give you a reminder anyway: in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), a young orphan is whisked away from an abusive home in mundane 1990s Britain to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he learns to use his magic as the forces of evil begin to gather again.

Little Witch Academia also takes place at a school of magic: Luna Nova Magic Academy, a prestigious school for witch education. Atsuko Kagari is a new student at Luna Nova and, much like Harry, has come from a mundane background. But Atsuko has come to Luna Nova not on the tails of provenance, but with a mission: she seeks to become a witch like her hero, Shiny Chariot, and use magic to become a source of hope and happiness for the people around her.

Both series employ coming-of-age narratives in European-style magical settings; the tone of Little Witch matches the tone of Sorcerer’s Stone fairly well. Little Witch is a great family-friendly anime, and both stories focus on the power of love as its own type of magic.

Read Vampire Academy, Watch Vampire Knight

Warring factions, a pair of runaways, and danger abound in Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy, the first book in a series of the same name. Following vampire princess Lissa and her half-vampire best friend/bodyguard Rose, Vampire Academy is a blend of danger, romance, and intrigue when Lissa and Rose are forced to return to St. Vladimir’s Academy, a school for vampires, after being on the run for two years.

In Vampire Knight, Yuki Cross is the adopted daughter of Cross Academy’s headmaster and serves as a Guardian at the school, alternately protecting the Night Class of vampires from discovery by the humans and the Day Class of humans from the vampires (and their appetites). But she’s torn between her long-time crush on the Night Class’s Kaname Kuran and her friendship with the Day Class’s Zero Kiryu, another Cross Academy Guardian who has also trained as a vampire hunter.

Released around the same time in the mid-2000s, these two vampire school stories are great fits for fans of the other. Vampire Academy and Vampire Knight also bring romance into play much more than any of the other series on the list, making these series great for those who seek out the drama and thrill of a supernatural love story.

Read Red Sister, Watch Riddle Story of the Devil

There were going to be assassins in here somewhere.

Mark Lawrence’s Red Sister, the first in the Book of the Ancestor trilogy, begins with the conviction and near-hanging of Nona Grey, age nine—who is whisked away at the last second by Abbess Glass, the mother superior at the Convent of Sweet Mercy. But the girls attending the school at this convent are trained in more than just letters and doctrine: poisons, knifework, and survivalism are all parts of the core curriculum.

At Myojo Private School, a special class is brought together for a similarly dark purpose: twelve girl assassins whose single target is the thirteenth member of Class Black. Azuma Tokaku is one of those assassins, a top student from an elite assassin training school who assumes it’ll be an easy job—until she meets Class Black’s target, Haru Ichinose.

Readers who enjoyed the nearly all-female cast of Red Sister will probably also love Riddle Story of the Devil. While Red Sister takes place in a fantasy secondary world and Riddle Story is in a slightly sci-fi contemporary thriller setting, both combine high action and tricky, mistrustful relationships, and a suspenseful story.

Read Not Your Sidekick, Watch My Hero Academia

In Andover, superpowers are common… but Jessica Tran doesn’t have one, despite her superheroic lineage. Which means finding an internship is going to be a little tricky. When she does find the perfect (and paid) internship to put on her college applications, it turns out to be with the city’s most notorious supervillain. On the plus side, she can annoy her superhero parents while hanging out with her crush, who ended up at the same internship. But Jessica soon discovers a dangerous plot that could threaten them all.

On the other side of the globe, Izuku Midoriya is born without superpowers in a world where eighty percent of the population has an ability called a Quirk, destroying his childhood dream of becoming a hero who can make anyone smile like his idol All Might. But one day, Izuku meets All Might in person—just before Izuku runs headlong at a villain to save his childhood friend. He learns All Might has a secret: he was once Quirkless, too, before his predecessor bestowed his Quirk to him—and now, All Might is doing the same for Izuku.

These two superhero stories share protagonists who start off without any superpowers to speak of. But both Jessica and Izuku find themselves on the path to heroism, despite the obstacles they face. While many superhero-focused media tend to the dark and gritty, both Not Your Sidekick and My Hero Academia are funny, light, and hopeful. While Not Your Sidekick technically isn’t about school, much of My Hero is set at U.A. High School, the most prestigious superhero school in Japan.

Feliza Casano writes about science fiction, manga, and other geeky media around the internet. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she moderates two book clubs and lines her walls with stacks of books. Visit her online or follow her on Twitter @FelizaCasano.

There’s nothing like cuddling up on a dark October night with a creepy horror novel—or hunkering down to watch a scary anime. In this season of terror, we’ve got four pairs of horror books and anime to check out, from favorites to stories you shouldn’t miss.

With horror fiction and horror anime both being such incredibly in-depth areas, we’ve narrowed it down to pairings of stories that focus on people and the relationships between them. While many of the stories possess paranormal elements, the real terror lies not in the monster you’ve barricaded out, but the person you’re locked inside with.

Read The Devil Crept In, Watch When They Cry

Small towns in horror can be home to truly terrifying things. Ania Ahlborn’s The Devil Crept In is the tale of one such small town: Stevie’s cousin and best friend has gone missing, and he knows as well as anyone else who’s seen a cop show what that might mean. Except that in Deer Valley, children and pets have gone missing or been found dead more than once over the years. And even though Stevie is searching for the truth, he can’t imagine the answer he’ll find in Deer Valley.

Similarly, the anime series When They Cry (or Higurashi: When They Cry) introduces a horrifying mystery set in a rural village in the Japanese countryside. When Keiichi moves to Hinamizawa, he befriends a group of girls near his own age. It might sound like heaven for some teenage boys, but after the manager of a controversial dam project is found dismembered, the girls’ behavior grows increasingly bizarre, and Keiichi soon finds himself in grave danger.

Read Lord of the Flies, Watch Future Diary

William Golding’s 1954 classic The Lord of the Flies isn’t strictly a horror novel, but this story about a group of boys stranded on a mostly deserted island asks questions and provides answers that might bring dread to any reader: what are the lengths to which people will go when their lives are in peril—or when they have the chance to seize power? Ralph, one of the novel’s key characters, wants the boys to work together to succeed, but the tenuous civilization they build on the island soon begins to unravel.

Future Diary is a tale about the balance of safety and power with a supernatural twist: to find the world’s next god, the current god gives twelve people a cell phone diary with a specific power—and Yukiteru has one of the most valuable, a diary that can predict the future. Like in Lord of the Flies, the relationships between people take center stage in this anime, depicting the loyalties and betrayals of people desperate to preserve their own lives—and people greedy for power.

Read Misery, Watch Perfect Blue

Paul, the author protagonist in Stephen King’s Misery, is known for his romance series surrounding the character Misery Chastain—and he’s ready to move on from Misery’s story to new opportunities. But a car crash in Colorado leaves him injured and in the hands of a crazed fan of the Misery Chastain series, who’s enraged by Paul’s plan to move on. She’s prepared to do whatever it takes to get the ending she wants for her favorite character… even at the expense of Paul himself.

In Perfect Blue, Mima is leaving her spot as the lead singer in a popular musical group to pursue a career in acting. Like Paul in Misery, Mima seeks new opportunities in her career, but the move to acting angers one of her fans—one who turns into a terrifying stalker. As the only film on this list, Perfect Blue is the shortest anime to commit yourself to during the spooky season, but it’ll still leave viewers with a lingering sense of paranoia.

Read Another, Watch… Another?

Is this technically cheating? Who knows—and really, it doesn’t matter, because Another is an exemplary work of Japanese horror in both novel and anime form. Originally published in Japan in 2009, Another follows Koichi Sakakibara’s transfer to a middle school in the countryside, where everyone seems to be ignoring Mei, one of the girls in class. Contrary to their warnings, Koichi tries to befriend Mei—but by doing so, he unleashes a chain of gruesome and horrifying deaths of his classmates and the people around them.

Like When They Cry and Future Diary, Another is a supernatural story, though Koichi is pretty reluctant to admit that at first. But in a lot of ways, what’s truly terrifying is the things people will do to their friends when they’re frightened… and the lengths to which they go in an attempt to avoid triggering the curse in the first place.

Feliza Casano writes about science fiction, manga, and other geeky media around the internet. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she moderates two book clubs and lines her walls with stacks of books. Visit her online or follow her on Twitter @FelizaCasano.