Come on, don't act that surprised
Time once again for my bi-annual review of anime. I’m sure there’ll be a top 10 from 2011, it’s just that no one will see it. I don’t know why I never finished it, maybe because it looked too much like Chris’ and I didn’t want to look like a copy-cat, maybe I’m just lazy, maybe my feet hurt, maybe it’s too crowded in here. Maybe I just want to go home.
It’s not even anime
Criteria
Let’s get to it!
10. Kokoro connect
Not pictured: Karate-girl
I feel pretty lied-to about this show.
It’s advertised as a show about a few friends whose lives are flip-turned upside down when they start switching places with one another, and one would think it’d turn into some sort of awful love-comedy. In reality, they mostly find out they’re all pretty bad people. They eventually find out that it was some alien trolling them all along and they learn a lesson about friendship. Sounds like the end of the show, right? Apparently alien-sama wasn’t done screwing with them.
The whole first part as advertised was actually pretty good. They actually hinted that the main character, practically the harem lead, had a Jesus complex. To say that he’s some sort of “deconstruction” of harem leads would be giving this show too much credit, since he still hooks up with everyone, even the guy, I would argue. Everyone can best be described as a hashed-out version of some cliché archetype. The show’s strongest suit was definitely the characters and how they interacted.
The bad news is the show tries to pretty tastelessly appeal to the lowest common denominator of anime fans with the age-changing arc, and drags its feet in drama during the part where the karate girl was scared she was going to kill someone. The art falls pretty pathetically short as well, full of what I can best describe as KyoAni’s rejected character drawings. Complex (at least, complex for ANIME) character interactions are a plus for this show, but it wears out its welcome.
9. Jormungand
Guns!
Speaking of character archetypes, JORMUNGAND has got a pretty long list of them in this show, but I feel like I’m probably not too far off-the-mark in just saying that they’re all just crazy.
Jormungand follows the story of Koko Hekmatyar, an arms dealer from **** country. Her whole family consists of arms dealers, and basically she’s the smartest one. Her and her merry band of highly-trained mercenaries run about the globe selling arms here, buying arms there, and shooting people anywhere in between. The action is probably the best part, with realistic portrayals of weapons and enough gun porn to make any gun nut pop a you-know-what.
The characters and action make this a decent pick, and it’s not totally out there like most anime these days. At times it has some pretty dark commentary on society and government. It can get sort of lost in its own commentary, and usually won’t tip towards one end or the other.
SPOILERS
The worst part is absolutely the ending, when you find out that Koko’s plan all along was to control the information across the globe using a quantum computer to hack into everything everywhere. It’s unfortunate for poor Jonah, who tries to find a job with someone that isn’t totally insane, but he ends up working for Koko because he can really only deal with guns and has no tradable skills. Koko has some sort of God-complex, and ignorance is bliss for poor Jonah.
/SPOILERS
The first season is absolutely the strongest part of the series, earning the number 9 spot on this list, but don’t hold your breath for the ending in the second season when you find out Koko’s “New World Order.” It will probably disappoint.
8. Sakamichi no Apollon
“Dopes on a slope” is about a jazz band that has to break up because women always cause more problems for bands than they solve.
Here are said dopes
Some guys are trying to hook up with some girls they like, but the girls like someone else. It leads to some confusing moments for the male characters deciding if they like playing jazz with each other, going to school, and overcoming their own insecurities enough to really go after these girls. After all, if the women liked them in the first place the show would only be 2 episodes long.
With one of the episodes being entirely some bizarre slideshow of pictures
Where Kids on the Slope succeeds is the Yoko Kanno soundtrack. Even “Favorite things” sounds good when English isn’t your first language. If jazz is your genre, pick up the soundtrack for a listen.
The show also looks nice; credit where credit is due, this show really paid attention to the way the instruments are played. Sometimes the piano doesn’t make sense, but the trap set is entirely consistent with the soundtrack. It’s a shame there wasn’t more jazz in the show in general, because it’s all very well done.
7. AKB0048
It’s hard to know where to begin with AKB0048. The name is taken after the name of a popular band in Japan, “AKB48”. You might recognize the name as the Japanese artist who sang the song in Wreck-it Ralph, “Sugar Rush.” Even if you don’t know who or what AKB48 is, don’t worry! The show has almost nothing to do with the real AKB48.
In fact, it’s some sort of dystopian future where some sort of space government decreed that entertainment is too lewd or something and therefore no one should be allowed to enjoy it. It’s a stretch to make sense of the motivations of the robot things constantly harassing young female pop stars like King Kong harasses the Empire State Building.
Gross
AKB48 holds tryouts for the next generation of AKB and a few girls qualify, so they immediately begin training. It’s funny that the young pop stars-to-be deal with really normal problems like crazy fans, giving autographs, and traveling from planet-to-planet, but at the same time they fight other robots and act surprised when some girls don’t want to do that sort of thing.
I just wanted to wear cute outfits…. and dance on a spaceship stage
The “Idol” genre of anime is growing quickly and is very popular. Props to the guy that coughed up the idea of taking a bunch of idols and putting them in space, it works great in this show. There’s a smattering of actual AKB48 songs, and a few originals. The background soundtrack was interestingly performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic (known best for their work on Tytania, obviously) making this a smattering of great music all around. Now, the next idol show will take idols, and have them open a restaurant. Calling it now.
6. Binbougami-ga
Literally, “poverty God” – or more appropriately, “The God of bad luck” – is a story about the luckiest girl in the world being antagonized by the unluckiest God. Essentially, this girl with insanely good luck is causing problems in the world because she’s taking all the luck from her friends, and their lives are being ruined, usually to the point of dying.
On paper, the show seemed pretty dull, and the plotline alone isn’t totally original or interesting. However, hearing Hanazawa Kana, a voice actor who typically plays the meek and shy girl, take on the role of a mean and generally loud-mouthed protagonist is a nice change of pace. The humor was also entirely unexpected, as it has a good share of hilarity throughout.
There's even a black guy in it!
The plot leaves a lot to be desired, however, with the usual “mean-girl-turned-nice and learning a moral lesson” shebang. Anything that isn’t a reference to another show or doesn’t have the drill hair girl in the background just feels like it’s just going through the motions to get to the end.
…so you can find out where drill hair girl was
5. Fate Zero pt. 2
Fate Zero is a prologue to another anime, “Fate/Stay Night.” Like Fate/Stay, Zero revolves around a competition between people who own “servants,” mythological heroes from the past. These heroes come from varying times to fight each other seeking to answer the questions in the same vein of inspiration as “who would win in a fight between Rambo and Merlin the wizard?” They are not named directly so as to hide their strength to the other heroes fighting, and instead are named by their general strength, such as Archer, Saber, Berserker, Rider, and so on. The winner of the competition can make a wish for anything want.
The story revolves around one man named Kiritsugu and his servant Saber – who is actually King Arthur and for some reason female. All the other masters are shown throughout as well, with their own reasons for desiring the free wish. What is drastically different about this show compared to Fate/Stay is how it doesn’t suck, doesn’t revolve around a kid with orange hair, and has some of the best art in a television series I’ve ever seen.
This anime stuck out like a sore thumb against everything else in the same way a Hollywood production film is compared alongside a SyFy “made-for-tv” special premiering at 2 PM on a Tuesday.
With a re-premiere at 2 AM
4. Mirai Nikki
This was a manga well before this series got the greenlight for an anime adaptation, and so my bias is pretty heavy in favor of this show. All it needed was a few people skilled in speaking the lines from the comic book and I’m sold.
Mirai Nikki is a suspenseful/horror story of “future diaries” (the title of the show). 20-odd people who obsessively keep normal diaries of their everyday life suddenly notice their diaries fill themselves out with the events of the future, and the level of detail these future diaries maintain is the same level of detail their author maintained beforehand. Naturally, the main character Yuki has potentially the best future diary, because he wrote about everything surrounding his life. Enter Yuno, Yuki’s classmate, who keeps a diary exclusively about Yuki because she’s totally and absolutely obsessed with him.
These two find themselves in a competition to kill every single other person with a future diary to claim the throne of Deus, some sort of God-like entity that oversees all of humanity. As expected of anyone that keeps OCD records in a diary, every single person in this competition is comically insane. Here is where character design is the double-edged sword of the series. While each character is somewhat endearing in terms of how absolutely insane they are, it can give way to absurdity and disbelief of the viewer. The competition is still very smart, in very chess-like “all according to plan” engagements between the future diary holders, and the extremely strange relationship Yuno shares with Yuki.
Despite whatever qualms one may have with the absurd character designs (*cough*), this leaves a lot of interpretation to the voice actors, who do very memorable performances throughout the show, alongside a plotline that’ll keep the viewer guessing.
3. Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun
“Tonari” (“The Monster Sat Beside Me”) is a love story about two kids that are too smart for their own good. We’re talking genius-level here, like those weird kids you see around Colorado School of Mines walking around with their shoes on their head or something.
…or have a pet chicken they carry around
The main character is a studious girl named Shizuku. Her primary focus is her studies, putting just about all other activities on the backburner. As a result, she has no close friends, and romance is just about the last thing on her mind. Enter Haru, who also has no friends, but puts EVERYTHING on the backburner. He crosses Shizuku when we find out Haru is actually a genius, getting better grades than Shizuku without any effort. Then Haru decides he loves Shizuku. This all happens in the first episode.
No time for foreplay
This RomCom scores so high because it basically doesn’t waste time with “does he love me, do I love him” every single episode. It does happen, but not in the way that makes it drag like in similar shows like Kaichou wa Maid-sama or the romance episodes in Baka test. It follows the formula of the romance triangle without being insufferable.
That’s really all I have to say about it. It’s unfortunately a victim of my blurry memory, and therefore I can say things like, “It’s not memorable” when we all know I just have a bad memory.
2. Daily Lives of High School Boys
If there’s one show to watch from the previous season, it’s this one. The show revolves around the daily lives of three friends, but introduces other high school boys acting like high school boys. The show even abandons its own theme down the line by introducing the daily lives of crazy high school girls.
The title, “Daily Lives of High School Boys” is a premise, not a rule, and the show presents several skits per episode of stupid things people do in High School. It immediately scores higher than the other comedies on this list for the simple fact that it doesn’t make the mistake of having an over-arching plotline about a love interest or an evil monster or something. It’s a fun variety show with everything I could ever ask of a humorous show, and it does it well. If I had to pick and choose funny scenes from the show, it’s probably easier to watch the thing from start to finish. There are a few skits that miss pretty hard, but the ones that hit will be knocked out of the stratosphere.
THE STRATOSPHERE
There’s little else to say here regarding the humor or plot, but I suppose some references could also be hard to catch without any previous knowledge of video games or anime. You know; high school stuff.
1. Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, or “Humanity has declined” is a story told from the perspective of… uh… they never state the main character’s name, but we’ll call her “Watashi.” Her job is to be a diplomat between the race of humans and “fairies,” a new race of beings on Earth whose presence isn’t fully explained past the fact that their existence changed everything. To describe the setting as “post-apocalyptic” is giving normal post-apocalyptic settings too much credit. It can best be described as “post-something” that drastically reduced the population of humans, implied throughout the series to have been brought about by themselves.
Clues as to what happened are presented through the world “Watashi” explores and through her interactions with the strange fairies and other characters she meets. Themes explored include what it means to be a leader, the failed space program, and the economy for smut.
These men are kissing!
Jinrui’s thesis on the overall decline of humanity is less glamorous than such fantastic things like thermonuclear bombs, zombies, or aliens coming down in gigantic spaceships lasering everything to death like so many War of the Worlds look-alikes. Rather, the track society maintains, whatever that may be, is unsustainable and creates fairies somehow.
About those fairies, their only desire is to do things that are fun, reproduce quickly, possess an extraordinarily high intelligence, and have a capacity for fast manufacturing, putting even the most efficient Chinese factories to shame. They make things of questionable usefulness to humanity, but ultimately they represent the next level of life on Earth, despite being only a few inches tall. They sometimes serve as something Watashi contrasts with the rest of humanity, but they’re largely just a plot device to set the scene for some new disappointment with humanity.
Its method of getting its point across is mostly irony and dark humor. “Black comedy” is the best phrase I can use to describe it, which is funny, because it could also be used to describe every movie starring Tyler Perry.
Both do an excellent job chronicling the decline of humanity
While the theme is consistent, the episodic focus is a very narrow aspect of the overruling theme, the decline of humanity. There is very little to tie each of the episodes together into a neat package. The achronological order of the episodes makes it even harder to know what to feel about mankind’s demise. What they lose in message, they gain in storytelling, and vice versa. Bringing me to the last thing the show did that no other on this list can claim, it had a decent ending.
So that’s it. Yes, I realize Sword Art Online isn’t on this list.
This list was done months ago, and I wanted to put in a bit here on the end to describe why Sword Art Online was the worst thing ever, including plot holes, pointless art direction, and convenient character motivations. The more I worked on this part of the top 10, the more I quickly realized I was writing a novel comparable only to Mr. Plinkett’s most grating reviews of Hollywood movies.
So that’ll come at a later date. For now, this is the top 10, only 4 months late.
Grant Walker · April 8, 2013 at 6:59 pm
1. Sword Art Online is not the worst thing ever.
2. iDOLM@STER is the worst thing ever.
Other than that I have only one issue with this list, and I will keep that a secret.
Gene · April 8, 2013 at 10:36 pm
It’s dopes on a slope isn’t it
or mirai nikki
I bet it’s dopes on a slope
Gene · April 8, 2013 at 10:36 pm
It’s dopes on a slope isn’t it
or mirai nikki
I bet it’s dopes on a slope