Anime of the decade: Epilogue

1. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
2. Mushishi
3. RahXephon
4. Five Cen­ti­metres Per Second
5. Kara no Kyoukai
6. My-HiME
7. Ten­gen Toppa Gur­ren Lagann
8. Code Geass
9. Black Lagoon
10. Texh­no­lyze

Eleven days, almost twelve and a half thou­sand words, nine­teen videos, one hun­dred screen­shots and ten anime later, the sum­ma­tion of a dec­ade of anime is complete.

About the list

To call this any­thing other than a monu­mental effort would be under­stat­ing pre­cisely how long was spent work­ing on this fea­ture. The easy part was com­ing up with the top ten, in com­par­ison to the writ­ing, edit­ing, video encod­ing and screen­shot sort­ing that needed to be done, simply pick­ing ten out of less than a couple of thou­sand of releases was straight­for­ward. There was little hand wringing over the entries, the top three and last one were already fixed and most of the remain­ing seven were pre­dis­posed towards cer­tain places. The most con­ten­tious slot was num­ber nine, a myriad other shows and movies could have eas­ily replaced Black Lagoon but in the end the silly-serious jux­ta­pos­i­tion it man­ages won out. Kara no Kyoukai was also a late entry into the top five but the final movie con­firmed that it def­in­itely belonged in the list.

The decision not to do a stand­ard one-post sum­ma­tion had already been made: for a year end sum­mary per­haps but for many of the entries, this would prob­ably be the sole chance to speak about them in con­text, espe­cially some of the earlier dec­ade entries such as Texh­no­lyze and RahXephon which were around only when inter­net dis­trib­uted fan­sub­bing was only just tak­ing off. The full extent of the media required to achieve this was monu­mental. Transcod­ing from DVDs provided good qual­ity screen­shots but not all DVDs are cre­ated equal and foibles such as chan­ging video types and inter­laced field orders caused havoc at a time when order was desired. Trav­el­ling dur­ing the Christ­mas period required all of the media to be ready prior to the list being pos­ted which promp­ted late nights and early mornings.

Many of the entries had not had screen­shots pro­duced for them before and sort­ing through a fifty two epis­ode series, each epis­ode gen­er­at­ing two hun­dred and fifty screen­shots, was a task not best suited to slight inebri­ation so com­mon dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son. Other prob­lems ranged from writer’s block for sev­eral key entries to an abject lack of time for the final ones res­ult­ing in screen­shots for Ghost in the Shell added shortly after it was pub­lished. Regard­less, the list is now com­plete and a new dec­ade begins.

Also ran

There are of course numer­ous other releases not men­tioned which are still bril­liant in their own right includ­ing greats such as FLCL, Wolf’s Rain, Gun­parade March, Xam’d: Lost Memor­ies, Azu­manga Daioh, Witch Hunter Robin, Clay­more and Tokyo Majin to name but a few; the ones which missed the short­l­ist for the top ten list and would likely go into a hypo­thet­ical 11 — 20 and bey­ond list were, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

Gun­slinger Girl

The second series, Il Teat­rino, proved just how pre­cious the first series of Gun­slinger Girl was. Atmo­spheric and heart­break­ing, the story of a group of young girls given a new lease of life only to become assas­sins at the behest of their adult hand­lers sounds trite and creepy but instead it was bril­liantly poignant look at stolen child­hoods and Italian organ­ised crime.

Ga-Rei Zero

From a gen­eric manga came this stun­ner of a series; begin­ning in media res, the first epis­ode is a tour de force on how to twist the expect­a­tions of an audi­ence and toy with their form­at­ive attach­ment to char­ac­ters. The rest of the series scales back the viol­ence but por­trays a touch­ing look at typ­ical high-school romance and comedy.

Eureka Seven

The most epic of Stu­dio Bones’ pro­duc­tions span­ning fifty two epis­odes, a recently released movie — Pocket Full of Rain­bows — and innu­mer­able manga adapt­a­tions, Eureka Seven was bold, ambi­tious and enga­ging. A mag­ni­fi­cent series in its own right, it hov­ers just out­side the top ten for its lack of emo­tional res­on­ance and a lam­ent­able focus on young chil­dren who veer too often onto the side of annoy­ing more than they do tolerable.

Shuffle!

One of the clas­sic harem erotic games from Navel turned into a very respect­able anime series. Des­pite its source, there is very little fan ser­vice and instead the focus is squarely on the rela­tion­ships, his­tor­ies and ongo­ing inter­ac­tions of the char­ac­ters. Set­ting out the paradigm for many sub­sequently released games lends it a famili­ar­ity, but it will be the protagonist’s even­tual choice of girl that defines one’s enjoy­ment of the series.

Moy­ashi­mon

A unique manga turned into a rauc­ous series, the tale of an adoles­cent who can see anthro­po­morphic microbes and his mis­ad­ven­tures in an agri­cul­tural uni­ver­sity is supremely enter­tain­ing. It’s hard not to fall in love with all of the char­ac­ters: whether it is the seagull suck­ing pro­fessor Keizo, the harsh post­gradu­ate Haruka, or the dis­ap­pear­ance prone Kei; all are por­trayed suc­cinctly and in a bright, superbly anim­ated series.

Stellvia of the Universe

Close to being a guilty pleas­ure, Stellvia of the Uni­verse is the story of a young girl join­ing an elite plan­et­ary space sta­tion whose mis­sion is to stop a destruct­ive wave emit­ted from a dying star. Twee and melo­dra­matic, Stellvia mixes teen angst with sci­ence fic­tion res­ult­ing in a series that is easy to watch and wholly engrossing.

Die­buster / Aim for the Top 2!

Fol­low­ing on from one of the most loved series GAINAX have ever pro­duced and the one that put them on the map as a top-tier stu­dio was always going to be dif­fi­cult. While it doesn’t man­age to cap­ture the original’s bound­less ima­gin­a­tion and emo­tion, it has a great try and after a rocky start man­ages all the gran­di­ose pomp neces­sary from planet sized machines and galaxy span­ning swarms. Some­what eclipsed by Gur­ren Lagann, but still massive fun.

Gen­shiken

Veer­ing away from the manga in the latest iter­a­tion was slightly con­ten­tious, but Gen­shiken is still the premier series for the dis­cern­ing otaku. An aggrand­ised view of the typ­ical socially-awkward young adult but the core story of an hon­est pas­sion for their obses­sion and the internal rela­tion­ships between all the mem­bers of the group is best viewed as a won­der­ful otaku soap opera.

Say­on­ara Zetsubou Sensei

Adapt­ing a sup­posedly impossible to adapt manga was not going to be easy, but SHAFT proved that it had the mad­ness cap­able of doing just that. The first series was a riot of dis­par­ate anim­a­tion styles, quick-fire jokes and zani­ness, unfor­tu­nate then that each suc­cess­ive series after it got pro­gress­ively slop­pier. The over­rid­ing feel­ing was that if the stu­dio weren’t going to put the effort in, don’t bother.

Heroic Age

A slow burn­ing sci­ence fic­tion opera that bor­rows lib­er­ally from Greek myth­o­logy — the title not with­stand­ing — and presents a char­ac­ter led drama on the search for a uni­ver­sal saviour who was raised by the Golden Tribe. Sweep­ing in scope, it is a poised and thought­ful series that doesn’t shy away from inter­stel­lar com­bat, but always main­tains a pseudo-scientific grip on events.

Gankut­suou

Prob­ably one of Gonzo’s last great series, Gankut­suou is a loose adapt­a­tion of Alex­an­dre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, fol­low­ing Albert and his deal­ings with the tit­u­lar Count as well as numer­ous other aris­to­cratic fam­il­ies. Pol­ished and visu­ally unique, Gankut­suou takes some liber­ties with the source mater­ial but with Jouji Nakata voicing the count and the impossibly pretty Hay­dee present, there’s a lot to fall in love with.

Other lists

There were of course numer­ous other dec­ade and year end lists.

Tak­ing the dif­fi­cult route with fifty entries:

• Mar­tin / Mono no aware: Part 1, Part 2
• Sasa / Het­ero­chro­mia: 50 animes [sic] of the decade
• Gaguri / Ha Neul Seom: Top 50 Anime Series of the Decade
• Japanator: 50 — 41, 40 — 31, 30 — 21, 20 — 11, 10 — 1

Carving up by category:

• Psgels / Star Crossed Anime Blog: Part 1, Part 2
• Spiral / Bok­uta­chi no Blog: Anime, Manga, Flops, Anime movies, Couples, Male char­ac­ters
• Kur­ogane / Kurogane’s Anime Blog: Part 1, Part 2
• Exec­ut­ive Otaku / THAT Anime Blog: Trends and moments that made me suf­fer in 2009

I’ve obvi­ously missed loads, drop any other ones into the com­ments and I’ll see if there’s enough to do an aggreg­ate total.

Video

The You­Tube ver­sion of the video was cross­pos­ted on TheO­taku and garnered a few choice com­ments:

I’m also won­der­ing who in the world had enough time on their hands to cre­ate this insane video… — ink.black.sky

This video makes me feel like I need to watch more anime. — Des­breko

The com­ments so far on You­Tube are tra­di­tion­ally erudite:

nice — Bloodheaven7

gud job — bozzj­money

 ¶