Wow, I should probably update this on occasion. Anyways, happy new year, all! And what better way to get things going than by complaining about the previous 12 months.
Let's be honest: 2008 was a pretty awful year for anime, all things considered. No, really. Take a look at this list, go through it, and count the number of series (no movies or OVAs, those are cheating) that you're certain will become future classics. Seriously, I'll wait.
All done? Now, second question: remember how many of those there were back in 2007? Go check, if you need to. Kind of eye-opening, isn't it?
Yup, it's been a bad year. Last time I wrote a top ten list; this time I couldn't justify making it past five. And that's even by breaking my own rules about including sequels. It was about the time I realized I'd have to put Macross Frontier and Ikkitousen Great Goddamned Guardians (decent but distinctly unspecial shows) on the list that I decided to cut it off after the ones that really deserved the credit. So, five (plus one tie) it is. That said, they're all excellent series, and I recommend you give 'em a shot if you haven't already.
1 - Daughter of Twenty Faces. The best show of last year was also its biggest surprise: nobody, least of all me, expected anything out of this one. Like 2007's Claymore, this show had no money worth speaking of but plenty of heart and spirit to make up for it. I think they actually had less money than Claymore, yet somehow they clawed their way through a wonderfully executed set of 22 episodes. Aya Hirano reaches her career height as Chiko, the hardest badass of the year next to Duke Togo. Tomizawa Nobuo is completely forgiven for that whole Futakoi Alternative thing. A fantastic effort all around, really.
2 - Zoku Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and Goku Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. The original series was already one of the best shows of 2007, but in '08 Shaft managed to make it even better. The jokes are funnier, the parody is more biting - and this is an anime, something which (let's be honest) tends to do satire with all the subtlety of a blackjack to the back of the head. Even if they don't make any more, SZS and its sequels are already up there with Azumanga and Guu as the best comedy animes of the decade.
3 - Kurenai. Red Garden, Kurenai's predecessor, was always a little too offbeat for me to truly love. With Kurenai, though, the team's found its footing. The singing's back, but thankfully limited to one (really fantastic) episode. The bizarre twists are still around, but here they actually work. At heart, Kurenai's a talky show driven by character interaction and occasionally broken up by action sequences. Unfortunately, those action sequences are the series' weak point (they remain underdeveloped up until the final episode, where they finally get it right). Still a fantastic show by any measure, though.
4 - Toradora! Jeremy Clarkson, internationally famous blowhard, once reasoned that the existence of the monumentally expensive Aston Martin DBS could be explained, essentially, as its being an Aston Martin DB9 where each part was a little bit better. I feel a similar sentiment towards Toradora: it's as if someone got ahold of 07's Lovely Complex, redid all the designs, and then set to work improving everything they could find. Toradora is an unbelievably good show, for what it is. Just like that, it set a whole new standard for anime romantic comedy: its best rival, the Nodame Cantabile sequel, constantly seemed tired and old-fashioned in comparison. The only reason it's not further up the list is SZS.
5 (TIE) - Michiko to Hatchin. A better successor to Cowboy Bebop than Samurai Champloo. No, really: this is the spiritual sequel that no one saw coming. It's got Shinichiro Watanabe's fingerprints all over it, despite the fact that he's (apparently) only responsible for the music. Still a few episodes to go, but it's been so fantastic thus far that I have a hard time believing it'll manage to go wrong at the end.
5 (TIE) - Code Geass R2. Many of the shows on this list are flawed in one way or another, but Code Geass The Second tops them all in this regard. Without question, the final episodes of this series are the single biggest disaster of the year; it's as if the writers expected all along to get themselves a third season, and were only told two months from the end that it wasn't going to happen. There is a tangible sense of "oh shit, we need to wrap this up fast!!": the entirety of what was presumably to be Code Geass The Third gets sliced apart, pulverized, concentrated, and shot directly into your arm in the space of some three episodes. It's an awful, unforgivable mess. The fact that the show belongs on this list, despite the ending being terrible, is not only a side effect of this year's general mediocrity however: for most of its running length, in fact, R2 was the best piece of entertainment in animedom, mixing high melodrama with the goofiest of plot devices and some delightfully out-of-place high school hijinx. Code Geass was never half as serious as it pretended to be, and that's to its credit.
Farewell, 2008; may 2009 succeed where you couldn't quite make it.
