My Favorite Anime
A page I'm making just for fun. May never go live. Just like thinking about lists.
Salutations! I've been an anime fan since I was a little girl clutching public library copies of the original Card Captor Sakura run, eagerly tracing the flowing lines of Moon's exquisite hair or Fly's bouncy, puffy wings to learn how to draw. I didn't have private, high-speed internet as a kid, so most of my anime wathcing happened when I was a teen and young adult, in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. To be honest, that time period formed my taste in anime and this list can be pretty dated to that time. Still, I think everything on here truly is very high-quality for differing reasons.
One note: I have always been a stickler that anime and mange should be rated differently, since a paper comic and an animated cartoon are different art forms. We've all seen a gorgeous mange get adapted into a mediocre, poorly-paced mess, and we've all seen soulless manga adaptions of incredibly anime. This is specifically my favorite anime list; a list of favorite manga, which I will probably also make, would have different entries.
Also, this is not a favorite list of anime movies either... again, I consider them differently enough from series that I would rank them seperately.
And so, a nostalgia-colored, highly subjective, rapidly-aging of a list of one idiosyncrat's best ever!
Yeah, I'm gay. Keep scrolling.
You may know Rose of Versailles. ROV is/was an absolute classic of the shoujo genre. Written and drawn by Riyoko Ikeda, ROV is the rather fictionalized story of the life of Marie Antoinette, but it is also 50% the story of Ikeda-san's made-up Franch rEvolution fan character, the androgynous Oscar de Jarjeyes, a woman raised as a man to carry on the family name and look damn good doing it.
I loved ROV, but I preferred the manga to the anime. And my Ikeda Riyoko bishoujo of choice is not Oscar, but an objectively worse option named <3 Asaka Rei <3, a substance-abusing depressed 17-year-old called the <3ANGEL OF DEATH<3 by other high school girls, who are in love with her, like me, as I am also in love with her.
It's not just because of Hisoka. But it could be.
I have been an absolute Togashi Thot for a long time. This isn't a controversial opinion, Togashi Yoshihiro is an all-tiem great of shounen manga and has been for decades. HunterXHunter and YuYu Hakushou are his two most popular series and they're both great watches. If I were to say what draws me to Togashi-san's works, there is sort of a trifecta of stuff that keeps me coming back: the bloody-knuckled ne'er-do-well delinquents he writes with such charm, the tactile, weighty, absolutely granular strategical detail with which he constructs his combat, and the absolutely top-tier villains. Togashi is GOOD at villains. Arc villains, final bosses, bit villains, eternally vexing antihero frenemies. He's good at it.
(as a side note, my favorite Togashi villain is YuYu Hakushou's third arc villain Sensui, an absolute trashfire freakshow of a fucked-up (subtextual) queer with a delightfully cringe fake mental illness that I shall describe as 'problematic all the way down.' So, watch YYH too.)
HXH is a classic shounen, an anime you have probably at least heard of before. It enjoys a classic shounen setting in which a very vibrant cast of characters, who posess a special power not existent in the real world, use that power to develop wildly variant fighting styles and beat each other into a pulp with increasinly dire stakes in the background. I know a lot of people who watched season one and didn't get farther, and I don't blame them. It's a long show, and, since it just gets better as it goes on, well... the beginning is the least-good part. If you keep watching, though, you will be well rewarded.
I think this is going to be the most unpopular entry on this list. I don't think most people think Tutu is this good.
Oh well.
Princess Tutu is an anime about ballet, and it knows its source material very well. I am a sucker for art that is about other modes of art, because I love the creative adaptations of he source material into another art form and the connections they draw. I love books about music, I love comics about movies, I love movies about painting, I love dances about weaving and, well, I loved this anime about dance. The bedrock of Tutu is a love for classical ballet and an encyclopediac knowledge of ballet that serves as the raw material from which the characters are made.
That sort of sincere passion for art, channeled into making poor art, will always serve to make me ready to love an anime. But what does make me love this anime is the characters, all of which I just love to itty-bitty pieces. It has four main characters and I would rip my goddamn arms off trying to decide which of the four is my favorite because it genuinely is every single one of them. In fact, I think I'll spend the meant of this review introducing you to the four of them, form the most important to the least.
Poor girl. Ahiru (literally translates to 'duck') is a duck. I'm not kidding--the rest of the main cast are reincarnations (kind of) of important characters of this story. Ahiru, though, is a duck, a simple, very literal bird who saw the beautiful prince dancing and fell in love with him.
But then Duck is told (by who?) that the prince is sad--that he needs help. She is made an offer: turn into a girl so that she can help the prince regain his lost emotions, and she will be of service to him. She will be able to turn into a magical swan princess with the power to heal his heart and ease the suffering of those around him, tortured by his excess shed emotions. However, if she ever expresses her feelings to him, she will turn back into a simple duck, forever, and her story is over--though the story of the beautiful prince will live on.
She's actually the protagonist, which I forgot to mention. Main character, whole show.
I love Ahiru. She's good all he way down, with a surface-level cheerful kindness that is wrapped around a deeper, understanding, compassionate kindness, around and even deeper core of sheer empathy.
That's--I said four characters. I don't even like this guy.
When I said that 'someone' offered to let Duck turn into a girl so she could save the prince, that 'someone' is Drosselmeyer. He wrote the story that everyone but Ahiru came from, The Prince and the Raven. He's the real-world author fo the story. What's kind of weird about that is he died a long time ago, but Ahiru doesn't know that and doesn't know to question it. It's also weird that he can turn ducks into girls. It's also weird that the characters form his story are in the real world going to ballet school. It's also weird that he can shift through the background of Gold Crown Town, the too-pictureesque town in which the story takes place (the anime, I mean), his looming, titanic visage haunting the facades of buildings, the bowl of a fountain, the cobblestone street, the very sky above Ahiru's tiny red head.
Why is he doing this? This is kind of... genuinely awful for everyone involved. Why doesn't anyone think this is weird? Why are so many people just... talking animals, which the narrative will literally state they weren't before, but no one seems to be actually bothered by this? Isn't it--wait, why can't you fix the prince? Why won't you? Aren't you supposed to be... I mean... dead?
Princess Tutu has an atmosphere not quite like anything else I've ever seen. It's moody, it's heroic, it's germanic, it's honestly a shockingly good blend of gory european folk tales with the conventions of shoujo. It's heavy and expressionist and dark, it's soft and fairy-tale like. I watched it over and over when I was young; it was one of the few shows that made me geninely feel 'transported' in a way that made he concept of being 'transported' new. This one took me away, picked me up out of my life and put me somewhere else.
It can be very silly; there's a filler episode or two that I usually skip. People give me mixed reviews about whether or not they think the ending lands, and I admit the ending isn't my favorite part either. I tend to loop episodes from late in the first season and the middle of the second, when all the main four are having concentric breakdowns around each other, magnetically repelled by and pulled to each other, each completely baffled at what's happening ebcause they're all missing essential peices that you, the viewer, absolutely have. They keep running around each other and suffering and struggling, and you watch with a bird's-eye view over the storybook setting of Gold Crown Town, feeling...
How do I describe that feeling? I've never quite managed.
a part of me says that Mononoke should be nuber one. This is one of the most unique, beautiful, fascinating, and re-watchable anime I have ever seen. Some of these anime I have not done much repeat watching. I have seen the entierty of Mononoke (though it is only twelve episodes) at least six times. I once watched the whole series on an overnight transatlantic flight, and that sure is a memory.
First off, Mononoke is one of he most visually stunning shows I have ever seen. Take a look at a few screencaps, and just know that the style is even weirder and more off-putting animated (complimentary).
Second off, Mononoke's 'protagonist' is a blatantly inhuman but intriguingly under-explained figure named 'The Medicine Seller,' Kusuriuri. Kusurirui is a man of few words, and they don't always make sense.
He appears to purposefully track and hunt Mononoke, a slightly fictionalized rendition of a subtype of Japanese folk spirits whish are powerful, dangerous, and usually malicious. He weilds a magic sword that will always just fucking gut that Mononoke, but he can only unsheathe is when three conditions are met: he has to discover the spirit's Form, Truth and Regret.
He describes what 'form', 'truth', and 'regret' mean five times in the show. A show I have seen a half-dozen times. I do not know what these things are.
Well, I'm being a bit evasive. I have my personal summaries of 'form', 'truth', and 'regret', but I think you get a better esperience if you watch the show without me over-explaining it first. After all, it's a mystery show. It's five mysteries, one right after the other, some longer and some shorter. Each begins with the revelation of the existence of a Mononoke (sometimes before and sometimes after a little scene-setting) and end with its secrets revealed and its head spewing copious, technicolor blood. But it's not about the fights, which are always spectacular, it's about getting to them, the very slow and very intriguing increase of informaiton you get about the process itself over the course of five mysteries.
Mononoke is classy. It never over-explains. It never shows every single card, but the endings are still emotionally fulfilling. Each new set and conceit is intriguing and a group of people can argue about which of the five mysteres is the best (thematically? plot-wise? artistically?) for hours.
Both because it'll be fun and because it'll go farther in convincing you to take a watch than anything else, here are juicy three-sentence sumamries of all five mysteries, only touching on elements you learn right off the bat:
Fists pound on the door of an old but wealthy inn in the middle of the night. A woman late in her first pregnancy is running through the rain, seeking shelter. Within the inn waits a humble medicine seller, and a inn staff that seem to be particularily repulsed by the thought of sheltering this mother-to-be in need--but why?
A beautifully srange merchant ship is transporting an assortment of travellers to a faraway shore, including the merchant himself, a young beauty, a monk, a story-teller, and a humble medicine seller. Overnight, the boat travels far off course, though such a mistake should have been impossible,a nd into dangerous waters where spirits are known to roam. It becomes clear very soon that this was no mistake--someone on this boat wanted to come to this evil-infested sea, but who?
A miserable young woman waits judgement in jail, where she is visited by someone she has never met before: a humble medicine seller. She tells him what crime she is conviced of, and he tells her that she's wrong--but she's not wrong. How could she be wrong when she did it?
A young woman who is the heir to an ancient and lauded school of incense-burning announces her intent to take a husband. Four men declare interest in marrying her and agree to take place in a formal incense-smelling contest to decide who is worthy of becoming her husband. But one of the men doesn't show, and in his place comes a humble medicine-seller, who asks if he can fill the empty chair and compete--not that anyone else knows why.
The highly-antipicated day in which a newly-built train station opens has arrived, and the lucky few who won a ticket to the first train out of the station flock inside. But the train comes to a sudden stop when the conductor, in a panic, believes he hit somehting on the tracks. When seven passengers get back up, they find they are suddenly in an empty train car together with no one else and no way out--until somehow, impossibly, a humble medicine seller enters from a non-existent other train car, and placidly, nigh cheerfully informs them they are about to have the worst goddamn day of their miserable lives.
How I love him.
'Jesus Christ,' you're asking yourself, 'What the hell beats Utena? Is it Eva?'
No, it's not Eva. Not knocking Eva, Eva is good drugs. I liked Eva. I liked the ending. I liked the 'I'm so fucked up' scene.
That was an evasive introductions, but how do I describe RGU? If you're an anime fan, now that it's been thirty fucking years, you have either seen Utena or you have been avoiding it. Utena is a staple anime, legandarily weird, infamously cerebral, and Queen of being Blatantly Lesbian decades before you could just pick up Strawberry Lily I Love You Darling volume 13 hot off the shelf and marketed to teens. Best of all, even if you haven't seen it, among its dual reputation for being Gay and Weird, it casts a long shadow behind it. Under the cowbells and curries and snails in the pencil-box, if you've heard enough about Utena, sooner or later you caught the whiff of fear. You might have seen a friendly Content Warning that seemed kind of... uh... extreme based on what you knwo about the Weird Sword Lesbians anime. You might have seen tags about the poster crying and screaming and throwing up ect and you're not sure it's jsut because she ships it hard. You might have seen a real freaky screencap.
Ah, whatever. Let's not worry about that. Utena is a school story, kind of. It takes place in a school that is a very charasmatic setting, part of the story like the arched, spiking sets of German Expressionist films are part of the story, more eeffective in its intent to impress than half of the rabidly, stiflingly weird cast of characters. It is a story about dueling, and the pacing is usually 'an episode (or two) of tension lead up to a duel between two characters whose deals we have been slowly teasing out.' It's a magical girl anime with a shiny, repeated transformation sequence and excellent magical items. It is a deftly-done queer romance about breaking out from a system build brick by ballustrade to oppress you. It's an anime I would genuinely describe as 'surreal fiction', in the way that Vandemeer's Anihilation is surreal fiction; there is one plot and you can easily follow it, but the plot is only half the point. The other point is a fearlessly strange and inventive mode of storytelling that uses as many conceits as it fucking wants to tell a story hat is doing it's damndest to hide itself into the cracks and crevices, the space between the lines, so that you can't see the ugliness hidden inside. It's about your girlfriend's much older brother.
Mushi-shi looks like this.
_the_images_
Mushi-shi and Mononoke are often reccomended in the same breath. They came out around the same time and have similarities, namely in protagonist. Unlike the mysterious and otherwordly Medicine Seller, though, the protagonist of Mushi-shi is so down-to-earth he is practicaly earth. Dirt, grime, and bugs. Especially bugs.
This is Ginko. He is homeless and hunts weird ghost bugs. He is rude and smokes all day and he is the only anime man I have ever called 'husbando,' and I did it with my full chest.
Here are some other anime that I like that I didn't want to write ~1000 words about!
I'm showing my age, but I'm such a sucker for OHSHC. Plot: In a magnet school for absurdly wealthy high schools, a group of bored boys have created their own host club to entertain bored girls. The school's only poor scholarship sudent, a tomboy names Haruhi, is mistaken for a real boy and recuited into the host club. By the time they all realize she's a girl, it's too late. Silly romantic comedy hijinks ensue with a sort of... glaze of homoeroticism on top that was just entrancing to me as a closeted teenager. OHSHC has a lot of heart that doesn't come through in a bare-bones description and it's one of the only romcoms that I am weak to. I have a type advantage agains the genre usually.
Absolute hero of an explicitely queer anime. No. 6 is a dystopian sci fi with solid worldbuilding about an absolutely charming little freak of a gifted child getting whisked away to a societal outcast's underground world of really old books and cross-dressing. The plot is interesting, but not as absorbing as the honestly refreshingly weird relationship that builds between the two individual and compelling protagonists. Fair warning, I did some reading of the light novels that the anime is based off of and some of my vast affection comes from ahving that extra text in my head, but the anime itself should inject you with love for these two freaks on its own.
Hey, in this anime they fight to the death every arc to obtain a Tasty Food, and then they eat the Tasty Food, making them strong enough to go beat up the next obstacle in front of the next Tasty Food. Every episode starts with a food-based pun delivered with mythological gravitas. It's good.