Paranoia Agent / Mousou Dairinin

Beautifully-rendered psychodrama about varied and random lives drawn together with a strange commonality. On the surface, they were all attacked by the same mysterious little boy with a bent baseball bat and golden rollerblades; beneath this, however, what similarities do they share? Why can the old man mathematically draw these threads in the parking lot? Why are the victims creepier than the perpetrator? The plot just gets deeper and deeper as this lavish, maniacal story unfolds!

The artwork is fantastic, very clear and quaint; the animation is smooth and high-quality, like it's an OAV or something. The setting is in contemporary Japan and each character, along with their own story, represents a facet of modern culture in that country, illustrating their environment as well as their own personal stories.

Peace Keeper Kurogane

If you like 'Naruto' this may also be up your alley. Tetsunosuke is a 15y.o. kid who wants to become stronger, but rather than call upon comic-book calibre ninja superpowers, he aims to join an assassin's house, Shinsengumi, and ultimately avenge his father's murder. There are some comic elements present as well as very grim drama going on - the child has to learn he can't win by simply bonking the bad guys on the head, but this lesson may come at a cost to his soul. The animation is very smooth, elegant, and sophisticated. The setting and storyline likewise serve to exemplify Japan's love and respect for its own epic past.

Read Or Die

Originally I'd only seen the OAV trilogy for this series, and at the time that's all there was, it wasn't a supplement to a TV series... yet. I freaked out over how incredibly good this show was: of course the animation was fantastic, it was an OAV. But not only that, the shows struck a chord of resonance with me: I adored the sweet main character, Ms. Paper, harding all those books in her apartment, writing notes to herself she'd never read, absent-minded of all things but her undying passion for literature. And then the action came slamming in, and that too was unbelievable: someone was cloning antiquated luminaries in various fields of science and art to create the most bizarre plot for world conquest ever! The OAV had great humor, incredible suspense and thrills, and a little tugging at the heart over unsustainable love in the face of other obligation.

Imagine my inordinate shock and delight when I realized it had been turned into a TV series! I'm not all the way through it, and so far it hasn't manifested any of the characters from the OAV (though initially it hints at Ms. Paper), but I love the characters that are present. They're each magnificent in their own right and I never get tired of watching this show! This is one of my absolute most favored series. The artwork is beautiful, the animation is smooth and attractive, and the storyline is wonderfully rich and detailed! You couldn't ask for anything more.

Scrapped Princess

Coming Soon...

Shingetsutan Tsukihime / True Moon Story/True Lunar Chronicle/Moon Princess

This is a bizarre, serious drama that will take some time for the viewer to piece together. The first episode features a collage of events that occur in the past and present. Some events revoke themselves as they are only hallucinations or nightmares, but it's never obvious in the moment which visions are true and which are delusional. One of the key focal points is that the main character, Shiki, was in a traffic accident he doesn't remember and since then sees lines all over everything. It turns out that these lines show where anything may be shattered or broken if a blade can be drawn along them. This is a very mysterious and compelling story unfolding, I'm anxious to see where it goes.

Shinkon Gattai Godannar

So much action! So much drama! And insider jokes that pepper it all, almost too fast to be perceived... This is the story of a tragic hero who could not save his big-robot pilot partner, the woman who loves him, and every other plot cliché personified. Described as a loving parody of all the giant robot anime of the '80s, this series is rife with subreferences and allusions to please everyone. If you can stand the ridiculousness of it, you're in for a rollicking adventure (yes, there is no other way to describe it).

Though this series hearkens to anime of two decades ago (how time flies!), the animation is state-of-the-art and very sharp. Portions of dazzling CGI accept skillful, striking traditional animation. Action sequences are particularly fast and furious but do not suffer for redistribution of focus: they're just beautiful, skillful, and really fast.

Super Radical Gag Family

Oh, my gods, this one sucks. So why don't I put this in the "Hated" section? Because I have to admit I laugh, and it has other features I like. Like the live-action shots of the Japanese punk band doing the theme song with the great lyrics, and the little cartoon kids sprinting through the live-action streets of Japan, and that bizarre-ass demon that shows up at the last second - what's that about? The humor here is over-the-top bizarre, but not as insane as 'Fooly Cooly' - more like a parody of what's offensive and incomprehensible about anime in the first place. I'll go on collecting these as they come out, never expecting very much from them but at eight minutes a pop it's a reasonable distraction.

Tokyo Underground

Coming Soon...

Trigun

I would be remiss in my duties as an amateur anime reviewer if I neglected to mention Trigun. This is a wonderfully complex comedy/drama about reputation, legend, integrity, and fighting to accomplish one's dreams. Pitching and weaving merrily between serious and ridiculous, the story follows two insurance agents tracking down the notorious Vash the Stampede, as their company is losing money due to his wanton exploits. Turns out that the bulk of the damage is being done by gangs of bounty hunters seeking to collect his head - based on his reputation alone! They're perpetuating his own myth! Of course there's more to it than that, but you'll have to see it all for yourself to appreciate it. This was a series I never wanted to end, I spent a couple weeks camped out in front of my computer going over every last downloaded episode, so excited to see the next adventure and discover how the plot would next unfold. It did eventually end, as all good things do, but the story was still satisfying and complete and I'm okay with how it wrapped itself up.

Twin Spica / Futatsu no Spica

Again, another heart-wrenching tale of tragedy! Man, I can't stand it! Five years before the telling of the story a rocket was launched, headed for space, when one of the boosters failed and the monolithic craft wavered and fell onto a city. The first episode focuses on one little girl who lost her mother, and her teacher whose boyfriend was one of the astronauts. Gods... I actually cried at the end of this one. Maybe I'm just imbalanced today or whatever. But this is not atypical of anime drama, many start out with the death of a parent and a young child getting past the adversity of emotional loss and environmental pressures. It's incredibly tragic! The rest of the series follows her life as she grows up and aspires to become an astronaut, due to conversations she has with a strange ghost in the nearby cemetary. Only in Japan...

Vampire Princess Miyu

I feel kinda silly about this one. I became a very hard and fast fan for this series due to maybe five episodes I'd seen. What I didn't realize was that I was watching the OAV, and that Vampire Princess Miyu was actually a TV series with many more episodes than I'd imagined, none of which I'd seen. I found this out when I picked up the boxed DVD set and none of the episodes looked at all familiar. Oh well, guess I'm in for a treat... This series, from what I saw, is very artistic and elegant in its out-and-out creepiness. It doesn't shock or alarm or leap in your face, it's more a subtle, insinuative horror that comes from inside, and it's reinforced by everything about it: the music, the segues, etc.

Video Girl Ai

It's been a long time since I saw this one but I remember liking it a lot. There's little action, mostly it's about a shy boy who has to learn about relationships through the help of a magical VHS tape that projects a virtual girlfriend. There's a lot of sweetness and sentimentality, I was really into it for this series. It got more mystical after the regular relationship stuff: the courtship centered around thoughtfulness and appreciating the other person, but the search and rescue was the pretty quintessential romantic ideal of standing up for your beliefs in the face of almost insurmountable odds. The animation itself was perfectly fine, sufficient, nothing complex but pretty standard for a TV series.

Witch Hunter Robin

This was instantly one anime series that caught my passion. It was gifted to me maybe a year before I started watching it, so I stupidly forestalled my own coolness in putting this off. Witch Hunter Robin is a series that combines the supernatural with conspiracy theory, balanced against questioning moral fiber and human identity. Heavy meat! It carries the tone of suspense that only crescendoes towards the end, never loses its momentum; every answer brings three or four new questions with it. The characters are left struggling for the answers, but fortunately they do not play stupid or take extra long to figure things out; frequently they conclude refreshing epiphanies that carries the story along swiftly, and many times the plot twists in unexpected directions! This series really is a thriller, not to mention the bold, striking artwork sets every frame of this show apart from standard anime.

You're Under Arrest! (live-action) / Taiho Shichauzo

Maybe this shouldn't technically be under anime, since it's not animation but is live-action, but it's still so cute! It is preceeded by both anime and manga versions; the live-action version is reputed to be possibly less family-friendly than the original anime. I just downloaded the first show and it's pretty cartoonish in its own right: two cute, giggly, overeager and bumbling female traffic cops get into wacky misadventures. The characters are all stratified just as they are in anime, it's easy to imagine that this is what animation would look like if it could be mathematically converted into live-action. You have to learn to get past the costumes and exaggerated expressions to appreciate it within its own context, but if you can do that this show is a lot of fun!