Tag: Anime

Top 10 Anime of the 2010s

The 2010s were a major decade for myself personally and solidified my anime fandom as a permanent fixture in my life going into adulthood. Early in the decade I started this blog (and actually updated it), hosted a podcast, and got as deep into the fandom as I could stomach… and emotionally barely survived the experience. The second half of the decade I unfortunately pulled back on writing but dedicated myself to creating compelling content for anime conventions. Now moving into the 2020s I hope to continue my work on anime and the fandom in some way weather it is return to this blog, finally start to create videos, or simply keep traveling to Japan and getting lost in the woods and eaten by a yokai; whatever form that takes, I’m happy that anime is an unshakable foundation of my life even as life takes me to unexpected places and my goals change over time.

So here is my list of the Top 10 anime of the 2010s:

10. Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

Madoka Magica exploded on the scene in 2011 to an unsuspecting audience. The animation was beautiful and the enemies, created using a cutout-craft style of art, were a refreshing change to the art style of Japanese animation at the start of the decade. Madoka Magica was a standard Magical Girl show with a slightly dark twist until the third episode where one of the main characters is brutally killed and the show truly begins. What was set up as a show about a magical girl destroying bad feelings starts to peel back the layers to reveal more and more of the secret world hiding just beyond our sight. Even the most veteran Magical Girls didn’t realize what their actions were truly contributing too and the most horrifying realization is that the system they are perpetuating is unchangeable. A powerful witch would appear. Our heroes will die. The powerful conclusion was delayed by the horrible Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster and when the show returned the sacrifices of Madoka and the hope she brought to a world on the brink of collapse was a welcome message after a natural disaster shook Japan to its very core. Many attempts have been made to emulate the series but few have come close to mirroring the elements that made the show a triumph.

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Review: Mirai

Mirai takes the audience on a journey into the world of Kun, his household, his parents, and his ancestors. The past and future converge on Kun when his entire world is disrupted by the birth of his baby sister, the titular Mirai. His adjustment at no longer being the sole target of his parent’s affection leads him to come face to face with his future, and his family’s past.

The film takes place in the young family’s home which is divided up into two sections; the living section and then a playroom separated by a courtyard. The courtyard acts as a transitional area, a place which signifies a change is taking place. When Kun gets upset he runs into the courtyard to escape the situation or person who is upsetting him. As the film progresses the times when Kun retreats to the courtyard triggers journeys into the past or future of his family. In his first journey into this world he is confronted by the family dog who has no sympathy for Kun’s concerns over losing his parents attention. Bitter, the dog just lays out his own experience of being shoved to the side when Kun was born. These anxieties are laid bare when Kun’s grandparents visit and are obsessed with the newborn Mirai, but nearly completely ignore him.

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I wish Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory came out nine years ago

Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory comes about nine years too late. That isn’t to say the story isn’t compelling and that I don’t appreciate them finally picking up exactly where it left off. There is a lot of like about the new chapter of Full Metal Panic, especially as they detach from the formula established in the original and Segura goes off on his own. I’m thrilled that the show exists but I can’t help but wonder why it exists. The last Full Metal Panic! anime came out in 2005 and while there have been a steady stream of light novels and manga released in Japan the anime has all but fallen out of the mind of the American anime fan. Sitting here in the year 2018 where memes are passed around that claim “Kill la Kill” is old school, I find it hard to believe that fans younger than thirty are going to care about an anime that came out in 2002. So how large of an audience can the new Full Metal Panic have? At the time of posting Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory is sitting at about 54th on the Crunchyroll popularity ranking.

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Anime Review: Shirobako

Self indulgence usually comes with a price: Alienating a large part of your audience is the minimum someone can expect from creating a piece of art that is about creating a piece of art. Of course, there are times when the work transcends that self indulgence, when the messages run far deeper than just what the show is about on a surface level. Shirobako has all the trappings of a self-indulgent walkthrough of the anime industry from the perspective of people who live and work in the Anime industry. But it goes beyond that and creates a compelling narrative that anyone can enjoy. There are points in the story that are self-referential fan service, where actual anime creators cameo as helpful guides to our fictional heroes, but the show leaves enough context clues that even uninitiated anime fans can piece together what is happening and at the same time those who get the references enjoy the work that much more. It’s a delicate balance to maintain, but Shirobako handles it in stride.

The tone of the show is set during the very first scene. Our hero Aoi Miyamori is working late collecting key frames from the animators she has recruited to work on Exodus, the first original anime her company Musashino Animation has done in a long time after their recent history of spotty work. Aoi is sitting in her car at a red light listening to a radio show where the hosts are discussing the current state of the Anime industry. The hosts wonder how so many shows are being made every season and conclude that they are indeed in a bubble.

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Review: Your Name

The newest film from acclaimed director Makoto Shinkai, Your Name, follows two teenagers on the edge of adulthood. A boy from Tokyo, Taki, wakes up in the body of country girl Mitsuha and back in Tokyo Mitsuha has taken over the body of Taki. The changes occurs randomly and last one day, forcing the teenagers not only to deal with their own problems but also the issues of their counterpart across the country.

Shinkai enjoys taking his time in a film. He wants to give the audience a complete picture of the world, show them scenes from that world so the audience gets a vivid sense of how the character lives. In Your Name he employs this by the time he takes with each character the day of and after their first possession. But his use of photo realistic art also grounds the film in the reality of the characters and situation. Shinkai establishes time and place through the art, taking time to show elements of each character’s lives to ground them in their respective world.

We see Mitsuha’s world revealed slowly. Her relationship with her friends and their feelings towards the town, her dreams of going someplace bigger where there are cafes and good jobs. Her life as a shrine maiden, the rituals she has to perform, and the way her classmates react to the ancient display of Japanese religion and culture.

Shinkai’s world view about rural Japan and Mitsuha’s role in the world is laid bare by a story that the Shrine Priestess, Mitsuha’s grandmother, tells the young girls. At some point in the past a fire destroyed all records about the shrines role in the town. No documents of the rituals exist any longer. So while the actions of the rituals have been past down what their origin is and what they mean is lost.

This idea of meaninglessness in the rituals of the shrine is reflects how Mitsuha sees them. While she commits to them in order to make her Grandmother happy she has no interest in the shrine. She wants to leave this small town and go into the world. The small town represents a dying worldview, a place in Japan that still retains some of the isolationist mindset of the past. The people there aren’t advancing, aren’t changing with the rest of the world, the town isn’t attempting to draw young people in by changing to adapt to modern culture. It’s a dying world with people who are stuck, unmoving, as the rest of the country advances. They no longer know what their role in the world is, they just keep living the life they’ve lead for hundreds of years without thinking.

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Thoughts on Anime Panels in 2017

Home from Anime Boston and breathing a sigh of relief that my panels went off mostly successfully I found myself reflecting on why I do panels at Anime conventions. There are a few emotions that I had over the weekend that I’m struggling to compress before moving forward.

I enjoy doing panels but doing the same panels over and over again does start to lower the satisfaction of giving it. This was the second time doing my “When Hentai Goes Bad” panel and I presented it to a packed room of about 500 people. It was thrilling, but even though the room was bigger I didn’t get the same feeling I did when I did it the first time. My heavily modified “When Moe goes Bad” turned out to be my most satisfying panel to give because I just put a lot of work into it right before this convention.

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Thanks to everyone who made it out last night in the cold and rain to watch some cartoons with me. #animeboston2017 #animeboston #anime #animecon

A post shared by Scott Spaziani (@scottspaziani) on Apr 1, 2017 at 7:24am PDT

That’s probably most of the problem. The heavy amount of work I put into “When Hentai Goes Bad” before I ran it the first time last summer probably made giving it all the more satisfying. My preparation for giving it last weekend at Anime Boston was cutting some clips and running through the notes. So ultimately I think I will always find giving new panels, or completely reworking panels, to be the most satisfying part of the work: Releasing something I worked hard on to a live audience. But at the same time I wonder how I can get that satisfaction more often. I’ve considering making more YouTube videos, going back to writing regularly, and getting out and taking more photos as key creative outlets. But I don’t do any of them enough. I want to chase the high I feel when giving a brand new panel. I just need to create more things more often.

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Trying to keep the crowd excited last night while #animeboston checks 400 IDs at the door #anmeboston2017 #wristbandsplease

A post shared by Scott Spaziani (@scottspaziani) on Apr 1, 2017 at 7:59am PDT

I will continue to give panels at conventions because of the creative satisfaction it gives me to create a presentation and then immediately get a live reaction. But I need to think of new ways to channel that desire and to create more often. After all, just doing two or three conventions a year is far from enough.

Some advice I can offer to new panelists or people wanting to start:

Nothing is Ever Perfect

What prevents me from blogging a lot is that I keep going over a piece that I’ve written until I’m satisfied. This forces me into a kind of paralysis and delays posting completed works for weeks at a time.

This isn’t limited to writing either. I find myself doing it with videos and photos that I finish editing, then let sit without doing anything with because something in me wants to keep working on it. I’ve forced myself to post things more often and to quiet that voice, but sometimes it’s overwhelming.

The thing about panels is that there is a hard deadline: The day of the event. And the act of presenting the panel is an act of creation in the moment. Once a sentence leave your mouth, it’s delivered to the audience and can never be taken back and re-edited. As a creator it’s a refreshing exercise.

That doesn’t prevent me from analyzing the situation afterwards which can still create anxiety. But the creative piece is done.

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On love and Ice Skating

Yuri on ice was an immediate hit last season for a lot of good reasons. The characters were empathic and well thought out, the ice skating animation was gorgeous, and hints at a homosexual relationship in an otherwise standard sports anime lit a fire inside fans eager to see that narrative played in something that wasn’t pornography or boys love. But Yuri on Ice goes beyond just a normal love story between two men. It’s about people passionate about the sport they have decided to dedicate every waking moment of their lives too.

The core of what Yuri on Ice is about can be seen in the very first episode, the catalyst of the story where Victor decides to drop everything and go to Japan to train Yuri. Yuri has been studying Victor for years, attempting to follow in his footsteps. He has followed his career and even got the same type of dog as Victor. Yuri very much has built his career as a figure skater, his entire life, after Victor.

When Victor saw Yuri skating he wasn’t just watching another skating copying one of his routines. He was watching someone who had studied that routine with passion and who was recreating it out of pure love for the art form and for the person who had developed it: Victor. Up to that point Yuri was a talented skater but he lacked a goal, he lacked passion. Yet when he wasn’t competing, when he performed alone for his friends on that ice rink he preformed a master level routine with elegance and style.

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Two years later

I started my Anime blog in 2010 for a couple reasons. I had run a few blogs over the last couple years but I wanted to focus on write longer pieces and try to build an audience around it. I choose anime because that was one of my consistent hobbies for ten years previously. I set up the website, I looked for people on twitter to follow, and I made a big deal about entering the aniblogging space.

Otaku in review was never a huge success but I got reactions from the right people. People I respected in the anime community came out and complimented my work. I became a known quantity in the space. I started to collaborate with some of the biggest names in Anime blogging. I mark the work I did at the time as the highlight of my professional career, despite never earning a dime from any of it. I cherish every single episode of the podcast and every single blog post I ever wrote. Then I stopped. One day I just said that it was enough. I put everything on the shelf and I walked away.

There are many reasons why I walked away. Most don’t have to do with any negative experience that I had. Simply put, I was completely burnt out on anime. At the time new anime had entered a dry period after an extreme high point. I was getting tired of just writing and talking about anime. As I started to feel burned out I started to spend time on other hobbies, such as American cartoons and comics. I didn’t feel like I could write about those things on the site I created. Finally, I wanted more free time because my job took up a lot of time and energy. I wanted to enjoy my hobbies without having to critique them.

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Con-vergence reflection: The Internet Generation

I had the pleasure of sitting in on Charles Dunbar’s Con-vergence panel at Otakon Vegas, in which Charles addresses the issues around why other fandoms seem to be taking over anime conventions. Charles’ conclusion is that anime conventions are more welcoming places, that the anime fandom is just more accepting of other fandoms. Then there is the more bleak side of things, the theory that anime fandom is just a secondary or lesser fandom than some of the more prevalent media represented.

The chief cause of the weakening presence of anime at anime conventions is that anime is a medium, not a genre or a single show. So where a group of ten thousand people may not have that many shows in common, three thousand of them have all seen Doctor Who and the other seven thousand has seen the Marvel film adaptations. So the Iron Man cosplayer is going to have more positive attention than the Lupin cosplayer sitting in the corner. Anime is a unique beast in this respect. Single media conventions, like a Star Trek convention, assume that all attendees share at least a common cannon. Even the old school science fiction conventions were dominated by the mass media properties like Star Trek, Battlestar, and the like. With anime there can be almost zero connection between the forty year old fans drinking in a bar discussing the tape trading days and the fourteen year old girls running around in Hatialia cosplay.

The element that made anime so appealing was that it was an entire world of media waiting to be explored, but that allows individual fans to go off into a million directions. This issue can be visibly seen at conventions. There are people who go to the conventions just to cosplay, play dress up and hang out with their friends. There are people at the same event who want to seek out academic programing in order to learn more about the medium they’ve come to celebrate. The latter is a much larger and younger group, one that may never make the transition to going to panels about anime. So if their friends shift over to dressing up as a non-anime fandom that is where most of the group will go. Anime fandom on the Internet is similar. I can write my essays all I want but the mass of people looking at screen caps and writing fan fiction isn’t going to care.

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Top 5 Anime of 2009

I know everyone is making these kind of lists and that I’ve already stated my top anime of 2009 on the podcast. But I figured this is a good way to look back at the year and maybe help readers catch a few shows they missed before getting swamped by the upcoming Winter season. I limited the list to five because I don’t think I have seen enough shows to warrant a top ten list. Even if I watched twenty shows, it’s probably somewhere around that, picking ten is still half the shows I happened to see.

I only have one rule for this list. The anime must have finished airing or being released in Japan or United States in 2009. If I have already seen the show in fansubs it becomes ineligible for the list the year it gets an R1 release.

The reason for this is because there are certain films that I have refused to see until I can get them on blu-ray. So I don’t want to exclude them from future lists. At the same time I really want this to be a list of the year the shows were originally aired in Japan. So I’m going to try the middle ground.

On to the list:

5. Clannad After Story

I wasn’t completely in love with the original Clannad. It was a nice little series but, like all the key adaptations, it had some serious problems. There are just some elements that do not translate from visual novel to anime well. Clannad, and Kannon before it, get repetitive and predicable, not to mention melodramatic.

Clannad After Story was able to shed most of the limitations of an adapted light novel. The concept of a high school love story being carried on after graduation was unique and presented in a way that felt genuine. Things aren’t all roses and fireworks after high school. The real world has to be tackled. Bills have to be paid. Clannad After Story, despite the melancholy and strange plot devices, is a well executed love story about two people who just wanted to live a normal life. It also will destroy your soul and reconstruct it in its own image. Just saying.

4. Casshern Sins

I have never seen a Casshern property before watching this latest iteration of the ancient franchise. The quality of the animation alone should earn it a place on this list. But on top of the ascetic value the show featured an incredible sound track and a solid story about the fear of death and what it means to be mortal. The dark atmosphere of the series was balanced with characters that were able to absolutely melt your heart without being obnoxious. The action was good, if a bit repetitive, but the real value of the show comes from the well presented themes. What does it mean to be mortal? What does it mean to be immortal? What is the power of hope?

3. Canaan

Canaan is one of the best action shows that has come out in a long time. It avoids being a stoic story of bitter revenge by giving the seemingly heartless Canaan a unbelievably cheerful foil. In fact all of the dark characters have foils which gives the show a tonal balance between light and serious. The animation is spectacularly well done and the action is fast pasted and fluid.

The most illustrative scene is when the President of the United States proclaims “LOVE AND PEACE” to a gathering of diplomats before being subjected to a deadly virus. Yes, it goes back and forth like that throughout the entire 12 episode run.

2. Ride Back

Ride Back finally blends normal animation with CG mechs that enhances, not distracts, from the overall quality of a show. From the first scene, which features the heroine doing ballet, the audience is given some of the most beautiful art and animation I have ever seen in a television show. The story doesn’t disappoint either, bringing into question the nature of advancing military technology in civilian hands, the question of unlocking ones talent, and a frightening look into a powerful government based on fear of terrorism make this one hell of a loaded 12 episode near-masterpiece. The only factor holding the show back from gaining the number 1 stop is an abrupt ending that was obviously rushed due to time constraints. One more episode and this show could have been flawless.

1. Toradora!

Nothing beats a good love story. Except a good love triangle and the only thing that beats that is a love square. Toradora! is the show that I watched the second it came out and immediately demanded more. The characters were deep, including the background characters, lead by the growing friendship come relationship of Taiga and Ruiji, the two social rejects of the school who help each other to grow together to become part of the class.

The best aspect of Toradora! is that the audience is unsure which of the three female characters to root for because each has their advantages and failings. You want to love them all. The dynamic love story, the excellent sound track, and beautiful art rank this show above all others this year because it was able to balance humor and drama, elation and disappointment, love and hate with a masterful command of character.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to watch everything that came out this year. Shows that I’ve seen rated very highly like Bakemonogatari or Eden of the East could have made this list. But at this point I don’t know. If only I could devote all my time to anime.

It is interesting to note that I mainly focus on shows that have a balanced tone. I didn’t realize it at the time but each of these shows, with the exception of Casshern Sins which is 80% “I wanna cut myself” depressing, balances serious themes with periods of light hearted fun. Those are qualities to look for in any good story not limit to just Anime.