Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
In general, this season has been full of quiet surprises. Ippon! Again, a series about a girls’ judo team, is among the quietest. Aside from the trivium that it is the first TV anime from relatively new studio Bakken Record, almost no one seems to be talking about this thing. Which is a shame, because I think it’s quite good overall, and it’s powering through the woes of being produced by a minor studio in the midst of possibly the worst phase yet of the production bubble very well. That is to say; it looks good most of the time, too.
But I wanted to zone in on just one aspect of that for this small article, because it’s not something I’ve seen discussed much, and I think it really helps establish Ippon‘s visual identity; the judo itself.
It seems obvious enough that an anime even vaguely adjacent to real-world sport would try to depict that sport in the best light possible, but while Ippon! Again mostly looks good, it is very much a production with limits. In the most recent episode, there are several places where those limits are visibly being hit; somewhat wonky character art being the most obvious giveaway. One would thus perhaps think that the actual judo matches themselves would be only passable, but they’d be wrong. Instead, these are easily the strongest moments of the series.
Ippon is, it should be said, more grounded than is usual for an anime production in the 2020s. There are occasional embellishments, such as chibi heads and whatnot, but for the most part this is a series that is decidedly trying to remain in the realm of the plausible. Something that could happen in reality, even if it hasn’t exactly. Working in this mode—where most of the traditional action anime tricks present an unacceptable compromise to the show’s artistic vision and are therefore off-limits—presents the challenge of rendering something as intense as a judo match in “strictly” realistic terms.
The match in question, between the characters Towa Hiura (Chiyuki Miura) and Erika Amane (Aoi Koga), succeeds here with flying colors. The entire fight channels a genuine, raw intensity with technical fighting that seems to me, as an admitted layman, surprisingly realistic. Much of the combat focuses on extremely minute motions; grabbing, counter-grabbing, pulls and steps. It’s deeply compelling stuff on a moment-to-moment basis, as much as any flashier and more “out-there” action moments to come out of this season so far. For added support, the episode at several points flips back and forth between the present match and a flashback, imbuing the present round with a real sense of urgency and stakes. Not always an easy thing to do for something like this.
We don’t actually see the conclusion of Towa and Erika’s match in this week’s episode, as it ends on a cliffhanger. Still, if Ippon! Again can continue channeling its strengths into areas like this, where it really matters, it will remain worth watching.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
I have to be honest, for whatever reason, much more than the past two years, I feel actively nervous about posting this. I’m not sure why? It’s not like my picks for last year were uncontroversial. Regardless, after a very extensive regime of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing(!), I have settled on a form for this list that I am mostly happy with. Hopefully you enjoy it, as well.
#5. SHINEPOST
Yeah, I like SHINEPOSTmore than BOCCHI THE ROCK. I almost feel the need to apologize for that opinion, but I can’t lie to y’all. Between the two, I liked this one just the slightest bit more, despite it being arguably the more conventional of the two. It is what it is, I could’ve gone either way. (And as mentioned yesterday, I did. SHINEPOST and BOCCHI switched places on this list several times.)
But enough handwringing, why’s it actually good? Well, SHINEPOST is rather unlike its genre-fellows on this list. It’s not utopian and relentlessly pleasant like Love Live, and it’s not a candy-surreal kids’ anime dream sequence like Waccha Primagi. Instead, SHINEPOST‘s best and most defining moments chronicle the stomach-flipping knots of anxiety that come from being a performing artist, the demons that can eat a performer’s psyche alive if left unchecked, and the very real camaraderie to be found in those fields anyway, in spite of all that. (In that sense, it’s actually slightly more of a piece with BOCCHI, although they, too, are fairly different.) SHINEPOST, in its brisk single cour, manages to touch on the pressure to succeed, how even modest fame can both weld new friendships together and cleave old ones apart, the fear of never being good enough and the burden of being too good, plus the ticking clockwork of the industry itself. The goal is simple and straightforward from episode 1; TINGS, the protagonists, must fill Nakano Sunplaza to its pleasantly symmetrical 2,222-person capacity for their first anniversary concert. If they can’t, their time with their agency, and as an idol group, is over.
I’m loathe to even float the word “deconstruction” in my writing, especially in its latter-day TVTropes-y usage. But it’s worth pulling up here, not because it describes SHINEPOST but because it neatly defines what it isn’t. All of this, frankly, pretty heavy shit, comes not from some desire to criticize or pull away from the girl group idol anime genre, but from a real love of it. Something that was trying to put distance between itself and its genre’s foundational texts would not be mythologizing something as mundane as a venue in the way SHINEPOST does.
More than that, though, the series’ real strength is that by laying its characters bare; showing their insecurities, their weaknesses, the complexes that gnaw away at their very psyches, it can really make you root for them in a way that something comparatively fluffy (such as again, Love Live) can’t manage to the same degree. If anything, SHINEPOST reminds me a lot more of that series’ perennial rival, Idolmaster, whose 2011 TV series remains the definitive golden standard for this genre. SHINEPOST is a true underdog; a scrappy series about a scrappy idol group from a still relatively-young studio (Studio KAI. Their second entry on this list after Fuuto PI), and all of those hardships, no matter how serious or melodramatic, are buildup to the absolutely electric immediacy of its finale. Even the absolute corniest plot details, like the etymology of the show’s very title (it’s a portmanteau of “shining guidepost”), hit like pure bolts of lightning.
And that kind of momentary transcendence, where you forget that you’re watching a silly cartoon and feel the energy? That is why it’s the best idol anime of 2022. TINGS kill it; accept no substitutes.
#4. CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS
Few anime come with this mixed a pedigree. Sure, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a TRIGGER series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a fact that comes with a hell of a lot of goodwill, but pretty much everything else about this thing would give anyone good reason to be skeptical; start with the fact that it’s a tie-in to the rightly-polarizing open world game Cyberpunk 2077, skip over to the fact that it’s got a Franz Ferdinand song as its OP theme, and roll on from there. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me—and it’s not a small part!—that wanted to boot Edgerunners from the list entirely. I considered deliberately putting off watching it until next year so I wouldn’t have to rank it, and even now that I have seen it, there remains a temptation to dock points less for what it is and more for where it came from. I’m not sure I want many anime to be globally-released tie-in promos for broken-on-release AAA video games. Certainly, the fact that you still, months after the anime’s been out on streaming platforms worldwide, can’t reasonably watch the Japanese audio track with English subtitles (well, you can try, but the sloppy dubtitle track doesn’t really work with the JP audio at all. Thankfully the dub is excellent; this is the only release on the list I watched dubbed, in fact!) is case enough that this probably isn’t how anime should be made.
All this in mind, it’s almost painful how fucking good this thing is. Edgerunners burns so bright that it leaves scorch marks: black as melted plastic and twice as toxic, pure neon, grime and dirt.
David, our protagonist, is a person stripped of his humanity both systemically, and, eventually, with violence. He loses his mother, his home, his status as a citizen, his sanity, his humanity, and, eventually, his life. In one sense, Edgerunners is a gradual sanding-down of his personhood until nothing is left.
Lucy, his co-lead, is an unscrupulous hacker who runs with a mercenary crew. Secretly, she harbors a dream of visiting the moon. It’s a poetic hyperbole; the stars we hang in the sky to keep ourselves going made very literal.
To home in on one specific example, no single moment in anime this year conveys the sheer amount of blasted-out trauma as episode six, which sees the character Maine completely lose his mind as a side-effect of his cybernetic implants. The result is harrowing; all gunfire and blood on the floor. That point is where I realized that putting this anywhere outside the top five would’ve required me to do some major mental gymnastics.
On the whole, the series is deeply discomforting and utterly visceral to watch in action. If this isn’t how anime should be made from a production pipeline point of view, it definitely is how they should be made in terms of having a strong creative vision and following it through to the end as thoroughly as you possibly can. RIP David Martinez; reduced to a tale for the next dreamer.
#3: Chainsaw Man
Forget, for a moment, everything else. Forget the rest of this list, forget that there ever was a Chainsaw Man manga, forget the very notion of ranking and reviewing and processing, debating, analyzing. Focus on one image; a chainsaw, covered in rust, and in blood – which itself will be rust soon enough. Now focus on the boy holding it, the boy who became it. And think, for a moment, about what it takes to travel the vast canyon between those two images.
I have called Chainsaw Man many things on this site, but if you strip everything away; the need to intellectualize the art we love, the fanbase, even the original material itself, you are left with those two images and the gap between them. A boy and his dog; a boy and his instrument of bloody fucking murder. Love twisted up and turned violent in the name of protection, in the name of needing to escape, in the name of trading bad for worse because you don’t know what better looks like. A frizzy-haired punk kid with a drawn knife; that, essentially, is Chainsaw Man.
A lot of other things are Chainsaw Man too, of course. Everyone Denji meets during his journey is or becomes part of him. In some cases, in ways the anime itself has yet to reveal. Death is ever-present, and any insinuation otherwise is a facade.
So, what form does this take? Well, young Denji is a devil-hunter, a professional mower-down of wicked monsters that spawn from humanity’s own fears, from the trivial to the deep-seated. He’s raised by a coldhearted yakuza, only to end up in the care of Public Safety, Japan’s own government-controlled devil-killer force. Along the way he strives for any kind of human connection, gleefully oblivious to his own desires. A recurring refrain from the character is that all he really needs or wants is a roof over his head, three meals a day, and maybe, ambitiously, to touch a girl’s chest before he dies.
Consciously, he probably does think that’s true, but it’s obvious from very early on that he’s looking for something deeper, and that un-articulated desire for true human connection lands him squarely in the palm of Public Safety’s obviously sinister head, Makima. This plot goes unresolved in the first season, but it is already obvious that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind. In this way, Denji is all of us, a hardworking guy being ruthlessly exploited by the system that provides him the few things that he can truly call his own. He makes and then loses his very first friend over the course of just these twelve episodes; how much more is in store for our boy, and how much more can he take?
That’s without even getting into the tangible specifics of the CSM anime as an adaptation. It is a markedly different experience from the manga; slick and polished but never sterile, engaged wholeheartedly in a deep emulation of the live action film that informs so much of original mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s work. It also probably has the best soundtrack of anything on this list, with a truly ridiculous twelve separate ending themes—one for each episode!—all of which go ridiculously hard in their own way. On the whole, we can easily say that, yes, this is the best-case scenario for adapting this material. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.
So yeah, all that poetic nonsense and it’s still only at #3. Look! I hate feeling like I have to justify every placement on this list, but this one does warrant at least a little explanation, I think. Part of it is that the show does have a tiny amount of minor flaws—a handful of very minor production gripes in a few specific scenes in a few specific episodes. On a narrative level you could also maybe make the case that Himeno dies a little too soon—but mostly, it’s just that incredibly, the Chainsaw Man anime has not actually gotten to the truly unhinged parts of its source material quite yet, and I’d feel a little bad for putting the cart before the horse. What point is there in giving out a gold medal to a rookie athlete? Even the very best have room for improvement. If I’m going to rank Chainsaw Man as the best anime in a given year, I want it to be a season where it is at the absolute fucking apex of its powers, something I can’t deny. Until then, it can settle for the bronze.
So, on that admittedly shaky logic. Yeah, still just third place. I could have put it at #1, and I would’ve felt just fine about doing so. To be honest, I like this, my #2 and my #1 pick about equally (I could maybe even argue for Edgerunners back in the last entry). But the following two anime are a little more undersung, and they’re also more self-contained, two things that do matter to me. I have to confess a certain irrational fondness for the underdog, too. So just wait, Chainsaw Man. Your day has yet to truly come.
#2. Vampire in The Garden
To be honest, I so badly want to just tell you to read my review of this, where I was reduced to clumsy poetry in an attempt to convey, if not necessarily describe, what this series means to me. But for one thing that’s lazy, for another thing, would it really help? I am still not done processing Vampire in The Garden, an achingly beautiful piece of fiction, and perhaps an important one as well.
The real truth of the matter is that queer stories that treat queer characters as people are still far rarer than you might assume. There are plenty that are cute, or that use us as tear-jerking props in a cynical way, but there aren’t really that many that feel lived-in, studied, like they were made to resonate with an audience of proper fucking queers first and foremost, with anyone else as a secondary concern. Vampire in the Garden really does feel that way. Is it intentional or just a staggering coincidence? If it is intentional, as far as I’m aware, no one’s ever said as much, so ultimately, I can’t really say so. What I can say is that Vampire feels important, if not to “queer people” as a group, then at least to me, personally. Somewhat frustratingly, though, it is such a shining, glistening thing that it falls apart like gossamer if you try to grasp it too tightly. You can describe its plot, but describing why it’s great is much harder.
In basic terms, Vampire is a story about two people who fill a void in each other’s lives. Both protagonists, the human factory worker Momo and the vampire queen-on-the-run Fine, have lost someone close to them. Through the struggle of eventually connecting with each other and healing through this shared loss, they are beaten down again by the world around them; both the vampires that seek to return Fine to her throne and the humans who hunt Momo down as a traitor, to be returned to her dreary existence in the city-tower-prison that much of humankind now resides in. Along the way, they seek an ineffable “paradise”, somewhere they can coexist in peace. Will it surprise you to learn they never find it? Not really, anyway. They pass through Fine’s own dilapidated manor, a segregated town where vampires and humans live side by side in only the most literal of senses, a village run on blood sacrifice, and so on. Fine ends up dead long before they find this mystical paradise, and there is more than a little suggestion that it doesn’t really exist.
But does that render Fine and Momo’s time together moot? Absolutely not. And that is what makes Vampire feel so vital (and so vitally queer) to me; the world sucks, and it often conspires to rip us apart whenever it can. It is absolutely crucial that we appreciate our time together, while it lasts.
So! That’s most of the list. There’s only one entry left. As with last year, I put up a tweetabout a month before this went up,where I asked people to guess what they thought my number 1 pick would be.
This year, two people got it right.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
What can I say? Congratulations to Blue Dash. And hell, I’ll throw in a shout out to my good friend Josh, too, since he mentioned it out loud while were talking at one point.
#1. Healer Girl
I am keenly aware of just how transient what I do here at Magic Planet Anime truly is. Anime criticism as a medium is still essentially in its infancy—most of us aren’t much more than consumer advocates, telling you to either spend or not spend your precious leisure time watching some particular series or another—and it would be very, very naive to assume that anything I write here will ever persist throughout the ages. If anyone writing in this field now makes anything that endures, it’s unlikely to be me.
I write anyway because when something really does touch me on a deep, personal level, I end up feeling like I have to scream it from the mountaintops. This doesn’t happen often—I like most anime, but the amount that I truly love, in the way where I know I will come back to them five, ten years from now, is much smaller, and rarely does a given year produce more than one or two such pieces—but when it does, I really feel like little else in the world matters to me, in those moments. 2022, astoundingly, produced four, and we’ve just met three of them. This is the fourth. Healer Girl, my favorite anime of 2022.
It is a font of genuine, deep light and warmth. It’s really all in the name; Healing. The iyashikei genre rarely gets the credit it’s due over here in the anglosphere, but in Healer Girl, the genre has found its best representative in many years.
I have to confess; I spent much of 2022 so, so, so tired, and so, so, so sick. I have gone through more than one total emotional breakdown, caused at least in part by a ten-car pileup of illnesses I have been battling and continue to battle. I won’t go into details because to be honest it’s not anyone’s business but my own, but know that it has sucked. Many days, I have gotten up and wondered if I’d really be able to continue writing like I have been, even though this site, for better or worse, is the project I’ve started in my life that means the most to me, by an order of magnitude. Without embellishment, 2022 was a profoundly shitty year for me. Probably the worst I’ve had since moving to Chicago in 2018.
Through it all, Healer Girl, perhaps improbably, has remained a source of genuine comfort. In a year where I had been having less of a bad time overall, maybe I would’ve been more comfortable putting something darker at #1. But I didn’t, and I can’t truly see into those possible parallel presents. So Healer Girl it is, because I need it—because we need it.
Part of it is the music; the opening notes of “Feel You, Heal You”, tap into some deep, rarely-touched part of my psyche, perhaps it’s the part that used to fall asleep listening to Wilson-Philipps and Faith Hill on a grainy radio when I was very young, perhaps it’s the same part that, when I was a younger anime watcher, cemented Kamichu!, which I saw on a bootleg streaming site that no longer exists, as one of my very first favorite anime. Whatever it is, and no matter how corny I’m sure it may seem to anyone who isn’t me, that connection is real, and extends not just to the music, but to the series built around it.
Healer Girl’s premise promises a cross between a “magical girl“ series of a variety unknown ’til now, a medical drama, and a slice of life anime. In practice, it’s all of these and none of them. It has all of the magical girl genre’s storms of massive feeling and emotion, a medical drama’s focus on literal lifesaving, and the school life genre’s easygoing warmth, but even as it feels born of these genres, it stands apart from them. Its great visual trick is the “image song;” literal conjurings of the magic music that the series’ world runs on. This is not something that would exist in a lesser series, and I’ve seen similar things only a handful of times. Almost on its own, this is what elevates Healer Girl into a truly rare artistic achievement. (The show is so good that while it has probably the year’s single best episode, its fifth, the Night on the Galactic Railroad-referencing “Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station“, this is almost an afterthought compared to its more general brilliancies.)
Healer Girl’s magnetism is difficult to explain in this way, because the series was not—is not—an event. There is no “Healer Girl fandom”, or at least, not a particularly large one. The show inspired no complicated thinkpieces or vigorous debates on its nature and true meaning. The impression I get is that the show was mostly liked, but just liked, by those who saw it, and I am something of an outlier for loving it as much as I do. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple anime, and whether or not it resonates with a given person is, I imagine, largely down to the old intangibles of feeling and mood. In this sense, I can imagine picking it as my #1, putting it in The Top Spot, might be contentious. (I doubt nearly as much as my #1 pick for 2021, admitttedly, but that’s another conversation.)
To me, Healer Girl doesn’t even really feel like a contemporary anime. It feels at once like a relic from a lost past and a transmission from some far-off, idyllic, solar future. A broadcast from a different universe; a softer world, one where the soothing tones of gentle music really can heal the sick. It is the endless everyday implicitly promised by all slice of life anime warmed with a gentle heat and decorated with floral blooms; an outstretched hand, whenever you need it. That, to me, is 2022’s best anime. If you feel it, it’ll heal you, a panacea in the darkness and the sickness.
Thus, the list—and the year here at Magic Planet Anime, although by the time you read this it’ll already be the first day of 2023—comes to a close.
I am very curious to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Were your picks similar or wildly different? I’m interested to know, so don’t be afraid to drop a comment or hit me up on any of my many social media locations below, I recently re-did my article footer with links to basically every site I maintain a presence for this blog on. Feel free to look around!
Let me take a moment here to also thank everyone who’s read this list—or any of my articles here over the past year—it really, truly means the world to me. While I’m at it, let me thank my good friends on the following Discord servers with funny names; The Magic Planet Anime server, the original The Magic Planet server, the Satellite Night Anime Block server, the Secret Scrunkly Server, Mugcord, and the Lesbian Radiohead Fans server. All of you have made ’22 so much better than it would’ve been alone, and I appreciate y’all a lot. I need to also give a shout out to my repeat commenters: you guys are the best, and make this blog feel so much more alive than it would if it were just me writing with no responses.
And lastly, just before I go, and as mentioned back in Part 1 of the list. If you can do so, and found the list worthwhile, please do contribute (either on Ko-Fi or Patreon), it was extremely effort-intensive. For your reference, I am writing this at about 8PM on the 30th. Crunch in writing is real, friends! Be careful out there! I’ve certainly learned some lessons about how I’m going to handle this for next year, now that I know there’s a real audience for the end-to-end breakdown rather than just a simple top 5. And for those who have already recently contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Again, it’s hard to articulate how much that means to me.
As for the site itself, I don’t plan to do regular seasonal coverage for the upcoming season, but I may drop occasional articles here and there on the more interesting stuff and will probably do at least a small few first impressions. (I’m very interested to see what’s up with the Nier: Automata anime, for example.) More than that, I have a lot of commissions to get cracking on! Hopefully you’ll enjoy those reviews when they go live.
Until next year (which is already this year for you) Magic Planet Anime fans!
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.
In some ways, this is the hardest part of the list to write. The stuff I liked pretty much without reservation, but which I still felt didn’t quite make the very top. But honestly, what else is there to say? At this point, you all know what you’re in for. Let’s get to the “solidly good to great” part of the list.
#17. The Case Study of Vanitas: Part 2
Remember 2022 as a banner year for the anime vampire. Two of the three shows on this list that involve them come primarily from the same hand, Tomoyuki Itamura, yet, they couldn’t be more different.
The Case Study of Vanitas, which entered its second season back in January, is fundamentally a dark fantasy series. It’s tinged with romance, drama, and sly humor, but everything is filtered through the church glass that composes its specific brand of vampiric fantasia.
Of course, the actual reason, so far as I can gather, that most people like Vanitas, is its shameless sensuality. Yes, this is probably the only thing on the list I’m going to outright praise for being horny, even as it ranks higher on the Problematic-o-Meter than most things I watch. Do you like men? Women? Both? Vanitas has a character or six for you to mercilessly simp for, and I do consider that something of a positive, if done in a way that makes emotional sense, as it does here. The vast reservoirs of easily-flustered bisexuals in the world are an untapped resource, some might say.
But on top of that, Vanitas’ second season also has a pretty compelling actual plot, featuring closed-off secluded worlds of snow, haunted by a twisted take on the already-spooky tale of the Beast of Gevaudan. The series’ gothic sensibility serves it well, here, as the sweetness that lightened up much of the first season turns decidedly sickly. (And even so, there’s still quite a lot of steaminess in the second season. Seriously, if you’re into that kind of thing you owe it to yourself to watch this.)
#16. ESTAB LIFE: Great Escape
If there’s a unifying thread for the anime of 2022, it might just be that a lot of them were really fucking weird. Novelty of premise is pretty easy to come by in anime, a medium that, moreso than many others, is pretty unashamed of its inherently pulp nature and will often race to the bottom to come up with the most bizarre thing possible to get more eyeballs on a project. Even so, Estab Life stands out for strangeness not just of premise but of execution. How many anime this year were both all-CG affairs and had an episode about the Penguin Stasi? As far as I know, Estab Life is the only one.
Sporting some strange mix of the traveler story genre, a droll-as-hell sense of humor, and decent action anime fundamentals, Estab Life surely stands out as one of the year’s most singular offerings, revolving as it does around a group of “extractors” whose job is to spirit away those unhappy with their lot in a bizarro future dystopia to one of the many other future dystopias—a collection of them now makes up what was once Japan. Even the stylistics and actual narrative aside, there simply aren’t too many anime with transgender yakuza magical girls and giant Facebook Like thumbs in them. But maybe you’re the sort who prioritizes character writing, in which case, I would point you to the fact that resident slime girl Martese is a curiously-compelling lesbian slime girl tomboy, team lead Equa is a quietly commanding presence, and even many of the show’s one-off characters are pretty interesting.
Estab Life is certainly not perfect (I am not huge on how Feres, my favorite of the main trio, is the one with by a fair shake the least amount of character development), but it’s compellingly weird and worth a watch. Incredibly, this strange little train hasn’t stopped rolling. We’re allegedly waiting on a mobile game, as well as a film with the tentative title Revenger’s Road. See you again soon, extractors?
#15. Do It Yourself!!
If the adage holds true that to build a city, one must start with a brick, surely the same is true for homes and the furniture that decorates them.
Thus, very broadly, is the premise of Do It Yourself!!, a gentle iyashikei—one of a few this year—about do-it-yourself crafts, mostly woodworking. The series is packed with enough goofy-pun character names that it might give you the impression that this is a slapstick of some sort. (The lead is named Yua Serufu, and her okay-they-don’t-say-they’re-in-love-but-they-pretty-obviously-are-at-least-crushing-on-each-other crush is a girl named Suride “Purin”, who attends a techy academy where she learns how to….3D print things. Goodness.)
There is an element of that; Serufu herself is pretty dang clumsy, and her pratfalls are treated as amusing slipups more often than not, but DIY!!’s real core is about how making things for yourself is irreplaceable, not just as a skill but as a passion. It’d be easy for the show to swerve from there into a rote “technology bad” message, but it never really even approaches doing so, and there are even a few scenes that showcase synthesis of cutting-edge technology and traditional crafts.
Indeed, the focus is on that spirit of craftsmanship itself, apropos from another visual treat from the studio Pine Jam, whose strong central staff seem to have developed a habit of putting out a show that simply looks amazing about once a year. (Whether that show is any good otherwise is another question, see Gleipnir near the bottom of the 2020 list.) This is apropos too for the year that brought machine art to the public sphere of discourse. It’s a topic that is probably not going away any time soon, but DIY neatly sidesteps any similar question with its own answer; isn’t there plenty of joy to be found in the process of creation itself?
#14. My Master Has No Tail
Is Rakugo having a bit of a moment? Probably not, but My Master Has No Tail airing in the same year that brought us the unexpected Jump hit Akane-banashi made me think. The two aren’t really terribly similar, but they share a key piece of subject matter in the traditional Japanese comedic storytelling art.
Our protagonist, Mameda, is a tanuki infatuated with the art form, since inspiring strong emotions via telling tales is a form of “tricking” people. But what begins as a fairly straightforward comedy / niche interest manga reveals itself to have a beating heart focused on Mameda’s own place in the world, and that of other beings like herself. (Her master Bunko is a kitsune, for example.) In the process, it places not just specifically these stories but, in a broader way, all popular stories, in a specific cultural context. Specific episodes deal with the process of passing artistic traditions on from master to pupil, and with Japan’s transitional Taisho period as a time when old things—both old ways and creatures like Bunko and Mameda themselves—are being lost to the tide of modernism. In this sense, there’s a surprising edge of slight melancholy to My Master Has No Tail.
Even so, this is primarily a comedy, and it’s a pretty good one. Both the rakugo itself and Mameda’s own antics are a light brand of amusing that never feels like it’s overstaying its welcome, even with the series’ absolute dumbest jokes. (One of the character’s nicknames being “Butt”, anyone?)
#13. Princess Connect! Re:Dive Season 2
It often comes across as a backhanded compliment to say that an anime’s best trait is that it just looks really good. It feels like you’re implying a deficiency in some other area. But if that’s ever the case, it certainly isn’t so for the second season of Princess Connect! Re:Dive, which thundered back after a year’s absence way back in Winter to blow basically every other isekai anime that aired this year out of the water. (It’s the last example of the genre you’ll find on this list, in fact.)
That said; this doesn’t mean that the story isn’t also worthwhile—it’s actually quite interesting, a novel take on the genre that manages to make it feel meaningful and substantive again in a year that was absolutely swamped with mediocre isekai. But, of course, the visuals and the writing go hand in hand. Princess Connect’s sideways spin on the genre means nothing without its phenomenal visuals; in particular, the fight scenes give a real weight to its fantasy heroics in the series’ latter half. What you have with Princess Connect is the Proper Noun Machine Gun on full autofire; the series builds on so many classic tropes, both from isekai and from fantasy adventure in general, that it risks drowning in them. But that never happens, it just builds and builds and builds, until its final stretch lights up into a blazing, spectacular show of fireworks. More than anything, this one is a treat for the chuunis out there. All spectacle, but pure killer, a whirling show of pyrotechnics that is never less than a total blast.
#12. Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Season 2
The dream lives on! While its younger sister Superstar floundered in the season that followed, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club made a strong return this year. Its second season wasn’t the blow-the-doors-open affair that its first was back in 2020, but the anime’s personable sense of purehearted sincerity remained even as it dipped into ever so slightly more dramatic territory. Old characters paired up into duos while new ones took the spotlight as solo stars, in a turn that somehow managed to do what Superstar failed to despite the higher character count overall. Most notably, two equally-fun polar opposites; the queen diva / secret idol otaku Lanzhu, and the introverted Shioriko, who has to be convinced to not prematurely give up on her fledgling dream of being an idol. Smaller character arcs like “Nana” finally giving up the facade and revealing to the whole school that yes, she is Setsuna, provide a nice cherry on the sundae, tinged with a slight bitterness not rooted in the series itself, but in the news that her voice actor won’t be returning to the role. If she had to leave, this was a good note to end on.
Nijigasaki’s remains a world where anyone can be an idol. There’s a kind of beauty in that, and the show’s strength comes from playing it very well. Even still, 2022 was home to more than one legitimately great idol anime, and I hope you do like idols and other girls who make music, because these aren’t the last ones on the list by a long shot. But first, something a little more….violent.
#11. Akiba Maid War
Is it a yakuza series? A deeply ridiculous comedy? Why not both? In a year of anime making the most out of completely absurd premises, Akiba Maid War might’ve gotten the most blood from its particular stone. On the surface there’s not anything terribly special about something deciding to subvert the old moe’ tropes by making the girls that embody them engage in mob war violence, and if that’s all AMW were doing it would be way farther back on the list.
On top of that, this is also another entry that feels unstuck in time. People don’t really remember this whole trend anymore, but there was a wave of these anti-moe comedies around the turn of the new millennium, where much of the joke was simply that the characters enacting the absurd hyper-violence were cute girls. Most of them weren’t really particularly funny and have accordingly lost their charge now that the thing they were parodying is simply the norm. Fortunately, because Maid War clearly loves all of its influences, it manages to paradoxically pull off being that kind of slapstick-with-firearms comedy, a fairly played-straight yakuza series, and even sometimes genuinely cute, all without really even breaking a sweat.
The sheer amount of small touches in this thing helps, too. My favorite example being the fact that most of the one-off maid characters who (spoiler alert, here) tend to get killed at the end of their episode are voiced by famous seiyuu. The crowning example being Aya motherfucking Hirano in the show’s penultimate arc. You don’t get anime that are this singularly their own thing super often. Despite its fairly obvious influences, and the several other interestingly retro anime that aired this year, Akiba Maid War stood in 2022 as an army of one, and accordingly, and this might just be the most underrated anime on the whole list.
#10. Waccha Primagi
The language barrier does strange things to relative popularity between Japan and the anglosphere. For the most part, the anime that are popular over there are popular over here, and vice versa. But there are exceptions, and kids’ shows are a wealth of them. Pretty Cure is the most obvious example, but one of that series’ main competitors, the Pretty Series—no relation—is up there, too. Waccha Primagi, like the other anime in the series before it, is ostensibly a promotional tool for an arcade game. Does this matter at all when evaluating the series? I’d say not really. I’ve never even seen the game in action, but despite that, I love this anime to pieces.
It’s fair to ask why. The fact of the matter is that Waccha Primagi is not the most polished anime on this list by any means, and its nature as a promotional tool means that it can at times feel repetitive. But there is really just something about it. The strange magic-filled world it conjures, where humanity and the animal “magic users” live in parallel to each other but come together to put on magical “waccha” idol concerts? That’s step one. Step two is the sheer amount of heart this thing has; its characters are candy-colored archetypes, but most pop with a rare amount of personality, be they the smug Miyuki, the anxiety-riddled gamer / idol otaku (yes, another one!) Lemon, the sporty Hina, or the princely Amane. Even Matsuri, the comparatively ‘generic’ lead, has an important role to play both as the audience proxy and as the lead for her partner, Myamu, yet another of the show’s most endearing characters.
But a broader picture than all that is Primagi’s actual plot. Waccha Primagi goes to some truly buck-wild places over its four cour runtime. Individual episodes contain straight-up gay confessions, simmering tensions between the human and magic-user worlds that threaten to erupt into full-on war at any moment, light satire of reality TV, a big bad who’s an entertainment and social media mogul, and carefully studied pastiches of the ancient “Class-S” genre of yuri, something with which its young target audience is wholly unlikely to be familiar. By its final stretch, one hardly bats an eye when Jennifer, the local Beyonce analogue, ascends to vengeful Sun God-hood to try to free her girlfriend from a magic diamond prison. And yet, the last two episodes strip all of that back away in an instant, and are hearteningly sincere instead. Waccha Primagi truly can do it all.
There were better anime in 2022, perhaps, but none hit higher above its weight class.
Well, alright, that’s a lie. One did. But we’ll get to that.
In the meantime, in spite of all of its strengths—and more than one kickass OP—Waccha Primagi was still not quite the best idol anime of 2022 either, as we’ll get to. Like I said, it’s been a hell of a year for the genre.
#9. Kaguya-sama Love is War! -Ultra Romantic-
Shot through the heart, and who else could be to blame? Love is War! makes a swing for personal notability by being the only anime to rank in the top ten both of this year’s list and of the one I did back in 2020. Why? Because it’s never stopped being just really fucking good.
The mind games that gave the series its title finally die down here in the last act of the first half of the series (the second, which goes in some pretty out-there directions, has already gotten off the ground via a theatrical film that we probably won’t get over here in the US for a while). But the show itself doesn’t really slow down for even a second. If anything, the third season is defined even more strongly by fun, stylish visual work, with all of its old tricks acquiring a heart motif that serves as the central symbol of the school festival arc. (In terms of filtering a fairly conventional story through delightfully out-there visual work, it really only had one competitor this year. We’ll get to that.)
And of course, capping it all off, is that scene. Spoiler alert, but not really, right? A first kiss raised to such ridiculous, whirlwind heights of idealized romance that it could get just about anybody’s heart pounding. In Kaguya‘s case, it was enough that it called for a really fucking funny Gundam homage. (Mute that video, just as a heads’ up.) Truly, the character there—Karen, a minor character in Kaguya-sama proper but the lead of one of its spinoffs—is all of us. The real question is what Kaguya and Shirogane are going to do now, with the entire direction of their lives solidly changed?
We’ll find out before too long, I’m sure. The first kiss never ends, you know.
#8. Call of The Night
If The Case Study of Vanitas was a little too gothic for you, and My Dress-Up Darling’s particular brand of steaminess didn’t really get you going, maybe this particular ode to nocturnality, originally from the pen of Dagashi Kashi author Kotoyama, would be up your alley, as an interesting and unexpected midpoint between the two.
In Call of The Night, we have a romance that doubles as an apply-as-you-please metaphor for the outsiders of society. Normal people do not walk around their city in the middle of the night and get entangled with vampires. This is your first clue that CoTN protagonist Kou Yamori is not, in fact, a normal person. What kind of “not normal” is a sort of grand, moving-target metaphor that resists any single easy interpretation; I’ve seen him described as neurodivergent, as a closeted queer person, and as several other things beside. The fact of the matter is that, as a living symbol, he’s all of these and none of these. His relationship with Nana is certainly charged, but charged how is kind of an open question until the series’ final act, where it turns on its head and reveals that, more than anything else, this is a simple “you and me against the world” sort of tale. The kind I’m a sucker for. The fact that it all takes place almost entirely at night—daylight is a rare intrusion reserved for flashbacks and a tiny handful of other moments—makes it look amazing. This is certainly the most visually impressive series LIDEN FILMS have ever made, and wouldn’t you know it, much of that is on director Tomoyuki Itamura, who not only also did The Case Study of Vanitas a number of spots back, but in years past has done an absolute ton of work on the storied Monogatari series. The guy loves his horny vampires; I can only respect the hustle.
And hey, Call of The Night is probably also the year’s only anime to make compelling use of Japanese hip-hop for its soundtrack, Teppen’s OP theme notwithstanding.
#7. Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story-
SolidQuentin was a prophet, because Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story- is some hitherto-unknown kind of genius. 2022 was stuffed with anime that leaned heavily on sheer WTF factor; Estab Life, Akiba Maid War, etc. None could swing as much iron as Birdie Wing. More than anything, the golf girls’ story just doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, which in a lesser anime could be a weakness, but here, it makes the show’s many disparate elements—illegal underground golf tournaments with morphing golf courses, characters who want to be good at golf with an enthusiasm that would put the average shonen protagonist to shame, a huge amount of rich girl/working class girl yuri subtext between its two leads, an incongruous fixation on referencing Gundam—feel whole. Birdie Wing feels like a dimension-hopper from a timeline where “irony” as a concept was just never invented. Every single thing it does is completely sincere; it knows it’s funny, but it’s not a joke. It’s camp, in its purest form.
And truly, the only real point of reference for things that feel like this is stuff like Symphogear. The main difference is that by downsizing that genre’s enormously campy energy to be about something as deeply trivial as golf, Birdie Wing makes the argument that maybe everything is this trivial, and maybe we deserve to have huge feelings about it anyway! Maybe our world isn’t so different from one where people play ludicrously high-stakes golf games with lives and pride alike on the line!
Every time I’ve written about Birdie Birdie, I’ve brought up “Nightjar“, its utterly insane choice for an ED, which carries a full-throated, big-hearted sincerity that, juxtaposed with a show that were even the tiniest smidgen more self-aware, would scan as a deliberate joke. But no, that is the beauty of Birdie Wing; this shit is as serious as your life, do not make any mistake. The only reason Birdie Wing isn’t even higher on the list is that it’s not finished yet. Season 2 airs in Spring, are you ready to tee off again? I, personally, cannot fucking wait. If it hits as many holes-in-one as the first season did, there is a very real chance that it will top the list next year. That’s not a threat; it’s a promise.
#6. BOCCHI THE ROCK!
Here it is, the hardest cut from the Top 5. I did not labor over a single decision on this list more than whether to include this in the Top 5 or put it down here as the “highest honorable mention.” Fun fact; by the time you read this, I have swapped it with the show at #5, by my own count, four times. This was a hard decision. Not the last of those on the list, but probably the one I’ve thought about the most.
In general, there were a solid handful of really fucking good music anime in 2022, let’s just lay that on the table. We’ve already seen a couple, and this isn’t the last one we’ll see on this list, but BOCCHI THE ROCK! might be the most unexpectedly successful. Not in purely commercial terms—although it did well in that regard, too—but in terms of setting up an artistic vision and then following through expertly. Few anime this year not only had this much style but used it to such compelling ends; it might actually beat out the third season of Love is War! on that front. No mean feat, considering how easily that anime turns its own medium into putty in its hands, too.
I will be honest, BOCCHI placing this high on the list is something of an act of course-correction, as well. I liked BOCCHI throughout more or less its entire run, but I really only started appreciating what it was trying to do—and thus, really loving it—pretty late, episode 9 or 10 or so. By that point, the Fall 2022 season was on its way out and I felt that I hadn’t even remotely given the show its well-earned due. But if Kessoku Band are a fill-in act, they’re a pretty damn amazing one, so don’t make the mistake of assuming I don’t love them or that this is a pity award, nothing could be farther from the truth.
BOCCHI THE ROCK!’s main point is to watch the title character, Hitori, alias Bocchi, herself grow as a person. She begins as an anxious wreck in the vague shape of an internet-famous guitarist and, by the end of the season, she’s still that, but she has not just a band but friends now. The thing is, if BOCCHI had simply adapted its manga straight, we would not be talking about it very much at all. Instead, BOCCHI THE ROCK’s real strength comes from the utterly absurd stylistic tricks it pulls out to pave the road along Hitori’s emotional journey.
Essentially, BOCCHI THE ROCK is unafraid to treat its characters as props. It’ll stick them on popsicle sticks and wave them around like this is His & Her Circumstances. It’ll render Hitori in chunky 3D and hurl her at a wall of gray blocks. It’ll turn her into a slug because sometimes when you’re this wracked by anxiety you really do just feel like a slug. It’ll have her slip out the bounds of her character outline like Jimmy from Ed Edd N Eddy just so she can look how a panic attack feels. Incredibly, at no point does it feel like BOCCHI is mocking Hitori herself. This is a relatable, we’ve-all-been-there sort of humor, one for the true otaku. This emotional power chord resonated with so many people that BOCCHI eventually overtook even long-anticipated shonen manga adaptation Chainsaw Man on MyAnimeList, in a come-from-behind victory for the socially anxious everywhere. (It doesn’t beat that series out on this list. But what is my blog compared to the will of the people, really?)
At the end of it all, you realize that Hitori is nothing more than an ordinary teenage girl; nerdy, talented but incredibly anxious, in serious need of a shoulder to lean on. And the series’ biggest trick is the ability to roll all that wild craziness into a gentle push on her back; before you know it, she’s shredding onstage. They grow up so fast.
I stressed a lot over that BOCCHI cut in particular. Hopefully the cult of the box of oranges won’t be too upset.
Tomorrow; the best of the best, the top 5 proper.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.
You’ve met the bad, and you’ll meet the good starting tomorrow. Meet the ugly. The weird, the flawed, and the under-sung.
Let me give you a peek under the hood, friends. To break this list—the whole thing, I mean—up into manageable chunks, I conceptualized it, as, essentially, four broad categories. The first part of the list was those few shows from this year that I genuinely disliked. This chunk? A motley assortment of the flawed but interesting, the under-loved and underrated, and a handful of things I still more liked than didn’t but was too frustrated with to put higher on the list. (I try not to think too much about this kind of thing when writing these lists, but if there are any truly Controversial picks here, I’m betting two in particular from this chunk of the list will be them.)
Without further ado, let’s get to this particular collection of weirdos.
#30. Miss KUROITSU from the Monster Development Department
It’s janky, it’s obscure, and it occasionally cracks problematic jokes. Nonetheless, Miss KUROITSU From The Monster Development Department is the first entry on the entire list that I can truly say that I like without too much in the way of further qualifiers.
Now, being a doofy comedy anime based on the premise of following a scientist who works for the evil organization in your average toku show, Kuroitsu is also undeniably really niche, at least as far as Anglophone audiences are concerned. But what can I say? I started watching it on a whim and found a lot to love between the deep-cut toku references, the absurd character comedy, and from time to time, some actual no-shit feel-good moments, such as an episode where the titular mad scientist helps one of her creations, a zombie girl, become an idol in spite of the fact that she can’t initially sing (or even speak) at all. Between that and the cameo of a character who is pretty obviously Minky Momo, I can’t help but have a certain only slightly-begrudging affection for this show.
Now, the gags about Wolf Bete, a male wolf monster accidentally put in a cute anime girl body, maybe those I could do without. But, hey, no show is perfect. Next!
#29. My Dress-Up Darling
Ah, young love. It can be sweet to the point of cloying, it can be horny to the point of awkward. In that sense, maybe no anime so far this decade has yet captured the feeling so well as My Dress-Up Darling.
You can distinguish MDUD from the bottom of the barrel romcom by virtue of both of its leads having tangible personalities. Honestly, Gojo and Marin make a pretty sweet (and believable!) couple the vast majority of the time, and it’s easy to intuitively understand how their overlap in interests—making clothes for dolls on his end, cosplay on hers—would push them closer together. On top of that, MDUD has a real love of otaku culture; Dress-Up Darling is almost certainly the anime this year with the most fictional anime, manga, games, etc. within it, and we learn enough about Pretty Cure ersatz Flower Princess Blaze that I was able to wring an entire april fools’ article out of the subject.
So why isn’t it higher on the list? Well, let’s circle back around to that “horny to the point of awkward” point. The series is fairly salacious; I’ve gone back and forth over how much of a flaw I think this really is. One must after all remember that this show is aimed at teenage boys, and teenage boys deserve good anime, too! Still, I think the series’ sometimes overbearing fanservice crosses the line of good taste a bit too often and it unfortunately hurts the show more than it helps. Maybe the inevitable second season will tone that down a little bit? Eh, let’s not ask for miracles. Ultimately, MDUD is an otherwise good show that just needs to learn to keep it in its pants better. Or maybe I’m just a prude, who knows.
#28. TOKYO MEW MEW NEW
The cat came back! 2022 was a great year for anime all around, but I was personally saddened by the lack of much that fits the broad “battle girl” mold. There were a few magical girl anime, but not terribly many that fit the wider idea of the supergenre, with even most of this year’s mahou shoujo being decidedly less fighty than normal. In the broader battle girl field there was of course Lycoris Recoil, but if you weren’t super keen on that show, or just wanted something that involved fewer guns, what exactly did you have to fall back on if you wanted to see a troupe of girls in themed outfits kick some ass?
Well, Pretty Cure. But! If you wanted a second choice, Tokyo Mew Mew New wasn’t a bad one.
Mew Mew New is a pretty naked nostalgia play; it aired in an otaku time slot, so it wasn’t really trying to compete with Pretty Cure or any other kids’ anime. Instead, it aims to be a distilled and concentrated version of the original Tokyo Mew Mew anime. A somewhat breezier adaptation of the manga that the former is based on, perhaps. I can’t say how well it succeeds in that specific regard—being unfamiliar myself with both the original Tokyo Mew Mew anime and the manga source material—but I can say that it’s an enjoyable and, more than anything, just downright fun twelve episodes of classic magical girl silliness. It was beat in even that category this year, as we’ll get to, but that doesn’t make Mew Mew’s attempt not worthwhile.
Speaking of which; of all the anime on this list that have gotten second season announcements, this is probably the one that surprised me most of all. But hey, I’m going to tune in, will you?
#27. Spy x Family
Once upon a Cold War, there lived a man named Twilight who, to fulfill a mission, found himself with a “fake” family consisting of an adopted daughter and a hastily fake-married wife. I think time and the show’s popularity have obscured just how weird Spy x Family’s premise is, but it’s worth bringing up because that strangeness is what makes the show worth following. When SpyFam dials things down into normal “shonen comedy” territory, you get bores like the episode of part two that is entirely about how bad Yor (the wife, if you somehow don’t know) is at cooking. When it remembers that it takes place in what is effectively East Germany during the Cold War, the show suddenly springs to life.
I’ll be honest, I debated long and hard where, precisely, to stick Spy x Family on this list. Because in its best moments it can be ridiculously funny—and it’s not just a parade of strong Anya Reaction Faces that’s making me say that—and even surprisingly heartfelt, but enough of it drags that I don’t really feel comfortable putting it particularly high up, either. I’ve written more about SpyFam than most anime on this list, and yet, I am still thoroughly undecided as to what I actually think of it “on the whole.” Ultimately, though, what I think doesn’t really matter here, SpyFam is easily the most commercially successful new face on this list, with its first season (broken up into two non-consecutive cours. Confusing, I know) raking in a truly rare amount of viewership not just among otaku but among the general public, probably owing to its fairly accessible nature. (There’s not a ton of “anime bullshit” in Spy x Family if that’s something you care about.) With a second proper season and a theatrical film on the way, Spy x Family will probably return for next year’s list. Maybe by then I’ll have a better idea of what the show means to me.
#26. Shinobi no Ittoki
Here’s a hypothetical for you; can you call something “okay” and mean it as a compliment?
No, I’m serious. Shinobi no Ittoki feels like a self-conscious throwback to an older kind of action anime, where The Sakuga™ was not necessarily guaranteed and was more of an intermittent thing when it did show up, where the character designs were mostly interchangeable, and the entire thing was entertaining but not really about much of anything beyond maybe some nebulous spins on big ideas like determinism vs. free will and cycles of violence. The series’ unflashy charm has all but guaranteed that it hasn’t and won’t ever develop a large fanbase (although, I should be careful about saying that ever since The Detective is Already Dead had its second season announced. Maybe you never really know.), but I’d argue it doesn’t really need one. Stuff like this is almost meant to fly under the radar, there was no way that this was going to pick up some huge following in the season that featured both Chainsaw Man and the return of Bleach, but that it has any fans at all is no mean feat, given the circumstances.
As for why it feels like a show out of time, I have a pet theory; a running theme in 2022’s anime was the knowingly retro. Miss KUROITSU is arguably an example as well, and we’ll run into a few more throughout this list. Of these, Shinobi no Ittoki might just be the one that realizes those mid-00s ambitions the most fully. Surprising, for an anime most people probably wrote off from its key visual alone.
Why does it nail that aughts-core authenticity? Well, in of itself, it’s hard to pinpoint anything “special” about Shinobi no Ittoki, but that very semi-anonymity is exactly what makes the show tick, a curious case of something being obviously nondescript but nailing the fundamentals so well that it manages to breathe a bit of new life into some pretty old tropes. The doofy high school protagonist who’s ripped from his ordinary life and inherits a secret legacy, ridiculous gee-wiz techno ninja gadgets, the scheming and sinister Tsuda-voiced villain, the death of the village chief, the final suicide mission, the all-in finale with excellent animation, it’s all here.
For bonus points: The blonde twintail traitor Kirei serves as an outside pick for one of Aoi Yuuki’s stronger—and weirder, dig that scratchy, nervous timbre—roles, if you’re into that sort of thing.
#25. The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2
Returning from way back in 2019, the anime more commonly known as Machikado Mazoku is the other other other magical girl anime on this year’s list. Although you could be forgiven for not really thinking of it that way, given that The Demon Girl Next Door focuses more on charming character-driven antics and general goofiness than it does fighting the forces of evil. (That’s really all in the rearview for co-protagonist Momo anyway. She’s retired.)
To be honest, in terms of “objective” merits and flaws, this is one of the rougher shows on the list. Machikado Mazoku’s second season has a real problem with overdrive pacing; some of the gags aren’t given quite enough room to breathe and it does hurt the show a bit by suffocating some of the more subtle character work. On the other hand, though, when it remembers to slow down there’s a real sense of approachable personality here, one that holds through equally well when the show delves a bit more into its proper plot with elements like journeys into lead Shamiko’s troubled mindscape as when it’s in more lighthearted pure-antics territory, as when she gets a job at a restaurant owned by a baku.
Machikado Mazoku will probably never top popularity polls, but managing to stick the landing on a second season several years later proves that it’s maintained its dedicated fanbase for a reason.
#24. Lycoris Recoil
Oh, LycoReco, what are we ever going to do with you? With the hype cycle some months in the rearview this feels like less of a #HotTake than it did at the time, but to me, what Lycoris Recoil is, before it is anything else, is an illustration of the difference between having good characters and telling a good story.
Here’s what it does get right. An extremely strong cast; not just Chisato and Takina, whose uneasy partnership blossoms into what anyone with eyes will be damn ready to call romance by the end of the show, but also Chisato’s father Mika, Mika’s villainous ex Yoshi, the playful hacker Kurumi, etc. They all feel like real people, and it’s a joy to watch them work through the winding tunnels of espionage that comprise the show’s plot. LycoReco does intuitively understand that a connection between two people, if it’s strong enough, can get anyone through even very dark times. This is a theme that showed up in several anime this year, including a few we’ve yet to get to, and it’s a strong core for something like this to have.
But, the same can’t be said of everything about LycoReco, which is why it’s not higher on this list. Too many of the actual plot points simply don’t survive any scrutiny, and I remain offput by the assumptions the show’s world is built on. Fiction that stars what are essentially cops develops more and more problems the closer it gets to reality. Lycoris Recoil’s galaxy brain spin of “it’s bad that cops shoot people but it would be fine if they used rubber bullets like the protagonist” is so utterly ridiculous that it’s not worth seriously engaging with, despite being a spin on a real thing some people think. The series’ commitment to exploring the idea is so minimal and half-assed that it scans as simply brainless rather than an active defense of the concept. But it is still pretty bad, and the show suffers for it.
Because of all this; how much of LycoReco’s downsides someone is going to be willing to forgive because of how charming the characters as written actually are, not to mention the show’s rock solid action anime fundamentals, is going to vary wildly. Especially because how good the show is at a given moment tends to be tied pretty directly to how much it’s focusing on its characters vs. how much it’s focusing on its boneheaded central narrative. I feel like an indecisive centrist putting LycoReco in this spot, of all places on the list, but as summer changes to autumn and autumn to winter, and LycoReco moves further and further into the past, I find myself totally torn between appreciating LycoReco for what it is and being disappointed in what it isn’t. There are worse ways to end your series than a sunny sky and crystal blue waters, so I can’t dislike the show and indeed, I don’t. The “retired in Hawai’i” ending doesn’t even entirely feel unearned. Even so, it still feels like something is fundamentally missing. So, when you get down to it, do I actually like-o ‘Reco? Well, at the end of the day, yes, but with a fucking lot of caveats. Hence its appearance here rather than a fair bit farther up. There’s only so many ways I can say that I love the characters but am not crazy about how they’re handled. It is what it is.
(And if you’re a super-fan and it makes you feel any better, this is another case where maybe you shouldn’t care what I specifically think. The show did just top a popularity poll over in Japan.)
#23. Fuuto PI
Every year, I watch a few shows that are solidly quite good, but have a few central flaws, or even just don’t hit quite enough high notes to make it into my personal best-of’s. 2022 was a damn good year for anime, so even the stuff that is merely decent, is, in a vacuum pretty good. Fuuto P.I. is one of those, combining a novel premise (transforming hero shenanigans + a somewhat silly pastiche of ‘gritty detective’-type stuff) with an impressive pedigree (it’s a sequel to 2009’s Kamen Rider W, which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen), and an unusual production team from Studio KAI, who are not really known for punchy action anime like this.
Upgrading to an older audience (remember; W is over a decade old. All those 8 and 9 year olds who watched it when it was new are adults by now) means that Fuuto P.I. acquires a bit of a sleazy streak, and while this feels like a flaw I should be nailing the series for, I found it hard to be seriously upset by the show’s more openly leery tendencies. Mostly because of the fact that it has a shameless amount of camp that really makes the jump from live-action tokusatsu to an adult-aimed action anime feel totally natural.
Because of where it lands in terms of character building, our heroes—Shotaro and Phillip—have already had their long journey wherein they learned to trust each other long ago. Here, they’re just two cogs in a well-oiled machine, with newcomer Tokime, the female lead and the focus of much of the fanservice, providing a twist on what is presumably the old formula. The result? A solid six hours of lightly trashy fun, combining action anime flash, the particular campy sensibility that only toku can deliver, and a few interesting, meatier points to chew on by its conclusion. And hey, the ending strongly suggests more on the way in the future. (Which makes sense, given that it’s an adaptation of an ongoing manga.) I’d watch it.
#22. The Executioner and Her Way of Life
The year is 2022, and isekai has reached a point of true saturation. Every single season, we are inundated with new tales of featureless potato-boys being whisked away to generic JRPG-style fantasy worlds and given heaps upon heaps of special powers which they use to fulfill idle fantasies of banging as many dubiously-drawn Hot Anime Women ™ as they can find while lazily hacking up goblins. The Executioner & Her Way of Life sees all of this, and it is not impressed. But to avoid going too far down the path of “this anime isn’t like other girls,” it should be noted that the main reason that Executioner is, shockingly good, is what it does with the basic conceit of an isekai in the first place. It doesn’t stand out because it rejects the premise, it stands out because it does something interesting with it.
To wit; our protagonist is not the otherworlder—isekaijin, as said in the show, which I don’t think is a term unique to Executioner but is one I am very fond of—Akari, who serves as more of a secondary lead. Instead, it’s Menou, an assassin employed by the local church whose whole job is finding these crazy-powerful elseworld drop-ins and killing them before they can cause too many problems. There’s just one issue; Akari is way more powerful than even she realizes, and Menou quickly develops a hard-to-place liking for the girl. I won’t spoil too much, but suffice it to say that what’s going on here is a lot more interesting than the stereotypical “guy gets a huge harem and looks at stat screens” plots that litter this format. (In fact, there isn’t a single stat screen at all, so far as I can recall, which is kind of amazing in its own right at this point.)
What this boils down to is that Executioner’s main strength lies in its ability to pull its parent genre apart into its constituent building blocks and then reassemble them into an intriguing new shape. Not just in its core narrative but also interesting worldbuilding details that show us just how the isekaijin have shaped Menou’s world. (Note, for instance, that literally everyone seems to speak only one language; Japanese. And yes, that detail is intentional. It’s pointed out explicitly at one point.)
It was not the only surprisingly good isekai anime this year (aside from another which will appear farther up on this list, there’s Reincarnated as a Sword, which apparently got quite good only a few episodes after I wrote it off. You can take my mentioning it here as an apology), but it was the only true anti-isekai this year. A story stitched together from the ripped-up shreds of a genre that many people, myself included, are very tired of by now. The show isn’t perfect, of course. Its flaws are few but fairly obvious; it ends in a noncommittal “go read the books, stupid” kind of shrug, it’s maybe occasionally a bit too edgy for its own good. That kind of thing. Still, all in all, in a year that had fewer “lesbians kicking ass” anime than I might have liked, you really do have to hand it to Executioner for holding it down.
#21. Delicious Party♡Precure
Ah, here it is. The exception, the thing I carved out a specific little niche of its own for. Delicious Party Precure—DePaPre, for short—isn’t actually finished airing, which on its own, makes scoring it a different, and much more difficult, prospect than ranking anything else here.
Yet, the fact remains that I really just utterly fucking love Pretty Cure. Delicious Party feels like it’s already being written off as a “weaker” season of the series before it even ends, and while that might be true in some grand rank-your-faves sense, it’s awfully rude to the show itself, which has maintained an effortless charm from its premiere up to present while dodging production issues and the deeply unfortunate Toei database breach earlier this year.
Certainly, that resilience shows itself off better in some corners than others. Amane, alias Cure Finale, is almost inarguably the character who’s most developed. Seeing her face turn is one thing, but the real meat is in how she copes with feeling like she isn’t quite a good enough person to be a Pretty Cure. Even that aside; there are all sorts of fun little details that only an anime afforded a full four cours—rare in this day and age—could indulge in. The gentle light that is the grandmother of Yui, the lead Cure, the quiet-girl introspection that Kokone is prone to, the zany antics of Ran (who, as Cure Yum-Yum, might hold the record for the silliest Pretty Cure alias), and even the ever-present B-plot about Mary, the girls’ mentor figure, and his disappeared former partner. This thing’s even got a time travel episode. Really, can you complain when even a “weak” Pretty Cure season is this good? I certainly can’t.
#20. The Ranking of Kings
You may be a touch surprised to see this here! Ranking of Kings (Ousama Ranking at home in Japan) started airing late last year, but only finished up back in the ‘22 winter season. The entire way, it forged a strong visual identity that looks like absolutely nothing else that aired this year and spun that visual charm into a fully realized fairytale world of princes, knights, and monsters.
Our heroes? Bojji the little mute prince and his roguish blob of a best friend, Kage. Together they set out on a truly classic adventurous tale, the kind that makes you wish that this sort of thing got such lavish treatment more often. Really, it’’s one of Wit Studio’s best-ever anime from a purely visual standpoint, with enough characterful sakuga to bring a smile to even the most cynical animation enthusiast’s face.
Ranking of Kings’ ending sees Bojji spurn his original goal, only to set out on a brand-new adventure, so it seems likely that we’ll return to this fairytale someday in the not-too-distant future. (A spinoff is definitively in the works. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a second season greenlit.) Like many anime on this list, I’d happily watch that second season, and I doubt I’m alone.
#19. TEPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Laughing ’til You Cry
Comedy anime get no respect. Whether classics like Nichijou or Azumanga Daioh or modern offerings like TEPPEN!!!!! here, pure comedy anime just never seem to quite pick up the followings that their more dramatic compatriots do over here in the Anglosphere. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that comedy is fairly cultural. Maybe people just don’t respect the power of a hearty chuckle enough. Whatever the reason; TEPPEN!!!! Deserves more credit than what little it got. If absolutely nothing else, it’s the only anime on this list whose air schedule was directly impacted by the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. That’s weird and notable enough to stand out all on its own; it helps that the show’s pretty good, too, featuring bizarre, absurdist shaggy dog tales concocted around everything from haunted inns to Bitcoin schemes.
At the end of the day that is why Teppen is higher on this list than a number of things I have “more to say about.” It was just fucking fun! Deriving a wide variety of zany slapstick from its central conceit of a group of teams competing to be the best comedy group in Japan (the titular Teppen competition) is in some ways the obvious route, but it worked for Teppen, and I can really only dock points for a couple off-color jokes I didn’t really like. Two sets of bonus points for you: along the way it found the time to squeeze in probably the year’s single best time travel-related episode (its fifth) and engineered an insanely catchy rapped OP theme. Put some respect on its name.
#18. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Final Season -Dawn of a Shallow Dream-
I have to confess; I develop a not-entirely-logical attachment to anything I cover for long enough. I have written about Magia Record in various places a number of times since it originally premiered back in 2020. It is, as of this entry, the only anime that’s showed up here, on my 2020 year-end list, and on my truncated top 5 last year. There is an admirable strength to that persistence, even as I have to admit that what MagiReco tried to do as it closed out its final season, Dawn of a Shallow Dream, is a pretty niche thing. I’m actually not sure between this and RWBY: Ice Queendom, which was the more-watched SHAFT battle girl show of the year. This was certainly the better of the two, but anecdotally, I saw almost no discussion about it at all. Have people really written the Madoka Magica extended universe off that hard?
If so, that’s sad, but all too apropos. This particular corner of the dark magical girl subgenre pulls off an interesting trick of thriving best when ignored, and Magia Record itself ends with the white-gloved hand of Madokami herself shutting the book tightly on this particular story, as its protagonists lament that no one will ever know what they did here. Will it even remotely shock you, coming from a woman who’s eagerly defended both Day Break Illusion and Blue Reflection Ray, that I thought this was pretty good? It’s not just the metatextual angle, but that does help.
Now that’s not to say it’s a perfect finale, not by any means. For one thing, it’s really more of a movie, with any notion of it being a “season” being put to a serious test by the fact that it dropped all at once. (Not that this is inherently a problem, but it does suggest some behind-the-scenes issues.) For another, it is visually all over the place. It never gets as unsightly as the ugliest parts of Ice Queendom, but there is some pretty wonky character art in spots, here. But, by contrast, there’s also a lot that’s really lovely to look at, and in general the ‘season’ has a mesmerizingly surreal look to it that, in its best moments, does ably recall the heights of The Rebellion Story, still the strongest single articulation of Madoka’s core themes and aesthetic concerns. I am also still a little sad that they felt the need to kill b-character Kuroe, who took an unexpected leap from being totally off my personal radar to one of my favorites in the second season last year.
Still, despite its shortcomings, I find it hard to argue that this isn’t a solid end to an intriguingly strange alternate take on the Madoka story. I’m glad we got to take this particular ride.
And that’s all for today’s chunk of the list. See y’all tomorrow.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.
Here we are again, anime fans. Every year, it’s seemed more and more surreal that I actually made it to the end of the year and kept up anime blogging. For sure, I’ve had my ups and downs this year—honestly probably more of the latter, for the first time since I began writing here on MPA—but I’ve kept at it, and y’all have stuck with me. I truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate that. You guys mean the world to me.
In past years, I’ve often let this introductory portion of the list run a little long. Instead, this year I’m just gonna run down the basics for you. This list, released in parts over the next couple days, will be of every anime from this year that I, personally, actually completed, ranked from worst to best. (That’s a little over 30 of them, if you were wondering. Not that much in the grand scheme of things!) The criteria for inclusion is a bit fuzzy, but for the most part, to get on this list, I have to have seen the series, and it has to be a TV anime. But, I allow myself some wiggle room, so you’ll see one or two things that were OVAs or ONAs and one that hasn’t actually finished airing yet! Two notable exclusions I want to bring up are Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury and Summertime Render. The former not being here is a simple case of its first cour not yet being finished. The latter is absent because the show is still not legally available in the US, where most of my readers reside, and I’d rather not open that particular can of worms at the moment. (I do highly recommend both, just for reference.) Also; the amount of entries in each part of the list is not going to be consistent. Roughly, it’s probably going to break down into the bottom five (this column right here), a column of shows I thought were “okay” to “pretty solid” (tomorrow’s column), a column of shows I thought were good to great (Saturday’s column), and finally, the top five on Sunday. Some I will have only a paragraph or two to say about, some I will have quite a bit more to say about. Hopefully you’re excited.
Finally, before we jump into the list itself, I do want to make a small plea, here. I don’t usually directly ask for financial assistance in the actual bodies of my articles, but writing the year-end list is extremely labor-intensive compared to essentially any other article on my site. If you can spare the money, and if you think what I do here is worth it, you can support me hereon Ko-Fi or hereon Patreon. Every little bit helps, and to those of you who have supported me at any point in the past, you again have my deepest gratitude. I really cannot articulate how much that means to me.
Anyway! Enough of the mushy stuff. You guys are reading this part of the column for one reason and one reason only, right? To read about this year’s few true washouts, the worst of the worst. To tell the truth, most anime this year were pretty good! 2022 overall stands as probably my favorite year for anime since 2018, which is a hard fucking bar to clear. Nonetheless, there were a couple real stinkers. Some of these are going to be obvious, a few might be controversial. We’ll save the good and the ugly for another day; let’s meet the bad.
#35. LOVE FLOPS
Where to even start? LOVE FLOPS, the year’s worst anime—at least, the worst I actually saw end to end—is an endlessly self-impressed, completely clueless piece of derivative junk with no greater point, no aesthetic value, and of real importance to absolutely no one. It is horny without being the least bit sensuous, and pompous without the slightest bit of genuine intellectualism. A cobbled-together kludge of tropes from all over Japanese pop culture: other anime, video games, visual novels, and manga. It’s impossible to call Love Flops disappointing; no one had any expectations for it in the first place. But somehow, it still feels like a huge letdown. Perhaps just in that it manages to be the most tedious and annoying harem anime in a year that also included World’s End Harem, which was also a stupid and self-serious piece of garbage, but at least had a half-assed titillation factor going for it.
The line of defense for LOVE FLOPS as some kind of secret masterpiece is obvious; it pulls a classic trick of spending its first half foreshadowing a twist at its halfway point. People like this kind of thing; it makes them feel clever, and there is a real element of surprise. But what LOVE FLOPS neglects to understand is that the series must be compelling both before and after the twist, and LOVE FLOPS is neither. It is not compelling during its absolutely rancid first episode, which features a parade of harem cliches run through with a cocaine-snorting speed as well as two separate instances of a character being sexually assaulted by a dog. It is not compelling during its bizarre reverse-transphobia episode; it is not compelling when listlessly parodying some ancient idea of the magical girl genre and giving its token mascot character anal beads while doing so. It is, most damning of all, not compelling after its pretentiously built-up big twist; that the entire preceding series has been a simulation, after which the series simply switches to plagiarizing innumerable sci-fi works instead of a mountain of other ecchi anime.
This, too, has been done elsewhere, far better. Listen, I am a colossal sap, it’s not hard to get me to care about characters given twelve weeks to get to know them. This show’s (admittedly not terrible!) final episode made me feel nothing, it is a total emotional black hole. Like The Day I Became a God, which bottomed out the list the last time I did one of these back in 2020, it’s not that there are no good parts to LOVE FLOPS, and in fact it has frustratingly solid production values for something this utterly empty, it’s that those that exist make the bad parts—which vastly outnumber them—seem even worse by comparison. Bringing up The Day I Became A God is appropriate for another reason, because it is damningly clear by its end that LOVE FLOPS, in addition to being a terrible ecchi anime, also desperately wants to be a Jun Maeda show. And if Jun Maeda can’t even do Jun Maeda’s particular style right anymore, what hope did this ever have?
There is nothing of value here, and more than anything else I actually finished this year, I actively regret my time spent watching LOVE FLOPS. Let me be a cautionary tale; do not watch this. Neither you nor anyone else needs to.
#34. RWBY: Ice Queendom
There are a lot of tacks one could take in criticizing RWBY: Ice Queendom. It relies strongly on you having a prior investment in its parent franchise despite being billed as a reboot, but to be honest, that isn’t really one of them. Instead, it’s much easier to cite the slapdash production—some cuts look great, others look terrible, but in both cases it’s obvious no one is really steering the ship, because there is no visual coherence whatsoever—or the bizarre pacing, which somehow makes a single 12-episode cour feel like an eternity, or the strange decision to end the show on a lavishly-animated foodfight that is better both visually and narratively than the entire preceding 11 ½ episodes.
But really, you already know what the real problem with Ice Queendom is if you’re reading this. Yes, the tired, awful, no-good Furry Racism Angle, which Ice Queendom shamelessly resurrects and spends an ungodly amount of time focused on. Ice Quendom’s world features the Faunus, kemonomimi people, who are the repeated target of naked bigotry by several members of the cast, mostly secondary protagonist Weiss Schnee, and a truly stunning amount of Queendom‘s narrative resources are spent futilely trying to make this seem like a grey and grey moral situation, instead of a people being badly oppressed for their physical differences. Everything else takes a backseat to this, including basics like character development and plotting. For some reason, an inexcusably vast majority of Ice Queendom is fixated on the empty metaphor of humans vs. the Faunus, and it completely kneecaps the series. What separates Ice Queendom from LOVE FLOPS is the very thing that makes this series in some ways the worse of the two; it had potential! If it were more focused on the fundamentals and less on trying to wring some life out of one of the most overdone and undercooked stock metaphors in fantasy fiction, it might have been a good, or at least decent anime, but it doesn’t, so it’s not.
This is another one where it’s less a lack of anything good and more the presence of its very serious flaws that brings the series down. You can watch episode 4 and see what this show could’ve been if it had more focus on anything other than the oh-so important plot of Weiss working through her racist upbringing, and then you can weep, because it never gets back there. For the most part, it does not even try.
Even elements that ought to be interesting, like the surreal dream world that much of the show takes place in, are generally wrung dry of any real fun or intrigue by the fact that this show is so focused on trying to make you feel bad for Weiss that it forgets to do almost anything else. It is bizarre, it is offputting, and it is only through the fact that LOVE FLOPS basically doesn’t work on any level as a visual-narrative project that this is not on the bottom of the list. To be honest, I was tempted to put it there anyway just because I have gotten so thoroughly sick of writing about this show. Still; it at least is a show in its own right, and tells a coherent (if very bad) story from start to finish, which is more than can be said for LOVE FLOPS. So, second from the bottom it is.
#33. Sabikui Bisco
Let’s be honest, here. I covered this thing week to week and even I barely remember it aired. I can’t imagine how anyone else feels about this particular action anime washout.
The story of Sabikui Bisco is one of potential unrealized. Solid foundational points like an interesting setting, creative character designs, and an opportunity to put forward some legit social commentary are all squandered on a show that slowly and methodically weathers away its initially strong characterization and story over the course of its run. The animation and general visuals follow not long behind.
If you were to binge-watch Sabikui Bisco in a single day you could see the series degrade in real time like a fading photo, until nothing is left but a vague, shapeless gray spot. This fact ended up presaging what one of the two studios behind this thing, NAZ, turned in for the adaption of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer, which, if I had actually finished it, would probably beat out even the dregs we’ve already seen to bottom out this list. Maybe, for the fans that Sabikui Bisco, the manga, must surely have, this anime is as bad as that one. For me, it’s mostly just a footnote. While it aired, I went back and forth a number of times between whether I thought Bisco was mostly a good show with some flaws or mostly a bad one with occasional bright spots. With its ranking here, you can see where I eventually landed.
#32. Love Live! Superstar!! Season 2
There is no reason this should be as much of a nothing as it was. What happened here? The first season of Love Live! Superstar!!, from just last year, was not the blow-off-the-doors affair of a certain other Love Live anime from the year before that, but it was still decent. It had some warmth to it, some color, some liveliness.
Let this be an illustration, then, of how fragile “decent” truly is. Superstar’s second season is not the worst anime of the year, certainly, but it’s probably the most disappointing for me personally. A series of absolutely baffling writing decisions—doubling the size of the cast, shoving the first season Superstars mostly out of focus for large chunks of the second, having the admittedly-cool antagonist character show up in a total of four episodes across a 12-episode series—completely sink the second season of Superstar as anything more than a curiosity. Yes, it still looks pretty nice in spots, yes, the concert visuals remain appealing, and yes there are one or two solid episodes. None of this changes that a good 3/4ths of this thing is a gigantic letdown. More than anything else, it is simply boring. None of the new characters ever rise above mildly amusing, and their meager story is not an adequate replacement for, nor an interesting addition to, that of the original Liella crew, which this season has a bizarre obsession with sidelining wherever possible. There is really just no merit to this thing for anyone who doesn’t have a truly crippling idol anime addiction.
But that’s the real nail in the coffin. If it’s underwhelming on its own terms, Superstar’s second season is an absolute embarrassment in context, being totally knocked out the ring in simple quality; in visual pop, story-arc writing, and character development by not only its own sibling, the second season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, but by a totally unknown, very different idol anime that aired in Superstar‘s own season. Spoiler alert; that show will place much higher on this list than Superstar does.
#31. Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie
Rounding out the firmly not-good part of the list is this piece of romcom cotton. In a year that had Kaguya-sama, Call of The Night, even My Dress-Up Darling, there really just isn’t a place for a romance anime that had this little going on. Crucially though, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, unlike the last few entries, is not an actively bad show. I can actually imagine why someone would like it, which is more than I can say of Bisco or Ice Queendom or fucking LOVE FLOPS, but it truly is just a very standard piece of genre fare in a genre that had plenty of better options to pick from this year. Its weak central gimmick—that the titular Shikimori is, in some sense, “cool” (read: very nebulously kinda-sorta masculine. Sometimes.)—is not enough to push it past being, at best, a curiosity.
But I do have to give Shikimori some due respect on the basis of its visuals. Shikimori’s fairly nondescript story is still brought to glowing, gentle, pastel life by studio Doga Kobo, and it manages to accrue a handful of standout episodes that are much better than the show on the whole. (The best of these focuses on main character Izumi’s unknown other crush, Kamiya, a character whose elemental melancholy adds a touch of the truly human to a show that otherwise largely lacks that.)
I give Shikimori a little extra credit for another reason, too. This specific team at Doga Kobo is also the one who will do an anime that I am really looking forward to next year. And that story, set to premiere with an astonishing triple-length first episode a few months from now, seems like something far more deserving of their talents than the fairly anonymous stuff here. Shikimori itself is so-so, but in a very literal sense, it is a sign of good things to come.
And that’s the very bottom of the list.
To be honest, I always feel a little bad writing criticism this negative, even though people seem to enjoy reading it for one reason or another. If you’re in the camp who prefers more positive anime criticism—and if you are, don’t worry, I’m right there with you—then you have quite a bit to look forward to starting tomorrow. Even the least of the anime from this point on are a lot better than what we just discussed. (And to be honest, LOVE FLOPS and Ice Queendom are so rancid that I felt bad putting the other three anime down here with them. It just feels cruel, you know?) But I pride myself on critical honesty, and I did honestly dislike all of these shows. Hopefully you’ll appreciate the more positive stuff going forward, too.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
Of the anime I wrote first impressions on at the top of the season, My Master Has No Tail was and remains the most obscure over here in the USA. Its charming but unflashy production values and art direction as well as its somewhat niche subject matter have meant that it was basically destined to fly under the radar since day one. I loathe this phrasing, so I tend to avoid it, but it really is hard to conceive of something more quintessentially Japanese than a show about a tanuki learning rakugo.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, I’d actually put My Master Has No Tail ahead of several other “slice of life” anime this year. Partly, it’s simply that I’m a sucker for a good piece of art about the process of creating art itself. 2022 has felt light on those; anime that enshrine the creative and performative process itself as something worth valuing and holding on to. My Master Has No Tail is good enough that it’d stand out even in a year with more of them, but being the proverbial droplet in the desert has definitely made it mean more to me personally. (It’s not totally alone in this venture, mind. Earlier this year there was Healer Girls. This very season we have BOCCHI THE ROCK! Still, Master simply hasn’t picked up the fanbase that matches Bocchi, or even the more muted reception to Healer Girl.)
The anime’s tenth episode zeroes in on this to an even greater extent than the series previously has, as it heads into its final stretch. This episode focuses heavily on names, both in a general sense and several specific examples; that of the routine that features here, that of the previously-nameless Mameda herself, and on the tradition of name inheritance in rakugo as a field. In this way, it illuminates the importance of passing these artistic traditions on; from teacher to pupil, down through the generations. (The core conflict set up here is, in fact, about someone who doesn’t want that to happen.)
Mameda has, by this point in the series, been living with, and been the apprentice of, her master Bunko for some time. Except; the heads of Japan’s other major rakugo lineages aren’t having it. Mameda has to pass a test from all of them; the first was last week, and this week’s episode centers around the second. Her examiner, as it were, is Enshi Kirino, a cat-like rakugoka from a rich family who speaks in a dragging, laboriously slow monotone unless a metronome happens to be running nearby. (In which case, she can talk at normal speed. Though her tone is still informed by a sense of smug mischief.)
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is where the show finally makes use of “Jugemu”, probably the most well-known rakugo routine of all time, and certainly the only one that most western otaku are likely to be familiar with, if only because it’s referenced in anime, manga, and basically every other field of Japanese pop culture pretty often. The test put to Mameda is very simple; she merely has to memorize “Jugemu” from Enshi’s example (she has two opportunities to observe Enshi, in fact), and perform it perfectly. No mistakes allowed; not a single syllable out of place.
Enshi’s instructive performance is fairly interesting on its own; she puts a tightly-wound and almost mechanical spin on it, possibly in a deliberate attempt to psyche Mameda out, something her voice actress Ayana Taketatsu leans into quite well. Initially, Mameda just can’t commit the bit to memory. A problem when the entire premise of the routine is the title character thereof having a ludicrously long name.
Nothing helps until she thinks to meditate in the woods. There, for the first time, Mameda faces her fears in an honest way; she’s scared of failing the test, because failing would mean being kicked out. And she doesn’t want that because being under Bunko’s tutelage is the only place where she’s ever felt like she’s truly belonged. That realization is what makes the routine eventually click for her, and she recites it to Enshi, who in turn, is enraptured enough by Mameda’s performance—despite Mameda being totally exhausted at this point—to fall into reminiscence about her own master; the previous Daikokutei. Bunko‘s own master.
The episode ends with Enshi presenting Mameda with a paper fan on which she’s written her own name. I do not actually know for certain if this is some sort of traditional gesture of esteem in rakugoka circles, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn so. In small moments like this, My Master Has No Tail is as compelling an argument for the arts as any other that’s aired this year.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
What we’ve basically got here, in BOCCHI THE ROCK!‘s third episode, is an adorable little tale about how mistakes are rarely as big in reality as we make them in our minds, and how even people who really seem like they’ve “got it together” only occasionally actually do. Along the way, BOCCHI THE ROCK! continues to casually be one of the best-looking anime in a season that is not lacking for visual style. Witness the series go all-in on one-off gags by shifting art styles, waving around paper cut-outs on popsicle sticks or even weaving in tiny snippets of live action footage for additional effect.
Really though, none of that would be half as impressive without the character work on display here. As with any comedy, dissecting why Bocchi is funny kills the humor somewhat, but it is again worth circling back around to this idea of Hitori as the Ultimate Introvert. A constantly-fretting ball of anxiety who frequently blows things up beyond all reason in her own head, only to be taken aback when it turns out that no one is actually out to get her. It is, as I mentioned back in my writeup for the premiere, an immensely relatable feeling.
This episode centers around Ikuyo Kita (Ikumi Hasegawa), who Hitori is trying to recruit into her band as a second guitarist and vocalist. Her initial attempts go so poorly that she spends a memorable scene hiding in shame under the stairs at her high school, and laments her lack of social skills the only way she knows how; playing the guitar and singing while an imaginary music video plays in her mind.
Hitori from Bocchi the Rock 🤝 Eve from Birdie Wing causing random music videos wherever they go.
Kita is, in theory, Hitori’s total opposite; an irrepressible little firecracker of pure energy who gets along with just about everybody. But, as it turns out, she and Hitori have more in common than may first be obvious.
Like, a lot more.
“Kita is the guitarist who previously bailed on the band Hitori is now in” more.
As we find out, Kita cannot actually play the guitar. She lied about being able to, and joined the band to get closer to Ryo. And I want to be clear here; when I say she “joined to get closer to Ryo,” I mean she has a big-ass gay crush on Ryo and wanted literally any reason to be near her. This is not subtext.
Wow, a preppy girl falling for the slightly butch bass player. Surely this is a unique circumstance in history, never to be repeated.
We also learn that another reason Kita flaked out on being in the band is that, incredibly, she does not even own a guitar. She thought she did, and much is made of Hitori’s correct deduction that she’s been practicing this entire time just by feeling the calluses on her hands, but in one of the series’ comparatively more low-key gags, it turns out that she actually bought a six-string bass. Thankfully, at episode’s end, Ryo buys it off of her and she gets an actual guitar instead.
Which, yes, of course things resolve themselves cleanly. (Why wouldn’t they? If you want emotional devastation there are other shows airing this season for that.) Hitori spends some time worrying that Kita might replace her at the club, since she seems to be better at most of the club work than Hitori herself is, but that quickly dissolves when the aforementioned callus plot point rears its head. Hitori ends the episode as Kita’s new guitar teacher, and the band grows into a proper quartet, where it will likely stay for the rest of the series.
The rest of the girls take Kita’s deception in stride, and Nijika reasons that if she hadn’t done all that, she and Ryo wouldn’t have met Hitori. Forgiveness comes easy because, well, none of this was ever a huge deal in the first place. It was just mildly inconvenient. Bocchi the Rock! is developing a running subtheme, almost, about how these things seem so much more important in our own heads than they ever are to the people around us.
But in a more general sense, the series continues to be warm, personable, and full of charm. Here’s to looking forward to the rest of the season.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.
Since we last spoke about Lycoris Recoil, the series has undergone a radical shift in scale and focus. We saw the opening moves of this maneuver back in episode 7, but by now the show has mostly disregarded any direct “nitty gritty” political engagement. There are two things LycoReco cares about right now: mapping out the long arc of Chisato’s short life, and broad, philosophical questions of destiny and free will. Even though the show’s actual setting and characters have not changed much, we’re still a very long way from the montage of high schoolers capping people from the premiere.
We’ve known for a while that Chisato has an artificial heart, some future-tech thing that doesn’t actually beat, and which is essentially irreplaceable. So it wasn’t that surprising when, a few weeks ago, a minor villain posing as a nurse injected our protagonist with some knock-out serum or another and performed some impromptu surgery. The result was hardware lockout; no one can tinker with Chisato’s heart anymore, and that includes recharging it.
She has two months left to live.
Chisato’s life has the ring of true tragedy. Raised as a child soldier but addled with an incurable heart disease, she was singled out by the mysterious Shinji Yoshimatsu as a “genius” of killing, the primary skill of all Lycorii, and given her artificial heart with the understanding that she would use this gift to become an even deadlier assassin. Even with this in mind, we learn, it was doubtful she’d live past 18. Of course, for the purposes of being a deadly teenage supercop, that’s perfectly fine; Lycorii are discharged at 18 anyway.
The entire universe of Lycoris Recoil is aligned against Chisato; the “nurse” who’s pulled the plug on her heart is one of Yoshimatsu’s people, an obvious attempt to gain leverage on her to get her to return to her alleged true calling as an assassin, her former superior at the DA is not much better, giving her back a camera she’d confiscated some time ago to try to nudge her back into DA service. And of course, there’s her heart problems themselves, a natural ailment that the artificial heart has provided only a temporary reprieve from.
Chisato rarely shows any direct concern over any of this, and frankly she’s remarkably unflappable in the face of her imminent demise, but that’s precisely part of what makes her character arc so effective. Fearing death, at least a little bit, is normal. Staring unblinking into its face as you know it’s creeping ever closer, that’s another thing entirely. The ability to do that only comes from having spent the better part of your life in a seriously bad place. Even with all she very obviously cares for—Takina, the cafe’, Mika, etc.—she seems to have accepted this as inevitable from day one. It’s heartbreaking.
Yet, when, in episode 10 (the most recent), she finds out who exactly is responsible for all of that hardship, she holds no ill will toward him at all. She’s not really even mad at Mika for keeping this secret from her this entire time! Instead, she reiterates that she sees the two of them as her fathers, and when, in the episode’s final minutes, we learn that Shinji’s being held hostage by Majima and Robota, she doesn’t hesitate to spend a day of her rapidly-shrinking lifespan trying to rescue him. (The actual hostage rescue itself being territory for next week, we must assume.)
Chisato is, at the end of the day, an incredibly strong character. Not just strong in the usual anime sense, and not just strong as in “well-written,” but possessing of a vast moral strength, too. It’s hard to know whether to take her insistence that she hear all of the terrible things Shinji’s said about her in person as an incredible capacity for forgiveness, a denial that she’s been lied to at all, or both. But all signs point to her being very much aware of her own mortality, her ability to do all of this in spite of that awareness is both admirable and more than a little terrifying. Hers is a blitheness that hides a deep pain, something we really don’t get to actually see for ourselves directly.
While this is very much Chisato’s show, it’d be a mistake to not mention that the rest of Lycoris Recoil‘s cast has continued to be great, too. Mika’s deep and very much justified regret over his role in concealing the truth from Chisato rounds out his character in an excellent way.
Takina, in the meantime, has had to deal with the impending loss of her best friend (or “best friend.” I leave that distinction up to you, shippers), perhaps the first person she’s ever truly connected to, while also, in a twist of dramatic irony, being given exactly what she initially wanted; a trip back to the DA. She and Chisato are apart for episode 10, which while sad, does give her a few moments to truly shine on her own, and her single-minded focus on trying to somehow help Chisato is very grounded and relatable, despite the fantastical stakes. (This could also be said of Mika, actually. I am sure there is at least one father watching this show who absolutely cried his eyes out this past episode.)
The only real weak spot is Majima, who’s taken the main villain role in this last arc of the show. As a cartoonish caricature of an anarchist in a world built on some already-iffy foundational principles, he is probably the only genuine weak link in Lycoris Recoil‘s character roster and embodies most of the show’s remaining shortcomings. Still, he’s at least entertaining at this point, with his utterly ludicrous plot of “hide a thousand guns all over Tokyo and let carnage ensue naturally from there” being, all at once, a decent piece of commentary, comically stupid on its face, and weirdly lazy, as far as big endgame villain schemes go. But at this point, that’s expected of LycoReco, a show that is built on contradictions top to bottom.
The plot itself has taken an all-action movie tropes twist—again—as we ride into the final few weeks. A dying Chisato prepares to rescue Shinji while Takina and the other DA Lycorii try to deal with Majima running circles around them. Much is up in the air, and it’s impossible to exactly call where it all will land.
For any flaws it could be said to have, there is absolutely no denying that, as Lycoris Recoil nears its end, it remains an absolutely fascinating show, forever pulling in all directions and only recently settling into a groove that seems to truly suit it. (No one would call the show’s early episodes bad, I don’t think, but things have definitely improved.) The last bullets are in the chamber; gun cocked, but not fired.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.
Call of The Night is a show about living outside of social norms. It has been basically since day 1. Modern vampire stories lend themselves particularly well to this sort of thing, and that might be why the glove fits Call of The Night so well. But whatever the reason, it’s difficult to read the show’s tale of complex nocturnal relationships as being about anything else.
For Ko, vampirism has always represented an ideal exit strategy from the expectations of diurnal society. Vampires do not have to go to school, and since they (presumably, here as in most fiction) live very long lives, there is no need to truly manage one’s time wisely. After all, there can’t be any future problems looming over your head if “the future” never really comes.
In its past few episodes, Call of The Night has raised the obvious counterpoint to this idea; what about the vampires’ own social norms?
Recent episodes have established that as Ko is to humanity, Nazuna is to vampiredom. Nazuna is, in her own way, a social outcast as well. She’s apparently never turned another person, she’s unwilling to seduce people in order to do that, and in general she simply doesn’t seem to get along with the other vampires we’re introduced to very well. In fact, one could easily argue that Nazuna is more of an outcast than Ko is; at least Ko’s classmates seem to like him. The other vampires only just tolerate Nazuna, and that’s after learning about her and Ko’s unique situation. Before that point, one of those vampires, Kikyo Seri (Haruka Tomatsu), actually tries to kill her—and Ko, for knowing too much about vampires—marking the first genuine threat in the entire story.
Things work themselves out, sort of, but we also learn that Ko only has a year to become a vampire before being turned becomes impossible. “Failing to qualify,” as one of the other vampires puts it. What was once a choice has now been turned into a requirement, and worse, one with a time limit. The other vampires do not explicitly tell Ko that they’ll kill him if he can’t manage to turn in that time, but all evidence points to this, since then he’d be a human who knows too much about them with no way of turning into one himself. Once again, Ko finds himself up against a societal wall; expectations imposed, with consequences if they’re not met. (Rather severe ones, I must say.)
This, understandably, makes Ko anxious. Since now he feels like he needs to fall in love with Nazuna rather than just wanting to. He even tries taking her on a date, at Seri’s suggestion, but it pretty quickly falls to pieces.
Ladies, has your man ever left you feeling like this?
Things are only salvaged when Nazuna lifts him into the night once again; trying to fit anyone else’s ideas of what their relationship should be inevitably fails. It’s only on their own terms do Nazuna and Ko truly work together, not just as a couple but even just as friends.
All this said then, the question asks itself; is becoming a vampire really all it’s cracked up to be? Nazuna certainly doesn’t think so, and there is some implication that Seri may not, either. But there’s also a lingering hint that Ko may not have to face this looming problem alone.
In the most recent episode, 8, we’re also introduced to Mahiru (Kenshou Ono). Mahiru is a jovial, all-around friendly sort of guy. Ko really seems to like him, arguably to the point of a crush, and he makes a good first impression.
(I think every middle and high school has at least one guy like this. In my high school it was a stoner dude who was extremely tall. His name was Mitch, and I hope he’s doing well nowadays.) We find out, though, that Mahiru has also been seeing someone after dark, with the broad implication that he, too, may be in love with a vampire.
It seems like that for all Ko has used nighttime as an escape, his problems are not content to stay out of the shadows. As always, I am intrigued to see where the series goes from here, as it enters its final stretch.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
“Idols don’t ‘do the right thing.’ They do what they want.”
I’m breaking a personal rule with this one. Generally speaking, I don’t really like to compare currently-airing anime. Especially not if the main reason they’re being compared is that they share a genre. In my view, people generally vastly overstate the importance of genre and tend to use what should be a guideline as a box to lump dissimilar things together. Or worse, to rag on something for not fitting a particular, narrow ideal of what something in a given genre “should” be. Comparing seasonal anime on the basis of their genre alone is usually pretty basic and uninteresting.
Yet, something about the idol genre specifically reignites an old fire of partisan fandom within me. I latch on to favorites pretty hard, and even I’m sometimes at a loss as to succinctly explain why, both in terms of individual characters and—as this column will go into—entire shows themselves.
So today, I’m letting myself do something I normally wouldn’t; I am comparing two things that I fully acknowledge have little business being compared. Those things being the second season of Love Live! Superstar, about the idol group Liella, and new girl on the block SHINEPOST, about the idol group TiNgS.
But come on! How can I not? We have here two idol anime airing in the same season, appealing to the same groups of people, but with wildly different approaches. One operating from within the established Love Live franchise, and the other, a punchy outsider that evokes 2011’s seminal The Idolmaster. (Bonus points; Superstar is from the long-established Sunrise, and SHINEPOST comes to us from the still relatively young Studio KAI, perhaps best known at this point for the second season of Pretty Derby and last year’s Super Cub. They’re also working on the excellent Fuuto PI this season as well.) One is pure fluff; sunny, goofy, and, in its best moments, purehearted and warm. The other is a down-to-earth look at idols as players in the idol industry, focusing on ground-level character dynamics and getting into the heads of its significantly smaller cast.
So here we go; two idol anime, two very different takes on what that phrase even means in 2022. We will look at them one at a time, and then consider how we might use the knowledge of what each is doing to look ahead into the future.
We’ll start with SHINEPOST, the one I prefer by a fair bit. TiNgS were introduced to the world with their trailer PV toward the end of last year, and it (and the accompanying song, the scintillating banger “Be Your Light!!”), immediately hooked me.
SHINEPOST is a scrappy little anime, one that seemingly rather few people in the Anglosphere are watching. But for my money, it outstrips Superstar in a few respects; it’s more ambitious, and the particular suite of emotions on display here resonates with me more. I don’t think SHINEPOST is a “better” show in any absolute sense—I rarely think of anime in that way, and Superstar has its merits too, as we’ll get to—but it’s easily the one that’s captured more of my heart.
Part of that, I think, comes down to the fact that SHINEPOST has what is for me more relatable character writing. Particularly in the form of Kyouka Tamaki (Moeko Kanisawa, lead for the real-life idol group ≠ME). Kyouka does fall within a firmly established character archetype; she’s straightlaced, serious, a good student, and considers herself very ordinary. She turns to idol work out of a desperate desire to be special, to mean something to somebody as more than just another person. The devil’s in the details here; Kyouka’s desperation to be noticed also gives rise to a farily pronounced self-loathing streak. See, for instance, the way that she convinces herself that she’s not “really” talented in the weeks following a performance of a new song, in which she sang lead, gone awry. Throughout the show’s second major arc, she tries to settle for less, only for that to end up making her feel worse. It’s a punch to the gut. She reaches her lowest point when she slips into a McDonald’s incognito, hoping—and then actively fantasizing—that one of the other patrons will recognize her. It is, and I mean this with no malice in my heart whatsoever, truly pathetic, in the most profound sense of that term. I have been this person; lots of people have been this person, seeking petty validation from random strangers, only then to feel even worse when we don’t get it. It is a truly miserable feeling, the sort of thing that can swallow a performer’s psyche whole if left unchecked.
But SHINEPOST is not a show that wallows in these kinds of things. The point, after all, of showing you what this kind of character is like in the dark is to then lift them out of that darkness. Kyouka’s manager—an important character in his own right—is able to convince her that actively wanting to be special, that selfishly, shamelessly wanting to feel, even if just for a moment, like the center of someone’s universe, is not just okay but is expected of her. That’s where this column’s header quote comes from; and it’s one that will stick with me for a while. Sure enough, when she’s able to get out of her own head and adopt the mentality of just letting herself honestly want what she wants, she absolutely aces the next performance of her song. In doing so, she shoots her biggest fan, the one person to whom Kyouka really is so much more than just another face in the crowd, through the heart. She straight up faints; it’s hard to blame her.
Granted, this is just one particular arc. (Not even the most recent one, as Rio, the spunky short girl of the group, is the star of the current arc.) But it’s illustrative of SHINEPOST‘s character writing strengths, which make the series feel far more grounded than Superstar despite its rather weird high premise. (Would you believe something this good is being sold on the premise that the idol group’s manager can tell when people are lying? He’s a good character and all, but it’s a downright bizarre thing to hook your whole show on.)
Speaking of, let’s pivot to Superstar. Comparing the shows along a character writing axis in particular is rather unfair. After all; the Love Live series has never dealt with the ‘industry’ side of the idol industry, preferring to bubble its wholly fictional school idol concept off from real world concerns, which severely curtails the possibility of any kind of industry drama plotlines. (This despite the fact that, of course, any of the actual idols who voice the Love Live girls are industry professionals who’ve generally had to work very hard to get where they are, but that’s a conversation for another day.) Inherently, this isn’t a huge problem, and a different Love Live series, last season’s followup to Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, managed to turn that lack of serious engagement with what being an idol means ‘in the real world’ into a strength. Nijigasaki envisions, essentially, a utopia, where the distinction between idol and fan is nearly nonexistent and not only can everyone be an idol, but everyone should at least give it a shot. It has a particular kind of rare fervor that you don’t see in most of its peers over on the sunny optimism side of the idol anime spectrum.
Superstar, meanwhile, has what one could easily argue are higher stakes; its main cast are trying to win the titular Love Live. This is, in theory, a fertile ground for, if not the same kind of character drama as SHINEPOST‘s, at least something in the same general ballpark. Instead, though, most of Superstar‘s best episodes, especially here in its second season, have been a lot sillier than the looming presence of any serious competition would imply. One of season 2’s biggest developments so far is Liella expanding to eight (and eventually nine, although we’re not there yet) members. Two of those members, the stoic oddball Shiki Wakana (Wakana Ookuma), and the willful idol otaku Mei Yoneme (Akane Yabushima), recently got an episode all their own.
Shiki and Mei seen here in their natural states of “looking kinda stoned” and “being flustered and embarrassed.”
And while there was some focus on the twos’ relationship with each other (which goes past “best friends” all the way into borderline homoromantic, a plus for some viewers, certainly), the episode was mostly about wacky misunderstandings. It was a very good episode about wacky misunderstandings, but this, and similar examples throughout the series so far have made Superstar feel like a bit of a lightweight in comparison. Cheerful, fun, amusing, but not anything more than that.
Part of this, I think, comes down to Superstar‘s idols themselves. Liella are not by any means a bad group, and I’d put them on par with SHINEPOST‘s TiNgS in a vacuum, but none of its members come close to the sheer magnetism of, say, Nijigasaki‘s Setsuna Yuki or Lanzhu Zhong. You really need a certain level of camp to elevate this sort of story beyond the merely pleasant. And unfortunately, while there is camp and theatricality present in Love Live! Superstar, it’s mostly not from Liella themselves.
Let’s talk about Wien Margarete (Yuina). Or Vienna Margaret, depending on whose subtitles you’re looking at.
Introduced in Superstar‘s third episode as a rival not just for Liella on the whole but for center Kanon Shibuya (Sayuri Date) specifically, she actually hasn’t appeared in person in the two episodes since. She almost doesn’t need to; Wien has an absolutely electric magnetism that, honestly, none of the Liella girls can really match. What you have here is perhaps the classic problem of simply making the antagonist too cool. (And make no mistake, with her sneering dismissal of Liella and the entire Love Live competition, Wien is absolutely a villain, in as much as Love Live ever has those. Kanon frankly even seems a bit scared of her, despite the fact that Wien is literally a middle schooler.)
Granted, if a middle schooler with lavender hair started showing up outside my house to tell me how bad I was at singing, I might be scared of her too.
But at the same time, I’m unwilling to slam Superstar too hard over this. It is entirely possible that in the season’s back half the rest of Liella will rise to the occasion. Their actual talent, both in-universe and, outside of it, that of their voice actresses, is not remotely the problem, it’s just that you can’t beat crazy shit like glowing butterflies, iron clockwork, and a gothic lolita dress adorned with black feathers by being a pretty good idol group. (And honestly the show itself seems to be on my side here; go watch that clip and look at how Liella react to her. Those are the faces of girls who know they’re outclassed.)
Perhaps, then, Liella will meet that challenge at some point. As it stands, they just don’t have this kind of theatricality, but seeing the group transform into the sort of people who could pull that off would be very much worth watching. (If, still, an entirely different universe than what SHINEPOST is doing.)
In a sense, and to return back to our opening question, this is really less a criticism of Superstar and more of an open query. Now that this genre is entering its second full decade of being among the most successful and popular anime subgenres, where is it going? There’s a lot I haven’t touched on here, outside just these two shows. Right now, Waccha Primagi, a children’s anime that blends the idol and magical girl genres has been unwilling to let the possible outbreak of a war between humans and magic users—after the local Beyonce stand-in ascended to divinity and became an angry Sun God, naturally—interfere with its once-an-episode CGI idol performances. Last season, there was Healer Girl, which I would not really call an idol anime, but its dynamic approach to music certainly borrows something from the genre, and which it spun into hallucinatory dream sequences of rare beauty. And this very season, there are a few idol anime I simply haven’t seen; namely League of Nations Air Force Aviation Magic Band Luminous Witches, whose full English title is an absolute joy to have to copy and paste every time and which is a spinoff of the polarizing Strike Witches series, and Phantom of the Idol, which simply by starring a male lead, is already so far removed from almost everything else on this page that it’s almost another conversation entirely.
Perhaps, then, trying to say much about what idol anime will look like next year, in 5 years, in 10, is foolish in the first place. Writing this piece has been an exercise in perspective. Always a valuable thing, and I hope you’ve found reading it interesting as well.
Nonetheless, the fact remains. Whether the rest of the ’20s brings us more stories of passion and drama within the idol industry, and whatever twists they may have, more sunlit visions of a world where anyone and everyone can become the performer they’ve always dreamed of being, or something in between or even farther afield, the idol genre does not look like it’s going anywhere any time soon. People love pop music, and they love pop stars. That much seems unlikely to change.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Magic Planet 