Special Notice: This should really go without saying, but since I’m going to be talking about all of these shows in general, overall terms, you can expect spoilers for all of them, up to and including their endings.

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So here we are again, anime fans. Another year firmly in the past tense, not just within our specific sphere of interest but in general. Time is a funny thing, it’s already late November as I write this opening paragraph, which isn’t much less time than I gave myself last year, but despite the fact that I am demonstrably writing about fewer shows, I wanted to at least try and give each of them a bit more attention.

Yes, this marks a change in format. Last year I undertook the–in hindsight rather absurd–task of ranking every anime I’d finished that came out that year. The format required me to spend a fair amount of writing real estate on anime that I either didn’t like or simply had no strong thoughts on at all. This year, I wanted to simplify a bit. Only a bit, mind you. This is still me we’re talking about, after all.

So, this year the job is less complex, but simultaneously more difficult. 5 Anime I liked more than the rest; five that stuck with me and that I think will continue to stick with me. Plus, a handful of honorable mentions to get a positive word in for some anime that I enjoyed but couldn’t wholly self-justify putting in the main top five.

Just to fully disclose; as usual, these are indeed only my opinions, thoughts, and observations. My opinions that I consider reasonably informed and well thought out, but opinions, nonetheless. There is also the fact, of course, that anime I didn’t watch cannot make it onto this list by default, with apologies to the several anime I heard very good things about this year but did not find the time to watch myself. (Chiefly here I am thinking of ODD TAXI and Eighty-Six, but there are other examples too.) This list also consists exclusively of serial fiction, in the interest of keeping things fair, so the final Rebuild of Evangelion film isn’t here either. (Which is a shame, because it would’ve easily earned a spot on this list. My hope is that next year I’ll have seen enough anime films that actually came out in 2022 to make them their own list, but we’ll see.) And it’s only shows that are actually finished, so if Ousama Ranking ever shows up on one of these lists, just as an example, it’ll be the list for next year, when it concludes.

Ultimately then, what you have is a snapshot of what I consider particularly worthwhile in the medium of serial anime. A couple things went into picking shows for this list. The simple question of how much I enjoyed watching it week to week is obviously the biggest factor, and all else being equal is what I prioritized. But I did try to give at least some consideration to more nebulous things, such as general public reception, whether I think they will stand the test of time, etc. etc. (Factors that I am of course completely capable of being wrong about. But hey, I try my best.) Above all else was the simple fact of what they meant to me. It is, after all, my list, no one else’s.

Anyway, enough beating around the bush, let’s get to it.

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#5. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2

Madoka Magica was not the only franchise to make a welcome return this year, but of those that did, it’s probably the one closest to my heart. I will fully admit, there’s some circumstantial bias here. I missed out on the original Madoka Magica when it was airing now a good ten years ago. On some subconscious level it’s possible that my opinion of Magia Record is elevated by the simple fact that I get to see it unfold in real time. I’d be hard pressed to say that MagiReco’s second season was the most accessible anime of 2021–that’s part of why it rounds out the bottom of the list–but it was certainly among those I felt the most connection to. (Covering it week by week, on what would become my last bit of work for The Geek Girl Authority, probably helped.)

To a point, a show that looks like this speaks for itself. Public consensus has held for some time that Studio SHAFT‘s golden age is firmly in the past tense, but if there’s a case to be made for that whole “SHAFT Renaissance” idea that bounces around Anime Twitter from time to time, it’s somewhere in the frames of Magia Record. The season’s stronger episodes (which make up a good chunk of its brief eight) absolutely drip with style, and its premiere in particular is the sort of love letter to both the fans and the series itself that you just don’t get super often. Combine that with its wildly ambitious (some might say overly ambitious!) storyline that attempts to mythmake by tying together disparate parts of the wider Madoka ‘verse, it giving relatively minor characters like Kuroe a chance to shine, and just the frankly kinda insane fact that the Madoka Train is still chugging along at all a full decade later? Yeah, Magia Record earns its spot on the list, even if it is “only” at #5.

It’s totally possible that MagiReco’s third season–whenever it arrives–won’t be as good as this, or indeed that it’ll be much better, but this list is a ranking of what’s aired this year, and this year, the oddball middle segment of a three-part story happened to be the fifth-best anime of the whole damn thing. Go figure.

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#4. SSSS.DYNAZENON

As a sequel to one of the best anime of the 2010s–2018’s SSSS.GRIDMAN—SSSS.DYNAZENON is odd. It takes place away from that anime’s setting and involves only two of its characters (and only in a supporting capacity.) But considered thematically, these deviations from its predecessor make perfect sense.

If, as is often held to be the case, we can map GRIDMAN‘s characters to the inner workings of a single mind, and thus make the case that that series is about self-acceptance, DYNAZENON is the logical progression. The exterior to GRIDMAN‘s interior. Like a lot of anime this year, DYNAZENON dealt in themes of alienation and misplacedness. Common emotions that we all struggle with in a world where things feel like they’re falling apart faster and faster all the time. Yet, at the same time, it re-lit the fire of that old truism; no man is an island.

How? Easy. Director Akira Amemiya proved yet again that, yeah, you can still make a show that’s at least 50% giant robots fighting giant monsters by volume actually say something and have it not come across as corny or just over-wrought. DYNAZENON manages the impressive task of welding those fight scenes together with interrogative character work all over again, in a way that feels distinct from, but very much related to, GRIDMAN‘s approach to that problem.

All five members of our core cast are disconnected from society in some way. Be it Yomogi’s parents’ separation, the death of Yume’s older sister, Koyomi and Chise’s mutually-enabling shut-in habits, or even how Gauma is lost from his own world entirely. Over the course of the series they heal, but the journey is not a smooth or easy one, and the kaiju represent allegorical threats to their wellbeing as much as physical ones.

This is to say nothing of the Kaiju Eugenicists, those alarmingly-named villains who serve as the main four’s opposites on the other end of the good guy / bad guy spectrum. They’re alienated too, but their alienation consumes them, and is the driving force behind their desire to subjugate and destroy. In the case of Sizumu, it quite literally turns him into a monster.

DYNAZENON‘s driving question is thus how to move on from that alienation, from those things that drive a wedge between us and others. To its credit, it offers no easy solution, although in showing what really happened to Yume’s sister when no one was there to support her, it offers a dire warning of the consequences of not at least trying. The Dyna Soldiers find solace in the pieces of the Dynazenon itself, which, perhaps tellingly, is formed from what appear to be mere toys in their dormant state. But more importantly, they find solace in each other. To quote my own writeup of the tenth episode from back in June:

The only reason she couldn’t be saved like Yume herself was just a single episode ago is that, in a very literal sense, no one was there to support her. I suspect that SSSS.DYNAZENON may lose some people off that fact alone, but the point here is that Yume is still affected by her death. There are no easy outs, not even here.

But there are words of advice. Before the two leave each other for the last time, Kano tells Yume that she needs to rely on others more. And that, right there, is the entire thesis of SSSS.DYNAZENON as a series. Where SSSS.GRIDMAN dealt with the internal, all of its characters mapping to different parts of a single psyche, SSSS.DYNAZENON is external.

^{SSSS.DYNAZENON Recap: (S02E10) Which Memories Do You Regret?}

It’s known that a third part of the trilogy; a crossover, likely in film form, called GRIDMAN x DYNAZENON, will round out this particular series of stories from Amemiya and co., beyond that, details remain scarce. But SSSS or no, if they can keep making stuff like this, stuff that hits you right in the heart? His place as one of the new decade’s best directors is assured. Keep broadcasting, kaiju king.

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#3. Sonny Boy

Another theme we’re going to be seeing a lot of here is transience. It’s rather been my “word of the year,” so I hope you’ll forgive my use of it again, here, but it’s true. All things pass, and for many people our whole lives involve, at least to some degree, reckoning with that fact. Sonny Boy was not the only show this year to grapple with that fact, but it was notably thorough about it.

It begins in the void, but soon crash-lands into an island on the far side of summer. There, surreal parables about life, death, and everything in-between unfold like the show’s own Matryoshka Doll worlds. Universes within universes, wheels within wheels. The purpose? An ode to our lost digital generation; the Millennial/Gen-Z continuum. Adults are imposters putting on a show or so distant that they’re divinity. No one is truly there to guide the cast, much like there’s no one truly there for us except ourselves. They, as we, need to make peace on their own.

Of the anime on this list, I will cop to “understanding” Sonny Boy the least. There is a lot of symbolism here; it’s a dense show. (Which, hey, means it’s good for a rewatch.) But the series’ core of melancholy-hopeful nihilism is easy enough to map out, and that’s what earns it a spot on this list. Well, that and its absolutely stunning visual style. Sonny Boy looks like very little else that aired in 2021, and its surrealist, painterly looks would earn it a spot in the honorable mentions even if the show genuinely was all talk and no walk. But thankfully, while it may occasionally lean inscrutable, its heart beats strong.

Of the various treatises on the passing of everything that 2021 produced (gee, I wonder why that was on everyone’s minds), Sonny Boy stands as one of the more accepting. But in a way, my typing this is pointless. One of the show’s own characters put it best.

^{Perhaps I should be giving Rajdhani a co-writing credit for how often I’ve used these screenshots when talking about Sonny Boy.}

(As a side note; creator Shingo Natsume‘s next project is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. So, it seems like this is hardly the last time he’s going to direct something delightfully confounding. Perhaps it’ll show up on the list next year!)

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#2. Heike Monogatari

If Sonny Boy explored transience via surreality and imagined worlds far from our own, Heike Monogatari grounded its own investigation of the concept firmly in the real-world concerns of history and myth. Based on a historical Japanese epic, The Heike Story has the benefit of hindsight. From the beginning of the first episode, each character’s steps fall with inevitability. From Lord Shigemori, who takes protagonist Biwa in after her father is callously murdered by members of his own clan, to Taira no Kiyomori’s heartless power-grabbing ploys, every man, woman, and child here has their fate sealed before the first episode of the series even begins.

There is one exception: Biwa herself. (She’s voiced by Aoi Yuuki, in what would be the strongest role in the career of almost any other voice actress but is just another casual triumph for her. She brings alternating innocence for the Biwa we see most of the time, and stately, religious gravitas for the white-haired “seer” Biwa.)

Her role? To be conscripted as fate’s chronicler and become representative both of the nature of the original epic itself and more generally as a symbol of all of us. Witnesses to history, as we are, who so often are powerless to change it despite our own strengths. It can feel grim and fatalistic; seasons change and an empire falls like a leaf from a tree in autumn. But Heike Monogatari never makes it feel that way. Things simply are, and then they aren’t. Dust becomes dust, time ticks on.

Heike Monogatari is observance and acceptance, and the stormy lining to its silver cloud is that it’s so obviously timeless that even writing about it feels sort of pointless. It’s like trying to review The Iliad. It could have been #1, easily, and in almost any other year it would’ve been. Yet, at least to me, it was still somehow “only” the second-best anime of 2021.

But, before we get to the top of the list, let’s go through some honorable mentions. Because you’re worth it, dear readers.

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Honorable Mention: takt op.Destiny

Ribbons of highway and a great blue sky way. Ruins, cities, deserts, forests, monsters, and song. A world that’s lost its music. That was takt op.Destiny. Hardly the year’s most “together” production, takt op has the dubious distinction of sharing a bizarre ending twist with notable “would’ve probably made this list if quality wasn’t a factor at all” shortlister The Detective is Already Dead. But obviously, its spotty ending is not why it’s here. Of what I saw in 2021, takt op had some of the most purely joyous animation. Most of it took the form of fight scenes, and it’s easy to dismiss that sort of thing as lowbrow. But by tying it together with a thematic core about rescuing a world that thinks it no longer needs art with that art, it manages to make it all feel meaningful. For the bounty of good to great anime 2021 did have, it was rather short on anime that I felt compellingly made the case for art itself–something last year had in spades–boiling down to mostly just this, Love Live! Superstar!!, and Kageki Shoujo!! (Which itself only missed the list by dint of a dry run of episodes in its middle third.) So, for filling that niche, I am quite grateful to takt op, perhaps the year’s messiest pile of camp.

Honorable Mention: Zombie Land Saga Revenge

If someone asks me what I thought about the general quality of anime in 2021, I will tell them that I had to relegate the second season of Zombie Land Saga to the Honorable Mentions list.

Honestly it barely feels fair. Zombie Land Saga Revenge is everything you could want out of a sequel; it builds on the original in logical and interesting ways. Franchouchou start the season having blown their biggest concert, washed up and down and out. But the mountain waits for no one, so what can you do but try to climb it again? And we saw them climb again. Those ridiculous zombies fought claw and jaw to bigger and bigger concert placements, and along the way we saw them grow as people, with particular star turns for Junko and Yuugiri. Let’s not forget that in the latter case, Revenge decided to just become a historical drama for several episodes, an outfit it wore better than many actual historical dramas do. Zombie Land Saga truly can do it all. The best idol anime of 2021, and almost certainly its best comedy. And I had to put it on the HM list. What a year it’s been, eh?

Honorable Mention: BLUE REFLECTION RAY

More than any other anime on this list, and maybe more than any anime I’ve ever covered period, I really strongly think Blue Reflection Ray is underrated. It’s a victim of circumstance, really. Animated by a studio long past its prime in a year that had two other anime that did many of the same things as it but in a more flashy and accessible way, there is a real case to be made that BRR never had a chance. But this list is, ultimately, about anime that I love. And I truly do think BRR was something special.

^{And not just because it’s really gay, although that certainly helps.}

As a love letter to the magical girl genre, as a scrappy example of what even the most “low budget” of anime can accomplish with enough sincerity and grit, and as a rumination on how society treats young girls–another theme that came up quite often in art this year–Blue Reflection Ray stands tall with the best of them. When, in its penultimate episode, the Reflectors transform back-to-back-to-back just like a “real” magical girl team for the first and only time, BRR felt just as important as any other magical girl series. Girls in a world of lies living their truth for the first time.

Speaking of other magical girl anime.

Honorable Mention: Tropical Rouge Precure

This was the hardest cut from the proper list. TroPre is relegated to the HMs by a technicality; it’s not actually over yet, a quirk of the show’s odd schedule. (Precure series generally run for a full four cours over the course of an entire year, which makes accounting for them in otherwise neat and orderly lists like this one difficult. And yes I’m aware I said that only finished shows would be on the list. Sue me.) But that’s okay, because while Tropical Rouge Precure is great, it’s on this list less for what it actually is and more for the experiences I had while watching it. Its placement here is not due to its excellent sense of humor, its wonderful characters, or its at-times gorgeous animation, even though those are all very much merits the series has.

Unlike most other anime on this list, I did not–and do not–watch TroPre by myself. I watch it with a group of friends, every weekend, at around the same time. In this way, I get to have an experience that I very much would’ve liked to have had as a little girl; getting to talk about one of my favorite magical girl anime with some other girls my own age. A sense of lost youth is a common side effect of being transgender, and while never having gotten to chat about Sailor Moon with schoolmates is pretty low on the list of things I’m sad I missed out on, it is still on that list. So, as a balm for that particular little hole in my soul, I value the series a lot. We plan to continue this practice next year, so unless something goes horribly wrong, you can expect to see Delicious Party Precure somewhere on the list next year, too.

There have already been three magical girl anime somewhere in this article, and that’s the end of the honorable mentions. So you may well wonder; what’s at #1?

Well, a different sort of magical girl anime.

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Oh come on, you can’t actually be surprised.

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#1: Wonder Egg Priority

I knew from the minute I started writing this list that Wonder Egg Priority would be my #1.

I tried to talk myself out of it more than once; to convince myself to put Heike Monogatari at the top of the list instead. I like that show and Wonder Egg almost as much as each other. It would’ve been a compromise, but it was one I could’ve lived with.

But that’s the thing, right? It still would’ve been a compromise. And it’s my list, so there is no room for compromise. Wonder Egg Priority is my favorite anime of the year. Is it the best anime of the year? That’s a level of definitiveness that I don’t normally strive for when writing, even if this sort of format implicitly demands it. But if I’m the one being asked the question? Then yes, it absolutely fucking is.

Quite unlike my #1 pick for last year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Wonder Egg Priority ends the year not as a widely beloved (or at least liked) exemplar of its staff’s prowess. Its place in the popular discourse is, and probably always will be, that of a great folly. A production train-crash that physically hurt the people working on it and squandered its potential and left its audience profoundly disappointed.

Which, of course, is a massive oversimplification. I try to at least pay some attention to what The Public At Large think about the anime I cover, if anything. But the fact remains that while the consensus will probably always be against WEP, and not totally without reason, there are people who still like it. I am one of them. There are dozens of us. I just happen to like it more than anything else that aired this year.

But of course you want to know why, which is a fair question, given what this website is and what I write about on it.

It would be fairly easy to fall back on its many technical merits. Wonder Egg Priority is an incredible-looking show, constantly toeing a line between appearing pristine as jeweled glass and wild as paint-buckets tossed at canvasses. If CloverWorks never make anything that has quite this level of visual pop ever again, it would not be a mark against them in any way. We could talk also about its soundtrack, an underappreciated aspect of the series that colors every moment of it in a way rare both this year specifically and in general. (Sonny Boy is its only real competition from 2021 in this aspect.)

If we wanted to really stretch our critic-brains, we could turn toward its thematic merits. To try to break down the series’ elaborate use of symbolism. Or perhaps its understanding of how gender roles define and oppress us, and how the modern world will beat any young girl it can’t control into submission, co-opt her for its own ends and twist her into hurting others like her. (See: Frill.) We could cite its deeply compelling four main characters and their own specific twists on this notion; a recovering hikikomori (Ai), a former idol with past sins on her mind (Rika), a mysterious wunderkind with a vanished sister (Neiru), and the series’ own high-strung, gender-nonconformant take on the obligatory “boyish one” (Momoe).

We could talk about how they smash personifications of pedophilia, misogyny, and transphobia to paint-colored smithereens and are pursued by anonymous maniacs called Haters through their imaginary worlds. We could talk about how their mysterious “benefactors” who promise they can restore the dead to life turn out to be little more than hucksters past their prime. We could talk, at length, about all of this.

^{We could even talk about this!}

But frankly, I think “all of this” is, incredibly, at least to me, somewhat secondary. It is true that Wonder Egg Priority has all these merits, and I think they alone could be used as an argument for why the show is very good. And if they were all that Wonder Egg Priority did right, it would have earned a comfortable spot somewhere a few ranks back. Maybe between Sonny Boy and Heike Monogatari, as “merely” a show from 2021 that I’m confident I’ll still be thinking about in 2031. In truth, what is often cited as its greatest “objective flaw” (and oh, how I hate that phrase), is what locked me into holding it close to my heart forever, and why, if asked, I will say it’s among my all-time favorites.

Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t really have an ending.

Its story comes to an abrupt halt. Little is resolved, one of the main characters is missing. It’s a question mark. There is no “to be continued.”

This is, I realize, a stance held by very few. But endings are rarely what truly move me about stories. (Heike Monogatari is one of a quite small number of exceptions.) So on its own, WEP’s lack of an ending is no serious fault to me. Indeed, Wonder Egg Priority could have ended in any number of ways, from the sappy to the depressing, that would’ve given it some measure of critical and fan acclaim. If it had really nailed it, it could’ve sat alongside modern born-classics like Revue Starlight, hailed as a truly great example of what TV anime as a medium could achieve.

Instead, it dissolved into a cloud of smoke, seeping into our collective memories forever. It became an unanswerable question and an unsolvable puzzle; quiet as God and twice as unknowable. In doing so, it embodied the boiling haze of steaming existential confusion that is the modern zeitgeist better than almost any work of fiction I have ever experienced. Wonder Egg Priority left an axe-wound in the popular imagination. For that, I love and respect it immensely. In a way, it is this aspect that most closely ties Wonder Egg‘s form to its message. The girls’ struggle, ultimately, is against suicide personified. The Temptation of Death. The fact that they don’t explicitly “win” is contentious. But that’s the whole point; we don’t see how this story ends. Some small glimpses of incremental progress aside, we know nothing. Only that Ai marches forward, in spite of it all, to try again.

I have seen it argued that this is a relentlessly bleak ending, but both the reality of the subjects Wonder Egg speaks on, and its own stylistic flourishes make it fairly obvious that this is, in fact, hopeful. To live in the modern age is to live in a world filled with poison. To live on in spite of that, to get up every day, to snap your gaze toward the horizon and walk–as Ai does–is optimism. This world wants us dead. We live anyway.

Quite unlike last year’s #1, I do not expect that Wonder Egg Priority will ever be hailed as timeless or classic. I think if it is remembered at all, it will be as a mistake. The avalanche of public consensus is hard to fight against, particularly in the age of social media. But, as I have learned many times this year, I can be wrong. If I have ever been wrong about anything relating to this medium I’ve devoted so much of my time to writing about, I would like it to be this.

Because whenever I so much as think about Wonder Egg Priority, it comes back to me in an instant. The hyper-technicolor magical girl psycho-drama that no one asked for, but that we–or perhaps just some of us–sorely needed. Wonder Egg Priority might never gain any coveted status as a must-watch, as a classic of its medium or genre, as “one of the good anime,” or anything of the sort, but if it does not gain some kind of following, there is something truly wrong with this world indeed. We endure precisely because we know we’re not alone. It would be a horribly cruel thing for one of the best articulations of that idea ever put to the silver screen to be lost to obscurity.

Yet, in spite of everything I just said, I hold no delusion that I am the Wonder Egg Guru. I have spent the better part of a year attempting to reckon with the WEP Project’s first, last, and only output. To explain it succinctly, to square how much I love it with how strongly I oppose the worst parts of the industry that let it exist. But the fate’s-honest truth is that I am not much closer to “closing the book” on Wonder Egg Priority, for myself or anyone else, than I was when the TV broadcast ended in late March. It’s an enigma. I think at least some part of it always will be. And maybe it seems unfair to give the gold medal to an enigma. Maybe the #1 spot should be saved for something I can explain better. But it is my view that the role of the critic and commentator is not that of an interpreter. It is that of an honest witness. I could have sat here and thought myself into circles. I could have tried to justify putting something–anything–else at #1, but that’s not honest. And if I don’t have honesty, what do I have?

So, there it is. The most magical anime of 2021. The best anime of the year, so says me, is a series that draws a line from the strained psyche of four teenage girls to our own place, lost in the fog that smothers this haunted planet. Then, in a grand confrontational hammer-smash, it reveals that there is no line at all; these things are one in the same.

Now that’s a magic trick.

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And, yes, that’s the list.

What did you think? As I mentioned last year, I try not to pay too much mind as to whether my picks will be “controversial” or not, but, well, last year I didn’t top the list with what is probably the most divisive show of the entire year. So tell me your thoughts! Did you love my picks? Were they utterly baffling to you? Maybe 50/50? What were your top five, top six, top whatever anime of 2021? I’d love to hear from you, so please do leave a comment here or on Twitter. If you’re one of the folks who was disappointed by my #1 (and more than one person explicitly said they would be, whoops!) then…well, I hope this will spurn you to write your own lists, at the very least. (I maintain that basically everyone’s life could be improved by running a blog.)

Incidentally, I ran a very small little competition on my twitter account yesterday, and wanted to shout out @lilysokawaii, @pikestaff, and @theplatinumdove for correctly guessing my #1 pick. For the rest of y’all: better luck next year!

Tomorrow, an article will go up that briefly discusses my plans for 2022, as she fast approaches. I’ll see you then, anime fans.

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