The first season of Rakugo was a top contender among my 2016 anime, and its sequel is no slouch either. It is a shining beacon of superheroic optimism. My Hero Academia features a great cast buoyed by a wealth of creative powers, terrific fight scenes, and a strong underlying message about the importance of inspiring others. At a base level, My Hero Academia does little to distinguish itself from the standard shonen shell – instead, it simply embraces that narrative skeleton, and executes on it with incredible distinction at almost all times. While I enjoyed My Hero Academia’s first season, my enjoyment there was mostly “this is a very entertaining story and a passable adaptation.” For its second season, My Hero Academia upped the bar considerably, matching the outstanding strength of the school tournament arc with equally outstanding animation and general direction. Trust a show about a maid who’s also a dragon to perfectly articulate the anxiety and joy of raising a child. But Dragon Maid’s true secret weapon is its thoughtful illustration of the beauty of found families, and the warmth of family in general. KyoAni shows always tend to offer snappier comedic timing and better visual comedy than their contemporaries, and Dragon Maid’s mix of absurdism, slapstick, and character humor certainly lives up to that legacy. I didn’t really expect a show about a maid who’s also a dragon to win my heart, but Dragon Maid’s sturdy combination of stellar comedy and endearing characters made it a real highlight this year. The show marries an often striking visual style to fundamentally terrific character writing, offering a meditative drama that just keeps offering rich new surprises.
With its originally Rei-focused drama expanding to explore the stories of characters like Shimada and Hina, March has gone from being an incisive, focused exploration of depression to an ensemble story about the difficulty of simply getting by, and the harsh troubles we all face in our own lives. Fortunately, both those season halves are strong enough to earn the show a place on this list. With 2017 featuring one season’s back half and another season’s front, March comes in like a lion seems determined to flummox any attempts at “of-the-year” categorization. Now, starting with my actual number ten, here’s… And in fall, Recovery of an MMO Junkie demonstrated that full-length episodes are also pretty good for romantic comedies, while simultaneously offering a refreshingly grown-up perspective on dating, online identities, and social anxiety.Īlright, think that covers the honorable mentions. In summer, Tsuredure Children proved you don’t need full-length episodes to distill the essence of romantic comedy, capturing that “verge of a relationship” moment in tiny, adorable slices. In the spring, Tsuki ga Kirei offered a charming romance seemingly designed to directly echo the dramatic priorities of KyoAni’s best character dramas. Actually, I’ve got one honorable mention for each season of the year, so starting from winter: Saga of Tanya the Evil turned out to be a far better show than I’d expected, and ultimately rose to be a both entertaining and very angry war drama. Wait, wait, first I’ve got some honorable mentions. On top of that, simply celebrating the shows I love is one of my favorite things about criticism, and what’s a better venue for pure celebration than a list of my recent favorites? So let’s put the critical knives aside, and appreciate how good some cartoons can be. Not only are they fun to read, but to people who actually haven’t spent countless hours poring over the year’s better and worse selections, rankings can genuinely help point people in useful directions.
That all remains true, but at the end of a year that’s offered plenty of things to be cynical about in the real world, I’d rather end this introduction on a note of honest positivity. I normally preface posts like this with a glib assurance that rankings don’t really matter, art deserves to be engaged with in a manner more meaningful than relative evaluation, and thus this whole ordeal is a hopeless exercise.
#Best anime of 2017 reddit full#
With four full seasons of anime on the books, it’s time to mark out the true all-stars, the cream of the crop, the shows we just might remember in spite of our recency-mad fandom culture.
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