First Episodes:

#1 – Cross Game

Cross Game is another example of an anime which took some liberties in adaptation with its premiere, yet achieved spectacular results.  Unlike Hourou Musuko, which effectively skipped the first third of the story apart from flashbacks, Cross Game condensed the first volume of the manga into a single episode.  But oh, what an episode it was – a triumph which for me completely vindicated the decision.  It works flawlessly as a stand-alone prequel, even as it sets up everything that happens in the rest of the series.  This is character-driven storytelling at its absolute best – some of the finest writing Adachi Mitsuru (happy birthday Sensei, by the way) has ever done.

#2 – Shin Sekai Yori

I freely admit that a lot happened in the premiere of Shin Sekai Yori that I didn’t understand at the time.  But it doesn’t matter, because even as I was watching it was clear I wasn’t supposed to.  This first episode was all about world-building, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any anime episode that did a better job of it.  There would be occasional hiccups later – obvious budget lapses, ill-advised changes to the novels’ ending.  But From the New World still stands as a classic, one of the best anime of the 21st Century, and this premiere did a lot of the heavy lifting to set the stage for that.

#3 – Fumetsu no Anata e

Fumetsu no Anata e kicked off with basically a perfect first episode – a masterpiece of great subtlety and emotional depth that works basically as a stand-alone story.  That it would be the high-water mark for the anime is a shame.  This is certainly not the only case of a great premiere never being matched, but it’s one of the most dramatic.  Any series that can move me to tears with the first episode has something special going on, and the quiet, slow-motion tragedy of this premiere is a a heartrending masterpiece.  Fumetsu was occasionally great after this (and too often downright mediocre, too) but never as elegiac as it was here.

#4 – Hourou Musuko

As I said, choosing only 5 first episodes was both easier and harder.  There are gazillions of them, but how do you narrow it down to such a tiny number?  Thinking back on all the premieres I’ve loved, Hourou Musuko really stood out.  Manga readers were upset that the entire first arc of the manga was skipped, but I didn’t know that at the time.  That arc (elementary school) is wonderful, but so is this premiere.  A truly heartbreaking introduction to one of the most emotionally powerful stories in animanga, with one of my favorite scenes of all time (“Clair de lune”  on the bridge).

#5 – Tsuritama

I had two premieres on the same day that could have appeared here.  Spring 2012 was a truly staggering anime season, one of the best ever.  It was also for my money the clear best season ever for NoitaminA (and that’s a pretty high bar).  Tsuritama is a series I truly love.  I ranked it 7th on my 2010’s Top 20 list, and that feels too low if anything.  What a first episode this was – an explosion of color, sound, comedy, and the raw emotion of adolescent neuroses.  It was to be the start of a truly great ride, the best work Nakamura Kenji has done in his illustrious career.

Final Episodes:

#1 – Death Parade

The finale of Death Parade is one of the longest episodic posts in the history of LiA to date (it might be the longest, though I haven’t checked).  And there’s a reason for that, above and beyond it simply being a great ending for a historically great series.  There was so much to unpack here – Death Parade is one of the most intellectually dense anime of the century, and not one that offers easy questions or easy answers to them.  It remains the only full-length series director Tachikawa Yuzuru also wrote, which is astonishing given its brilliance.  Perhaps this was  the story burning to be told inside him, and once told he simply has no imperative to tell another one.

#2 – Tokyo Ghoul √A

I mentioned yesterday that Fumetsu no Anata e might be the worst series to make this compilation, but if it’s not, Tokyo Ghoul √A is.  This is a troubled series – an anime clearly at odds with the production committee, a director intent on doing some things differently than they (and perhaps the mangaka) wanted.  But here’s the thing: Morita Shuhei is an auteur, a true genius.  And this anime-original final episode is one of the most brilliant pieces of direction I’ve ever seen in anime.  This finale was hugely controversial, much-derided by many manga readers, and to our great loss the whole experience of this adaptation seems to have soured Morita so much that he’s abandoned anime altogether.

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care – I think it’s an absolute masterpiece, without question the final episode which most exceeds the overall quality of the series it’s concluding.  The visuals alone are staggering, but it also gives one the sense that after being straight-jacketed for 11 episodes Morita felt liberated knowing it was all over, and just creatively went his own way with glorious results.  I like the story choices he made, and the end result is a testament to his unfettered brilliance.  Anime is much diminished by having hounded him out of the medium.

#3 – Seirei no Moribito

I’ll be honest – I could have ranked Seirei no Moribito first in this category and not given it a second thought (no pun intended).  And ranked it on the premiere list too, for that matter.  But I’m trying not to be too predictable, and that would certainly have been the easy choice.  I don’t think a series is going to rank as my all-time #1 without a great finale, and Moribito avoids the crucial mistake so many epic series make – it brings the main  plot to a conclusion in the penultimate episode, leaving the final one as a time for reflection.  It’s not a happy ending, this, but it’s poetic and steeped in pathos.  It’s also the right one for the story being told, as painful as that was.  A tremendous, heartbreaking yet satisfying conclusion to anime’s greatest masterpiece.

#4 – Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai

2011 is very much the theme of the day here.  AnoHana is a somewhat divisive series.  At some point it become uncool to love this show, but screw that – unapologetic depiction of  emotion in anime has become so rare that I always treasure it when done well.  And this finale (there was a movie later and it was excellent, but not essential) provided just the right emotional catharsis after the roller coaster ride the series took us on.  “Mada nai, yo!” still guts me, to this day – it’s one of the most gut-wrenching lines of dialogue in anime history.

#5 – Undead Girl Murder Farce

Recency bias?  I really don’t think so.  Undead Girl Murder Farce is not a series I consider an all-time classic, though it was really good.  But its finale was a staggering display of directorial genius by Hatakeyama Mamoru.  Auteur works are a theme on this list, I think, both for premieres and finales.  This was truly a glorious experience, beautiful and surreal and breathlessly imaginative.  An anime ending for an ongoing manga adaptation could hardly be executed better.

Premieres and finales.  Are they the most important episodes of a series?  Broadly speaking, I would say yes.  And I’d add that final episodes are, generally, the hardest to get right (and that applies to more than just anime).  And they’re challenging in another sense as well.  As I wrote in my Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu series review post:

Finales, for me, are at their best as vehicles for reflection by both the cast and the audience – a time for quiet rather than bombast. 

Given all that, this makes an interesting topic for a retrospective.  Once more it’s Nicc (the LiA MVP without a doubt) who commissioned this piece.  At his request, these are just the best (in my view) premieres and finales generally.  Not, that is to say, ones that are dramatically better than their series as a whole.  That said, if I had any ties, I went with the latter just for the sake of making a more interesting list that shines a greater spotlight on the episodes themselves.

The hardest thing about this topic (and others like it) is trying to remember – in this case, all the first and last episodes I’ve really loved.  I’ve been watching anime for a very long time, having finished by my estimation a number of series in the high three digits.  Amongst those how the heck am I supposed to remember all the best premieres and finales, especially avoiding a recency bias in the process?  Not an easy ask, I can tell you.

As Nicc’s commission was for for both premieres and finales, I decided to do five of each.  As well, not to rank them against each other, as I think that would be basically impossible.  They each have a different job to do and those jobs are very different.  Choosing five first episodes was a lot easier I can tell you – there are many more examples of great premieres than great finales in the annals of anime history.