#1 – Vinland Saga

I’ve already written up my thoughts on Vinland Saga twice in the last couple of weeks – yesterday in my series review, and earlier when it ranked #15 in my 2010’s Top 20 list.  So there’s not much new to say about it at this point, and obviously the fact that it was the only 2019 (or 2018 for that matter) series to crack that list was a pretty obvious tipoff that it was going to be my #1 series of the year.

The only variable was the ending I suppose, but given that the series nailed it that certainly didn’t change things much.  This was a great show, plain and simple – epic and personal, deep, thoughtful, not afraid to challenge the audience and gorgeous to look at.  It was an adaptation of a beloved manga that even most fans seemed to approve of, and we all know how rare that is.  It was faithful, but still incorporated a fair bit of original material.  And that material was some of the strongest in the entire series, which is always an acid test for how good an adaptation is.  The only other thing I could ask for, really, is a sequel announcement – but while Wit danced right up to the edge of giving us one, they didn’t.  So now the eternal anime fan’s waiting game begins.

I do wish Dororo’s second cour had been the equal of its first, because then choosing the top spot for this year would have been hellishly difficult, and those are the dilemmas I love to have as an anime writer.  As it stands, though, Vinland Saga was clearly the class of the field.  Wit has their issues as a studio – overworked staff and chaotic production schedules chief among them, which may be why that sequel is still in limbo – but they can really deliver elegance and pure class with the best of them.  They seem to have emerged as the prestige wing (well, there is Shingeki…) of the Production I.G. family – so much so, in fact, that the Wit imprint now probably stands as a stronger leading indicator for a new series than that of the parent studio.

When you take the work of a great mangaka, hand it over to a premier studio with a sufficient budget and a talented young director at the helm, and add a superb cast it’s pretty hard to go wrong.  Great anime are, more often than anything else, great stories about great characters.  What matters is not genre or demographic of trendiness, but storytelling.  All of that came together in a perfect storm with Vinland Saga, and even if its greatness was as unsurprising as its place atop this year’s Top 10 list, that doesn’t make it any less glorious.

#2 – Dororo

The top of my 2019 anime list has had an interesting evolution.  When Mob Psycho 100 II premiered I was pretty confident that was going to be the year’s #1 series, but by a few weeks into the Spring season Dororo had become the favorite in my mind.  In the end it finishes #2 (I don’t think there’s tremendous suspense as to what #1 will be) but it – and MP100 – would certainly have been the top series in 2018.

Dororo has always been a sort of black sheep in the Tezuka Osamu family.  It’s never gotten the acclaim his more famous works have received, and even Tezuka himself seemed to lose interest in it, leaving the manga basically unfinished.  A 1969 anime and a 2007 live-action film followed, each giving their own take on the ending (and other things, too) but basically, MAPPA and Tezuka Productions had a pretty free hand with the 2019 version.  I think that was a good thing in almost all respects, because director Furuhashi Kazuhiro and writer Kobayashi Yasuko were able to treat Dororo almost as an original series.  While there were a few questionable decisions along the way – and they’re why the series is #2 for the year instead of in the top spot – for the most part they’ve improved on the original.

If I was ranking based on the best cour of anime in 2019, it would be very hard for me to rank any series above Dororo’s first 12 episodes.  They were close to flawless, and at their best – including some anime-original episodes – some of the best anime I’ve seen in many a year.  There’s no denying the second cour wasn’t quite on the same level, though to be frank I was worried (not altogether without cause, I would argue) that the series was going to flub the ending altogether.  It most assuredly did not, but the thematic disconnect in that cour is the only thing that kept Dororo from being an abject masterpiece and 2010’s Top 20 show for me (it barely missed as-is).  When it was on top of its game, Dororo was truly astonishing.

There are a lot of reasons for this – Tezuka’s DNA in the premise most obviously, but also the fact that Furuhashi-sensei is a virtuoso at historical fantasy.  Dororo is a series that ponders deep and profound ideas, often in extremely insightful fashion.  It’s a tragedy with a spine of hope, and a cast full of complex and fascinating characters (starting with the two leads).  It has a grace and poetry to it that we almost never see even in great anime, something almost Moribito-like in its dignity and cruel beauty.  This is a timeless series in the true sense of the word, a great story told for its own sake without deference to the whims of the moment.  That it exists is proof that anime is not quite a spent force as a creative medium; that series like it have become so rare is evidence that unless the production model changes, that day when it is may not be far off.

#3 – Mob Psycho 100 II

Here we begin the portion of the list where everything, today’s entry included, would have been my top series in 2018.  That might even include Kono Oto Tomare! too, but it’s a near thing – with everything from #3 on up it’s a no-doubter.  That’s not an indictment of Megalo Box, which I loved of course, but it is rather an indictment of 2018 – and an acknowledgement of reality.  And while I wouldn’t say 2019 was a deep year for really good anime, but it was pretty solid at the top.

As I noted in my series review post, with shows as good as Mob Psycho 100 the competitive pool is incredibly small.  A lot of it comes down to competing against themselves, and Season 2 of MP100 actually clocks in one notch higher than S1 did in 2016.  Primarily I would say that’s down to ’16 being one of the three best years of the decade, because I’d rank the two seasons just about level pegging.  The production values for S2 were even more off-the-charts spectacular (it’s in the running for best looking action anime in TV history), but in terms of content I actually preferred the first season by a hair.

That’s me – as great as the “World Domination” arc was, I yearned for more episodes like the S2 premiere – bittersweet, heartbreaking takes on adolescence.  ONE is brilliant at that sort of story, and Mob is such an endearing and moe (original definition) protagonist that those arcs almost always soar for me.  Of course what makes Mob Psycho 100 such a classic is that it can represent both those extremes exceptionally well, and the action episodes give Tachikawa Yuzuru (for my money probably TV anime’s finest director at the moment) and the preposterously brilliant team Bones put together for this series the chance to really strut their stuff.  You basically can’t lose – it really comes down to personal preference, a sort of bizarro “pick your poison” where the poison is delicious and makes your soul shout out with glee.

At the moment I’m in limbo with MP100, because I keep hearing that the final section of the manga is the strongest material of all and I’d really like to go into it fresh if it’s adapted.  But there are no guarantees on that front – this series is popular but not a blockbuster, there’s no active manga to boost the sales of, and there may not be enough material for a full cour of anime.  Tachikawa-sensei is already booked for another series in 2020 (an original but not one he’s writing himself, dammit) so if we do get a final season, it’s going to be 2021 at the earliest (I can’t imagine anyone else directing it).

#4 – Kono Oto Tomare!

Shows popping up here right before I do series review posts on them seems to be a trend this year, but it’s coincidental I promise you.  As usual I’ll save most of my praise for that post, but needless to say I think very highly indeed of Kono Oto Tomare.  I love the manga, and I love the anime.  There are things a performance series can do on screen that simply aren’t possible on the page, but that only really matters if the production takes full advantage of this.  And boy, has this one ever done that.

Perhaps the highest praise I can pay to this series is that it featured probably my two favorite scenes of the year in anime.  Both of them involved music of course, and “Ryuusugien” and “Tenryuu” were emotional powerhouses for very different reasons.  They were also absolutely wonderful performance pieces both musically and visually – the budget here hasn’t been huge, but Platinum Vision has absolutely used it where they needed to.  Generally speaking Kono Oto Tomare has been the most emotionally powerful anime of the year for me, and the second cour has been a marked improvement over the first.

I’ll go into more detail tomorrow, but there’s no risk in this ranking – I know exactly what the finale will be, and there’s no question it will be a satisfying and compelling conclusion to the anime.  Then it’s back to the manga (presumably) but I can’t really complain – two cours was enough for new viewers to get a sense for why Kono Oto Tomare is such a wonderful series.

#5 – Hi Score Girl II

Whenever a sequel appears on this list, the question of relative placement always comes up.  Last year’s first season of Hi Score Girl ranked #3, and this year it comes it at #5.  Broadly speaking there are two main reasons why a show might move up or down the list in successive appearances – its own quality, or the strength of the competition.  In most cases it’s some combination of both.

With HSG, it’s almost entirely reason #2.  If that’s a spoiler saying 2019 was better than 2018 – at least at the top – well, that should already have been pretty obvious.  We’ll talk more about that in coming days, but as for Hi Score Girl itself it was really more of the same.  If anything, the fact that this season was shorter (thanks to the superb OVA series, which part of me believes I really should factor in as part of the series’ ranking itself) might nudge the overall score down a bit.  That, and the fact that so much was established in the first season that this one was occasionally a hair repetitive thematically.  But those are quibbles, really.  If this season had aired in 2018, I suspect it’ds probably have ranked in exactly the same spot.

In light of yesterday’s galling events with Hoshiai no Sora, it’s probably good to step back and appreciate the miraculous happy ending this series had one more time.  HSG was treated so badly by both fate and the anime industry for so long, and in the end it triumphed.  It triumphed by being a superb adaptation, and it triumphed by proving more commercially successful than I (and I suspect the production committee) expected.  I’ve written so much about it over the past couple of years, including Sunday’s series review post, that you all know how I feel by now.  But it’s worth repeating what a remarkable and charming adolescent romance series Hi Score Girl really is.  So authentic, so cheeky, and so much heart.  It has a great hook, yes – but the fact that non-gamers like me came to love it is proof that the real firepower with this series is with the characters.

Gratification delayed is still gratification, I suppose.  I really should have been writing this in about 2015 but hey, at least I got to write it.  I love Hi Score Girl, I love what JC Staff did with it (a unique case where CGI actually made sense for artistic reasons), I love that it succeeded, and I love that – unlike so many wonderful manga – it received a complete telling on-screen.  Better late than never.

#6 – Beastars

This was a bit of a tough call for me, what with the news today that Beastars would be getting a second season. That’s wonderful of course, but it forced me into a decision about whether to consider it eligible for 2019. In the end I decided to keep it in, partly because of the nightmare of having to reorder the whole list and partly because with no start date for S2 announced, I think it’s technically a series with a sequel rather than a split cour. But if I looked up into the sky, I could see a mix of a couple of series I certainly would have liked to sneak into the #10 slot.

Be that as it may, Beastars is my #6 series of 2019, and it’s been a steady riser over this outstanding final run of episodes. I’ll be doing a series review post tomorrow (late flight in tonight and exhausted) so I’ll save most of my commentary for then. But needless to say I’ve been very impressed with this show. I knew the manga was very well-regarded but this always struck me a particularly difficult adaptation to get right – and I think it was. And Orange most emphatically got it right.

This has been the best season ever for CGI anime in my view (low bar, I know) what with Beastars and Hi Score Girl II. The latter is probably the first series where I could convince myself that CGI was the right artistic choice, and Beastars is without a doubt the most clever and beautiful use of the technology I’ve seen in a TV anime. I’m excited to see where the series goes from here, both visually and narratively. Now, let’s get a Vinland Saga sequel announcement and I can start complaining about that messing up the list, too…

#7 – Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue. 

If there was ever a series I was the target audience for, it’s Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue..  Yes, it’s the cat anime I waited my whole life for – but it goes so much deeper than that.  Cats, books, writing, social anxiety – there was really no element of this show that didn’t feel personal.  Yes I also think the themes it dealt with were universal – and that’s a gap (like simple and profound) that really great series are sometimes able to bridge.

Much about Doukyounin wa Hiza reminds me of Udon no Kuni no Kiniro Kemari.  Both are one-cour adaptations of ongoing manga which feature a bit (more than a bit in Udon no Kuni’s case) of magical realism and are strongly concerned with young adults dealing with the loss of their parents.  For all that the cat stuff grabs the headlines, Subaru’s personal journey is really the essence of this series.  And watching him try and cope with life without the parents who knew his frailties and shielded him is both involving and heartbreaking.

That said, the cat stuff is stupendous.  Anyone who understands the bond between cats and their humans surely lived and died with every scene in Doukyonin wa Hiza, which really nailed the subtleties of this part of the story.  And of course there’s a reason why cats are the perfect companions for introverts, and watching Haru and Subaru help each other is a wonderful experience.    This is a series with a great depth of understanding about both cats and people, and that’s the source of its narrative firepower.

Ultimately the questions Doukyonin wa Hiza asks – about commitment, about empathy, about the power of loving someone else to heal and spur growth – are fundamental to the nature of human existence.  They aren’t questions with easy answers, but this series explores the way the world can open up for us when we choose to let it.  It’s a wonderful and emotionally powerful series and its spot on this list was never really in doubt.

#8 – Kanata no Astra

Kanata no Astra was about as sasuga as it gets for me.  I read the manga so I knew what to expect, and this is not a story with a lot of misdirection (apart from the mystery element).  It’s about as straightforward as it can be – an old-school animanga lost in space yarn about a plucky bunch of kids and the world of adults that’s screwing them over.

In a sense the anime had a relatively simple job superficially – just translate the manga’s charms to the screen.  But a couple of brilliant decisions were made here.  Because Kanata no Astra is a fairly short series it’s well-suited for short adaptation – but not one cour short,  By starting and ending with double episodes and dispensing with OP and ED sequences a good chunk of the time, the series effectively ended up with about 15 episodes – which was what it needed to do a complete and satisfying adaptation (a few bits were still cut but honestly, the manga had a bit of chaff that was very trimmable).  Oh, how I wish Boku Dake Ga Inai Machi had done the same thing…

This is a good, approachable sci-fi mystery story with a couple of very nice hooks, but what really makes it special is the cast.  I love these kids so goddam much – they’re real charmers, all of them, and the way they cope with their circumstances is quite natural and realistic.  Ultimately I think Kanata no Astra, despite the fact the kids’ parents are truly awful people for the most part, takes a pretty optimistic view of human nature.  There’s a self-confidence to the storytelling, as if the mangaka Shinohara Kenta never had a moment’s doubt as he was composing the narrative.  And the balance between goofy humor and angst is exquisite – which I really think is the series’ most remarkable accomplishment.

A great manga that knows exactly what it is, a thoroughly professional adaptation that makes all the right choices.  The formula doesn’t get much simpler than this, but just because Shinohara and Lerche made it look easy doesn’t mean it’s not really difficult to get everything just right.

#9 – Sarazanmai

So all that stuff I said yesterday about Karakai Jouzu Takagi-san applies here too.  I could just as easily have given this slot to one of the series that were effectively tied for it, but – as yesterday – I went with my gut.  And this time, my gut said to put Sarazanmai on the list.

It’s funny for a writer/director who frustrates me as much as Ikuhara Kunihiko to be on my year-end Top 10 for the second time in three series – but that’s just a measure of his talent.  Mawaru Penguin Drum was an impossibly ambitious mess that was too brilliant to leave off the list, but Sarazanmai represents the most composed series Ikuni has ever done IMHO.  It really is his Tsuritama – the one where he somehow managed to find some narrative discipline, and actually seemed to open up emotionally.  In Ikuni’s case, I think being forced to work with a 12-episode format really helped (though that doesn’t explain Yuri Kuma Arashi).

Ikuhara summed up this story (which is damn rare in itself) with two lines of dialogue in the finale – “The dish is the vessel of life.  If it has form, it will one day break and be lost.  Only those who connect their desires through the pain of loss can take the future in their hands.” And of course “The future is not necessarily a bright one.  Hope and despair are both one with life.”  This is about as close to optimism as Ikuhara gets – yes, life is painful and ultimately ends in heartbreak, but it’s still better than the alternative.  The symbolism underlying Sarazanmai was the Tohoku earthquake (thinly disguised as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923), and as such, recovering from tragedy is the heart of the matter.  There’s a certain affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit here that suggests Ikuni himself may have been changed by what he saw happen after the earthquake and tsunami.

I can’t place Sarazanmai on this list without making note of the fact that it was one of the most visually stunning series of 2019.  Ikuhara’s imagination is seemingly limitless, and using Asakusa as a canvas he painted a gloriously weird and surrealistic portrait of Tokyo then and now, and the psyche of the adolescent male.  If Sarazanmai is a true measure of what he’s capable of these days, I wish Ikuni would give us a new series a little more often.

#10 – Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san 2

Here’s the thing about these lists.  Whatever number you pick – 10, 20 – is arbitrary.  My experience has been that there are always clusters of series – cutoff points where there’s a definite dropoff to the next series or series’.  And that number is almost never a convenient one (like 10).  This year I knew exactly what the first three series were going to be – they’ve been solid in my mind since before I even started working on this list, and never really wavered.  But the bottom of the list is a lot harder, as it often is.  So we have one step after 3, and the next ones are at 8 and 12.  Which means I have four shows which are for all intents and purposes equal in my mind, and only two spots.  Suck it, anime.

Well – what can I do?  A Top 10 this is, not 12.  So bear in mind when you read these next two posts that I could honestly have put the shows which ended up #11 and #12 (we’ll get to them at the end of course) in these spots.  I just went with my gut, basically, and for whatever reason Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san 2 was one of the two series it told me to pick.  And for certain, it’s a worthy choice.  Rarely in all my years of watching anime have I see a series improve so much from its first season to the second.  I can honestly say this – there’s never been a sequel which I less expected to make my Top 10 list actually make my Top 10 list.

Bottom line for me – this series made me smile a lot, and not just little Mona Lisa smiles either.  It brought me so much joy, and thoroughly elevated itself above the manga (which I love) with some wonderful stylistic choices and original material.  It showed the world why Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san was such an excellent manga, gently danced around why it can be an annoying one sometimes, and painted an impossibly adorable and hilarious portrait of first love.  It doesn’t deserve to be here any more than the two series it nudged out, but it definitely does deserve it just the same.

Honorable Mention – Senryuu Shoujo

As you know, I like to start off these lists with a series which, while not necessarily cracking the conventional list, deserves special mention.  For me, this year’s obvious choice is Senryuu Shoujo.  This delightful little gem is a great example of what short-form anime should be – unconventionally structured, not too demanding, and always leaving you wanting more.  My own posts on the series were a variation on that theme.  Senryuu Shoujo is cute, very sweet, and altogether very hard not to love.

Writing senryuu

Is a bit like haiku, but

Lots more tongue-in-cheek

 

A Refresher on Eligibility:

I’m going by the same eligibility standard I used for the 2012-2018 lists – that is, shows that finished airing during the year or split-cours that finished in 2019 are eligible. Split-cour series which finish in 2020 are not eligible for this list, but series that ended this year and weren’t officially confirmed as split cour when they did are eligible.  Shows that aired for the entire year (Gegege no Kitarou 2018 is the only example that springs to mind) are also eligible.

This means that in effect, the only shows not eligible for this list are the multi-cour series that began airing from Spring 2019 onwards and are still airing into Winter 2020, or true split cours that will finish in 2020 (at the moment Boku no Hero Academia fits that bill though, as I noted last year, in some sense this will be always be a split cour series until the anime is eventually completed).

As you know I always like to do a little contest, so… The winner will be anyone that guesses my Top 10, in order (which I suspect will be more difficult this year than any so far). If no one does that, I’ll go with the closest guess. Guesses made by 1700 JST 12/22/19 will be eligible. Here’s the prize: I’ll do a “Top 5” list on any anime theme or topic you choose. Dealer’s choice – you make the call.