#1 – Vinland Saga Season 2

Please head over to YouTube to check out this year’s #1 series video “write-up”!

#2 – Pluto

In terms of the Top Ten countdown, this is actually the post that packs a bit of drama – and this year may have seen as much genuine uncertainty as any. Once I get down to the first spot, it’s pretty unlikely anyone who cares enough to follow my list would have any uncertainty once second place is established. Has there ever been a series I picked as number one that could even at a stretch have been off the list altogether? Maybe Kai Byoui Ramune, but that won’t have seemed likely to anyone who frequents the site (or my social media).

So without further ado, my #2 series of 2023 (as you know) is Pluto. It’s crazy to me that it is, but it would have been just as crazy if it wasn’t, given what the #1 series is going to be. I talked about my reasons a fair bit in the Anime of the Year video (which will go live tomorrow, of course), so in the interest of decorum I won’t do so here.

What I can say is that just as Tengoku Daimakyou and Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu were effectively tied, so were Pluto and the show in the top spot. These are my *four #1 series” of 2023, and I can say with certainty Pluto would have been officially that at least 70-80% of the years I’ve been doing these lists. It’s a masterpiece of historic proportions.

I talked about so much in my series review post, and that post was so recent that I’m loathe to repeat it. No show is perfect (FLCL came the closest) and Pluto’s ending is the only element of the series that falls short of that for me. Not the substance of it but the style – a classically Urasawa abrupt ending with no coda. Murayama was not about to go off-scipt there given how closely he’s worked with Urasawa both on Pluto and before, so that is what it is. In terms of the adaptation itself, I really don’t think it put a foot wrong (despite some whining about judicious use of CGI).

The story with Pluto can sometimes feel like it’s more about the story of the production than anything. And that checkered history is a fascinating one, and with a happy ending of all things. But the most important thing about Pluto remains the work itself – the manga and now the anime, both of which stand as paragons of greatness in their respective media. It’s a unicorn melding of two of manga’s great geniuses, unlike anything before or since. That it went for so long without an anime is a travesty and a condemnation (get in line) of the production committee system, That it finally does have one – and that it too is a masterpiece – is a tribute to the persistence and determination of Maruyama.

Anime of the Year are an important part of what I do – they matter. In the long-term though, the importance of the calendar fades in my assessment of a work. My Best of the 2010’s list reflects this – there are cases where shows placed higher than others which outranked them in year-end lists. And strong years have non-AotY series that stand above top picks from weaker years. I don’t know how time will impact my views about any series, and there are no shortcuts to finding out. What I do know is that Pluto is a timeless classic, and for me will always stand as one of the finest anime of this or any decade.

#3 – Tengoku Daimakyou

As I noted yesterday, #3 and 4 on this list are basically a tie (and that’s true of the top two as well).  As I also noted any of those four could easily be a #1 series in many a year, and that certainly applies to Tengoku Daimakyou.  It just has the feel of an AotY – it checks all the requisite boxes.  And you can bet your ass it took a couple of pretty amazing shows to beat it this year.

The common thread running through number five (Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia) and #4 (Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu) is that they’re phenomenal manga (well, and both romance) which got relatively by the book adaptations.  Nothing wrong with them at all, they just didn’t surpass the source material.  BokuYaba certainly injected more stylish flair, but both those shows were broadly straightforward efforts that had source material that didn’t need a lot of embellishment.

This is why anime based on manga are so interesting to consider.  I love Ishiguro Masakazu, and Heavenly Delusion is a wonderful manga.  But for my money not quite as superlative as Insomnia or especially BokuYaba, yet it finished ahead of them (albeit with the latter it was basically a coin flip).  The reason is simple – this is a perfect adaptation, for all intents and purposes.  It had great source material to draw on, but it elevated that material to new heights.  Talented young director Mori Hirotaka put together a sterling team, Production I.G. imparted their usual seal of quality, and the rest is history.

There’s another element that needs to be addressed here.  Production I.G. is certainly one of the elite studios in the game, but even by their standards Tengoku Daimakyou really stands out.  And a big reason is that Mori and his team were given (by anime standards) enormous leeway in the scheduling.  It was widely reported that the series was basically done before the first episode aired, and you could tell from the very first preview that this adaptation was going to be something special.  I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to become a trend – this is the production committee system we’re talking about.  But it does illustrate what’s possible if talented animators are actually given adequate time to do their jobs.

There’s another commonality to these last three series – sequels.  At least theoretically.  It’s only official with Boku no Kokoro, and that’s also the one of the three which always seemed likeliest to get one.  But then, Tengoku Daimakyou was clearly given a huge budget (that’s not why it was so glorious but it didn’t hurt), evidence that the production committee really believes in it despite it only being a minor hit.  Even if that leak is accurate we’re still probably looking at 2026 before a second season could be produced, but as I noted in my series review post, anime this good can’t be rushed.  Tengoku Daimakyou was one of the most beautiful, creatively ambitious, and elegant anime we’ve seen in many years, and fully deserving of this spot on the 2023 list.

#4 – Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu

Now we come to the next phase of the list.  I spoke of tiers earlier, and they’ll all even-numbered this year.  12 was a tier, so was 8 – and so is 4.  These are the series that clearly stand above the others for me in 2023.  These are the ones that could, in some years, have been my #1 series (which tells you this was a very good year at the top).  I love every show on this list but these four especially are truly exceptional.

As the above would suggest, this show and the one immediately above it were extremely close.  I’ll go into details about why it fell the way it did with tomorrow’s entry (for obvious reasons).  But rest assured, Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu could very easily have been #3 this year.  Some years it would have been #2 or #1.  And for a variety of reasons I fully expect the second season the place even higher than the first when the anime year 2024 is reckoned up.

About that – eligibility is worth addressing here.  By my own rules BokuYaba doesn’t qualify as a split cour, because of the gap between seasons and the fact that the timing was not announced immediately.  In a year like this it would have made my life easier to roll it over to 2024’s list (Rurouni Kenshin as well) but I try to be as consistent as I can.

Again, Spring – wow.  What a season, especially for romcom.  I consider BokuYaba the best romcom manga currently running by a good distance.  As with Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia, the anime didn’t surpass the manga here, but it was faithful in spirit enough to capture the essence of the manga.  Director Akagi Hiroaki has already proved his mettle with romcoms, elevating the Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san manga to far greater heights in anime form.  He didn’t need to make the kind of changes here that he did there, but he clearly gets BokuYaba.  The art isn’t quite to the standard of the source – Sakurai Norio’s brilliance with character expression (especially Kyoutarou) would be hard to match.  But when a manga is this phenomenal, almost as good is still great.

To say I’m excited for Season 2 would be an understatement.  The material covered this year is great – what’s coming is even better.  The reaction to the anime among new viewers mirrored what happened with the manga almost perfectly.  Initial resistance and low aggregator scores, gradual buy-in, eventual acclaim.  Kyoutarou is for my money the best protagonist in romcom (and maybe in currently manga) and he and Anna are my favorite couple beyond doubt.  It just gets better from here, and I can hardly wait.

#5 – Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia

Spring 2023 will surely, at least for me, go down as the greatest romcom season of all-time.  It had volume, it had depth, and it had elite quality at the top.  Every age-bracket was covered, from Akane and Taiyou in elementary to college and adulthood.  If you love the genre as much as I do, it was an embarrassment of riches.

Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia is a high school romance and of course, anime has never had a shortage of those.  But there are good reasons for that, as this is the age bracket that most easily lends itself to the sort of romantic tension that manga and anime seek out (just ask Bill S. from Stratford).  I tend to prefer the dynamic in junior high romcoms these days, but great HS romcoms are no less to be treasured merely because lesser ones are fairly common.  

Is Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia a great romcom?  Yes, no doubt – not as great as the manga, but great nonetheless.  It took a true monster of a series and a historically great couple to beat it and Ganta/Isaki out as the best series and couple of Spring and of 2023.  Lidenfilms has proven itself capable of doing stylish romance adaptations that eclipse the source material with Yofukashi no Uta.  They didn’t do that with Insomniacs After School – they delivered a solid, faithful adaptation that mostly stuck to what was on the page.

Given how great the manga is, that’s certainly a desirable result.  If the anime lacks a certain wow factor it would have had with an auteur director or a studio that would have really doubled down on the source material’s stunning art, it also avoids any real missteps and looks quite lovely.  Its depiction of the Noto Peninsula is immediately engrossing.  And that’s important, because a sense of place (with Insomnia, almost entirely real places) is crucial to this series’ appeal.

The manga has ended, but whether we’ve seen the last of Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia in anime form is an open question.  There were leaks from generally reliable sources that a second season had been greenlit.  But that would have been somewhat surprising to be honest (the series is more a modest commercial success than a major hit), and there’s been no news since.  If this is all we get, I have no complaints, as the adaptation did justice to a truly great source material.

#6 – Boku no Hero Academia Season 6

Boku no Hero Academia holds a very significant record at Lost in Anime, similar in vein to yesterday’s Top 10 series but doing it one (two) better.  Six seasons, six appearances on the list.  Admittedly Season 5 was touch and go, thanks to awkward-to-adapt material and severe depletion of production resources thanks to a concurrent theatrical film (which also prompted some unwise tweaks in the narrative progression). It required a weak year to sneak in but it did, keeping HeroAca’s perfect run alive.

Season 6 was a glorious return to form.  One I predicted, mind you – the TV series finally had Bones’ full attention and it was adapting some top-shelf material.  Deku’s descent into darkness is some of Horikoshi’s best work, because Deku is such a superficially sunny and optimistic boy.  Horikoshi of course had laid the groundwork for this, but to see those seeds in Izuku’s arc come to fruition at last was really a powerful experience.

Was this BnHA’s best season?  I’ve thought about that, and it might just be.  The first cour of Season 3 is the best single cour of the series, of that I have no doubt. But for consistent excellence over two I think S6 has it beat.  And it’s no coincidence that the hands-down best antagonist of the series, Stain, was the centerpiece of that S3 arc and makes an important return in the final stages of Season 6.

Big shounen (especially Jump shounen) series are notorious for toxic fanbases (just look at the dialogue over Togashi’s hiatuses over the years).  Even so, I think Boku no Hero Academia’s is the worst in some ways.  I certainly don’t think there’s another fandom that loves to complain so much.  Everything from the manga and the anime gets nitpicked to death, and it can be hard to find anyone saying anything positive a lot of the time.

Despite all that, HeroAca continues to prosper.  Volume sales have actually trended up over the last couple of years (highly unusual with kaijuu of this age) and it ranks even higher in English sales than Japanese.  I get the feeling that it – and Horikoshi – are only going to be truly appreciated once this series is over and done.  The anime hasn’t been a totally smooth ride, but it’s performance in my rankings ably attests to my feelings about it.

#7 – Golden Kamuy 4th Season

By rights Golden Kamuy should have been on the 2022 Top 10 list.  But the final half of the season was delayed for about six months, in one of the oddest turns of events I can remember in anime.  All we were ever told was that it was due to the death of a critical staff member.  But as far as I know that staff member was never identified, and there was no news of the passing of an obvious candidate for who it might have been.  I have no idea what happened here but it certainly wasn’t business as usual.

All four seasons of GK have appeared in the Top Ten lists, of course.  In fact Season 3 was my anime of the year in 2020.  So in that sense one could say S4 placing seventh is no big deal or even a disappointment.  But the truth is, four for four is pretty impressive.  And the competition was pretty strong in 2023 – there have certainly been years when Season 4 would have placed higher.

I do think this season suffered a bit by having its momentum snuffed out by the delay and then getting literally dumped in the middle of the strongest anime season in several years.  I also think it lacked the cohesiveness and narrative drive of S3, which among the manga’s material was uniquely suited to a seasonal anime format.  I also think under a new director at a new studio (Brain’s Base) just a touch of Golden Kamuy’s usual sharpness was absent.  But this is all relative, and we’re talking about an awfully high bar.

Among Noda-sensei’s greatest strengths is his ability to keep introducing larger-than-life characters in seemingly endless numbers, usually ones who don’t neatly present as either heroes or villains.  Boutarou is only the latest example, and he was the best new addition of the season.  The fifth season – already announced – should be the final one.  And I have total faith that Noda will, as always, continue to expand both the story and cast in ways that make you shake your head in admiration.  I’ve said it before – there’s nothing in the world like a Golden Kamuy episode.

#8 – Jijou wo Shiranai Tenkousei ga Guigui Kuru.

Now we reach the point where every show was a dead-lock certainty to make the list from the moment I started seriously compiling it.  As I said a couple days ago I mentally had 12 top ten series this year, and the last four were in a pitched battle for the last two spots.  The top 8 were a clear step above that (though there are tiers within that group too).

Jijou wo Shiranai Tenkousei ga Guigui Kuru. was an adaptation of a manga I knew and liked, but the anime still exceeded my expectations.  Why?  I’m not sure if I just sold the manga a little short, or if the anime improved on it substantially.  I think it’s some combination of both (though the anime did cut the single funniest scene in the manga).  This was a great year for romcom anime and The Clueless Transfer Student is Assertive is part of arguably the greatest romcom season ever, Spring 2023.

Romantic comedy about grade schoolers is a very tough needle to thread.  Tonally speaking the balance is almost impossible to get right, but this series really gets it right.  It’s innocent with enough substance to the relationship to feel as if it’s not just a childish crush, and just enough mild ecchi to keep the laughs coming.  Jijou wo Shirananai Tenkousei also gets the balance just right when it comes to the bullying element in the story.  It treats it – and the pain it causes – with the respect it deserves.  But the series isn’t dragged into tragedy – the focus on the natural resilience of children and the importance of having someone to support you make sure that never happens.

Yep, it’s another great Pierrot (Signpost) adaptation.  My Top Ten lists are peppered with them and have been since the very beginning, and they do it without huge budgets or lavish animation.  I don’t think there’s another studio out there that captures the essence of the source material as consistently and comprehensively as Pierrot does.  This is just a wonderful anime through and through, with an incredibly charming main pair in super-chad Taiyou (aptly named) and uber-sweet Akane, and the greatest sideman around in Dai-chan.  I’m glad so many people seemed to enjoy this series, but I suspect a lot of them don’t realize just how deep it really is.

#9 – Rurouni Kenshin 2023

I just wrote a series review post on Rurouni Kenshin 2023, and as is my wont I won’t rehash at length here.  I’ve spilled a lot of ink on this series over the past year, but there are good reasons for that.  It’s one of the most important shounen in history, incredibly formative for me as a fan, and attached to major controversy.  It’s also a series where fans were crying out for a reboot for close to two decades before finally getting one.  In anime terms, RuroKen is a very big deal.

To summarize what I wrote last week, I don’t think one can judge this show until after it adapts the part where the manga gets really great.  That’s the Kyoto arc, it’s coming in 2024, and once we have that in the bank we can really start to assess Lidenfilms’ work here.  The Tokyo arc had its ups and downs in the 1996 anime, and there were things this version did better (and others that one did).  It was a great series on the whole, but the source material isn’t uniformly great during the chapters it adapted.

I don’t think we’re getting an ultra-premium, Tengoku Daimakyou level adaptation here – just a very good one that’s by design sticking very close to the manga.  That’s an improvement over the ’96 for me – the casting and music are not.  We also don’t get as much directorial flair this time, but Furuhashi’s flourishes didn’t always improve things for the better.  I like both series and there’s absolutely no reason one can’t and shouldn’t do that.  And the Kyoto arc is so sublime that a faithful adaptation is exactly what the doctor ordered.  If it finishes in 2024 (we still don’t know when it will premiere, and for how long it will run), “Kyoto Douran” will almost certainly place higher on next year’s Top 10 list.

#10 – Undead Girl Murder Farce

I know I’m a broken record on this subject, but this is usually the toughest spot on the year-end lists.  2023 being a good anime year is obviously a good thing, but it makes that final cut that much harder.  And as usual, my tiers don’t neatly give me 10 series.  The cutoff for me this year was twelve – it often seems to be for some reason.  As such this series and the first two on the 11-20 list are basically interchangeable.  And certainly all good enough to be top ten shows in an average year.

Undead Gil Murder Farce was kind of an outsider in my deliberations for a long time – I was leaning in another direction.  What turned it for me was remembering just how astonishing that finale was.  It was a magnificent display by Hatakeyama Mamoru and a brilliant team of animators, probably – well, certainly – the most visually impressive episode of any anime this year.  That on top of the fact that there were so many brilliant episodes over the run got UGMF over the line.

While the final arc wasn’t the strongest Undead Girl Murder Farce had to offer, the whole package was really impressive.  Talent wins out, and Hatakeyama is just a great director, right at the very top of the pyramid.  The cast was fantastic, the music superb, and the entire series had a manic energy, fearlessness, and snappy rhythm that was irresistible.  “Go big or go home” was this show’s mantra, and it always chose the former.  There’s still a lot of story to be told here and I don’t imagine we’ll see it finished in anime form, but what we got felt complete and self-contained.  Undead Girl Murder Farce was a testament to the idea that there’s no substitute for pure artistic genius.

Honorable Mention – Hirogaru Sky! Precure

This is a first, an Honorable Mention for a show (honesty compels me to admit) I dropped.  This is a tough category.  I try not to just make it a cheat to slot a 21st show into the rankings – in my ideal at least, it should be a series that’s either ineligible or one I just wouldn’t normally blog.  I could have picked something like Gamera: Rebirth (though it was perfectly eligible), but while the story was underrated the CGI was a big turn-off.  Hirogaru Sky! Precure (still airing and thus ineligible for the list, by the way)  even if I did see my interest in it play itself out, feels more in alignment with the spirit of the category.

I’d never watched a Precure series before this one, not being that much of a mahou shoujo fan to begin with.  Frankly what made me curious here was the apoplectic reaction among the fanbase at the idea of a male precure.  That turned out to be something of a tempest in a teapot, as Tsubasa (“Cure Wing”) was so inoffensive and blended into the vibe so seamlessly most fans seemingly couldn’t muster much indignation about his presence (and Murase Ayumu is obviously having fun with the role).   I think this show does what it does quite well, actually – it’s just that what it does gets kind of repetitive, and was never really my bag in the first place.  But I think it does have a niche in the mahou shoujo landscape, and I’m glad I got to know it.

It’s Top 10 time again already!?  Indeed it is, and quite a challenge this one is going to be, too.  It wound up being quite a solid year, certainly better than average over the last decade (and that’s two above-average years in a row).  As usual my tiers didn’t neatly align with a top ten or twenty, which makes things a lot harder.

A reminder – once more I’ll be revealing the #1 series via an “Anime of the Year” video on the LiA YouTube channel (a video which I will of course link here).

A Refresher on Eligibility:

I’m going by the same eligibility standard I used for the 2012-2022 lists – that is, shows that finished airing during the year or split-cours that finished in 2023 are eligible. Split-cour series which finish in 2024 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 (there weren’t any in consideration for me this year) 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 2023 onwards and are still airing into Winter 2024, or true split cours that will finish in 2024.

As you know I always like to do a little contest, so here we go… The winner will be anyone that guesses my Top 10, in order. If no one does that, I’ll go with the closest guess. Guesses made by 2200 JST 12/23/23 will be eligible. Here’s the prize: same as last year, I’ll do a “Top 5” list or haiku on any anime theme or topic you choose. Dealer’s choice – you make the call.  Please post your guesses in the comments below!