qb’s top ten 2016 anime
I think we’re all relieved that 2016 is nearly over, but this year also brought us some standout animation from Japan. I’m going to highlight the animated TV shows and movies from 2016 that made getting through the day worth it, in reverse order because countdowns are more exciting - magical girl correspondent qb
10. Yuri On Ice
A rare sports anime that balances strong character moments with showcasing the sport realistically, without becoming overly serious or boring. Perfectly captures the important qualities of watching competitive ice skating, while also featuring an internationally diverse cast of characters. Its surprisingly brisk and comedic tone, as well as the exploration of deeper emotions than you’ll ever see in high school sports anime, are welcome changes to usual the sports anime formula. I’m done with tournament arcs forever, but Yuri On Ice deserves recognition for its particularly ambitious take on the genre.
9. Pretty Cure All Stars: Singing with Everyone♪ Miraculous Magic!
The latest addition to the long running notoriously clusterfucky Precure Allstars movie series, Pretty Cure All Stars: Singing with Everyone♪ Miraculous Magic! takes a novel approach by having the entire thing be a full-blown musical, instead of just playing one awkward dance number over the credits. It’s a clever way to allow the ludicrously unwieldy 50+ main character cast to shine, while also reversing the usual Precure style of 2D animation for action and 3D CG for songs, so that the meat of the movie is slightly mo-capped 2D while the fight scenes have a chance to make use of 3D. The changes are noticeable and awkward at first, but they end up working really well. Given that almost all the other Allstars movies range from barely watchable to completely terrible, it’s a pleasant surprise that Toei is willing to try different things to fix their ill advised decade-long annual series.
8. Aggressive Retsuko
Aggressive Retsuko is an extremely short comedy anime by SANRIO about a 25-year old red panda who works in an office and vents her stress by singing death metal. Rather than using the same joke over and over, Aggressive Retsuko extends its comic-strip premise to other aspects of Retsuko and her coworkers’ daily lives and maintains flawless comedic timing, even if each minute-long episode only has time for a single gag. The humor is modern and relevant in a way that you wouldn’t expect from the creators of Hello Kitty, showing that SANRIO has been able to keep up with its audience as they have grown older. It’s a solid, hilarious comedy that hasn’t fallen off despite going on for the better part of a year.
7. Sailor Moon Crystal: Death Busters
After the disappointing performance of the Sailor Moon reboot’s first two seasons, Toei made drastic changes to the production team to ensure that Sailor Moon Crystal: Death Busters not only lived up to the original, but even surpassed it. The end result is dramatically different, with breakneck pacing unheard of for the magical girl genre, while at the same time being closer to the source material than the original anime ever was. I honestly had never been sold on Sailor Moon, but the Death Busters arc of Sailor Moon Crystal blew me away. It’s rapidly evolved from an ignorable cash grab into a full Dragonball Kai style reboot that for the first time showed me what Sailor Moon was really meant to be, and then some.
6. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure - Diamond is Unbreakable
The much anticipated adaptation of Part 4 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure - Diamond is Unbreakable was an incredible adventure for three straight seasons of 2016. Everything from the music choice to the color palette perfectly matches the setting of the series and maintains the absurdly high quality that Davidpro’s definitive adaptation of Jojo’s is known for. It’s especially notable the way David Production handled a particular series of encounters towards the end of Diamond is Unbreakable that all take place on the same day, by portraying them all chronologically over multiple episodes rather than one at a time like the comic did. The second half of Diamond is Unbreakable becomes immensely complicated for plot reasons, but due to a willingness to change and adapt the source material it’s stayed perfectly clear and easy to follow through the complexity. It’s an incredibly impressive feat that they managed to make this at all, but any rough spots in the production are easily forgotten by the creativity of the animators and strength of Jojo’s source material. It’s the part we were all waiting for, and it was worth the wait.
5. Tonkatsu DJ Agetarou
Topping off an above average year from the notoriously mediocre Studio DEEN is the simple story of Agetarou, an aspiring DJ whose family runs a Tonkatsu shop. Through the ghost help of a famous (but not actually dead) DJ, he realizes that frying meat and fly beats are exactly the same thing. After being taken under the wing of veteran “DJ Oily”, he meets friends and rivals from his generation of DJs, learns about of many kinds of music styles, and compares all of them to meat in some way. Tonkatsu DJ’s intentionally rough artstyle and very limited animation make it all the more charming, resulting in a short but sweet experience, like eating fried breaded pork cutlet in sweet sauce or beatmatching, same thing really. All the music is absolutely perfect for its grunge ass underground Tokyo dance club vibe, easily making my favorite soundtrack of the year.
4. KING OF PRISM BY PRETTY RHYTHM
I downloaded KING OF PRISM on a whim, and it instantly became my favorite movie of 2016. It’s impossible to fully describe that first viewing, but it was like a shared hallucination of dancing idol boys and ludicrous prismatic “”””ice skating”””” all while japanese dubstep pumps directly into your skull. It’s difficult to tell characters apart or remember anyone’s names, it’s completely laden with lovingly rendered male fanservice, the stupidly complicated plot is paradoxically a flimsy vehicle to get to the next song, and absolutely none of it makes any sense until you’ve seen a fifty episode 2013 anime called Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live. Even after seeing Rainbow Live, I don’t think I could actually explain what happened in it without foaming at the mouth. You just have to watch it.
3. FLIP FLAPPERS
Flipflappers is weird, fun, genre-hopping love letter to all things magical girls and beyond. Loosely about the adventures of middle school girls Papika and Cocona as they explore an alternate dimension called Pure Illusion, Flipflappers uses this premise as a launching point to touch on as many different genres and styles as possible, but also to tell its own original story. Since I’m a magical girl enthusiast, Flipflappers is exactly the kind of fun and experimental take on the genre that I wanted to see, especially as adult audiences view magical girls more and more as excessively dark and violent. The animation is kinetic and polished, the settings are dreamlike and breathtaking, but above all it’s extremely unique.
2. SPACE PATROL LULUCO
Also known as Studio Trigger’s incredibly long-form April Fools joke, Space Patrol Luluco is the coming of age story of a perfectly ordinary middle schooler named Luluco who’s forced by Inferno Cop’s brother to become a Space Cop and during the hiring process falls for a hot alien boy called AΩNova. After Luluco’s home city is shoplifted by a phone app with a singularity in it, Space Patrol Luluco becomes a wild galactic adventure that visits all of Trigger’s good shows, culminating in a bombastic over-the-top finale that proves once and for all that actually, there’s zero difference between the most worthless thing on earth and the most important thing in the universe, you imbecile. You complete moron.
Space Patrol Luluco combines the compact, charming fun of Tonkatsu DJ with the experimental qualities of Flipflappers to form Studio Trigger’s blatantly indulgent love letter to itself. It’s so inherently ridiculous that it’s impossible to take seriously, yet manages to blindside you with some unexpectedly emotional punches. As a whole, it makes me feel for the first time since Inferno Cop that Trigger has fully delivered on the promise they made when they formed; to just have fun making a dumb anime-ass anime. At its core it’s yet another take on the middle schooler coming-of-age story, but stretches that premise to infinity and beyond in classic Trigger fashion until it comes down to a middle school girl’s first crush literally deciding the fate of the entire universe. Space Patrol Luluco somehow exists as a hypercondensed, stupidly effective magical girl/cop/justice series that nails style, creativity, music, and comedic timing all culminating into one perfect punchline.
1. GO! PRINCESS PRECURE
Although it’s quite an achievement to nail every aspect of an effective magical girl series in shorthand, it’s even more impressive to consistently excel at all of those aspects for an entire year. Go! Princess Precure not only starts with one of the most impressive first episodes of any magical girl series, but it manages to keep up an incredibly high standard for its entire 50 episode run.
Go! Princess Precure follows Haruno Haruka, a middle school student who tested into a high-class boarding school (literally called Noble Academy) in the hopes that it would somehow help her achieve her childhood goal of becoming a princess. After her new roommate’s dream is stolen by a man with spiky hair and punk boots, she’s conscripted by talking animals, loudly declares her childish dream, and transforms into Cure Flora, a legendary Princess Precure.
Haruka meets Cure Mermaid and Cure Twinkle, and together they fight to protect the futures of their classmates, friends, and teachers from the Queen of Despair and her minions. Later on, the Queen’s dark princess appears, mocking Haruka’s lack of birthright and dismissing her dream as impossible. Eventually they surpass the idea that merely being royalty is what a princess is, and reclaim Haruka’s dream by asserting that anyone can be a princess, as long as they strive to achieve strength, beauty, and elegance.
Frankly speaking, Precure is just an animated vehicle for flashy kids toys. There’s no logical business reason why Go! Princess Precure’s fight scenes are so well animated, why its kids’ show plot is as compelling as it is, or why its just so much higher quality than nearly every other season of Precure before it. Go! Princess has to be the product of raw passion from everyone involved, because based solely on revenue this season wasn’t anything special. It exemplifies what a season of Precure should ideally be, and although Go! Princess doesn’t bring anything new to the table, or utilize an experimental style, it brings out the best in the magical girl genre and markedly improves on it, ultimately transcending the fairytales it’s based on to reinvent the concept of princesses for a modern audience. It’s an unusually ambitious Precure season that’s even more unusually able to back up its ambition with absurdly strong writing and animation, without missing a single beat over fifty episodes.
- qb (@queuebae)