Yaranakya’s Top 12 Anime of 2015

After a rather tame two years in 2013 and 2014, I feel like this year was a very strong one (if top-heavy) despite me watching fewer series than usual. Without further ado, here is a list of the series I found noteworthy this year (movies and OVAs not included):

#12 Yoru no Yatterman

To be perfectly honest, the amount of brilliance packed into this series should put it far above most series on this list. Metaphorically, this series can be seen as Japan’s rare but highly appreciated attempt to discuss and make peace with its “tainted past”. Even without that layer, though, there is so much here to chew on. The change of a society through acts of heroism is something we have seen often enough, but Yoru no Yatterman shows that there are half a dozen types of heroism, many thankless and forever unnoticed, and only combined do they give hope of success. The same goes for leaders, with the great mover of a given era often not being the one who can introduce stable change.

That said, there is so much wrong with this series, too! The god-awful humor, several episodes’ worth of filler and the final episode airing only half-done… Remake this into a watchable movie, please, and it can be truly great.

#11 Junketsu no Maria

A unique series with a strong focus on mediaeval Europe and its Church, led by a genki, do-good character who manages to be just a bit selfish and realistically flawed. The series strikes where it counts against the many incongruities of the Catholic Church without forgetting about developing its drama on the level of individual characters. However, the ultimate resolution feels somewhat rushed; the series’ critical approach to over-intellectualization of faith leads it to conclude that we should all just trust our hearts over our minds. This is not a bad approach, and one very much in tune with the contemporary Japanese approach to religion, but certainly it is not without its own flaws, which the series does not touch upon in its finale.

 

#10 Rolling Girls

It seems to me that Rolling Girls takes the viewer some twenty years into the past, when it was not quite clear what sells in terms of animated works. Back then, there was plenty of either redundant or over-the-top content in many productions, but many series also had a quirky charm to them less often found in today’s more streamlined (and oftentimes clichéd) productions.

When Rolling Girls did not work, it was incomprehensible or just not gripping enough. But when it worked, it worked. It is a refreshing soul-searching story where the characters who start out as nobodies are still nobodies by the series’ end. And amidst all the absurdity, both the human drama and space-squid drama ring true, leaving a strong impression. 

#9 Seiken Tsukai no World Break

Can you make an anime if given a stone and two sticks? Apparently you can. With literally laughable production values but outstanding sound direction, Seiken Tsukai no World Break exceeded all expectations regarding its entertainment value. Mind you, you do need to watch it with commentary or friends to get the most laughs out of it.

(I do hope all the comedy was intentional, though…)

#8 Fate/kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz

With the previous season doing unexpectedly well on this list last year, it is not much of a surprise seeing Illya here. The production values, the lovable characters and the fluid movement between action, drama and comedy are all still to be found in this installment. Kuro using trace powers to cheat at festival games was one of my favorite comedy moments this year, while using the problems of a budding fujoshi to parallel the building tension between Illya and Miyu made for some good setup.

Two strikes against this series: a few fillerish episodes and a somewhat subpar resolution of the main plotline. I praised Illya’s character arc in the second season, but while solving Illya’s issues through Illya’s development made perfect sense, solving Miyu’s issues through Illya’s development is kind of puzzling. There is another season in the works, so I look forward to seeing the new balance between the characters there.

#7 Parasyte Sei no Kakuritsu

An old-school sci-fi thriller with an environmental message. The series starts off strong, starts wandering about somewhat in the middle, but manages to finish things neatly. A stellar performance by Hirano Aya as the main character’s parasitic right hand. several good twists along the way and a pinch of grit where necessary make for a solid entry into the list.   

#6 Non Non Biyori Repeat

Slice of life shows rely largely on the atmosphere they can produce, and few shows can beat Non Non Biyori in the atmosphere department. When Renge ventures out on her first trip to the school building, it is the kind of setup where the viewer is conditioned to expect something unusual to happen, but NNB easily proves that simple everyday occurrences are quite enough for an adventure if seen from the right perspective. NNB is a series that celebrates life, but speaks as much about the eventual passing of things: Renge’s opening ceremony might well be the school’s last – a tacit admission the show leaves for the viewers to pick up on.

#5 Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX

This year’s Symphogear stayed true to itself, with some of the craziest action sequences of the year, while completely reversing the power balance between good and evil from the previous season. And yes, great music came out of it.

The first few minutes of this season are already near-legendary, what with cutting down mountains and whatnot. After the perfect first two episodes, the season goes into character arcs, some of them hit-or-miss, and concludes in a cinema-worthy slugfest.

This season’s plot might have benefitted from a less-is-more approach, as too many issues were tackled on at once and problems getting resolved in the same episode they were introduced does not make for great buildup. Still, all the characters took a step forward by the end of the season, which is always a good thing.

#4 Rokka no Yuusha

The tale of six seven eight brave men and women who gathered in a forest, then went on to fight a demon king never left that forest.

Rokka was all-out genre-defying. There was bromance, infighting, confessions, investigations… and they never left that forest.

#3 Gakkou Gurashi

I was ready for this to fumble. After all, it would be easier to miss this show’s airing altogether than to avoid getting spoiled about the “twist”. So throughout the first episode, I only saw an acceptable prologue, and all would be decided by seeing whether the series could build anything upon the foundation of that twist.

But no fear – the series would build more than plenty. The twists were mostly a formality, conscientiously telegraphed ahead of time. The real-deal was how the characters reacted to those twists, and why they reacted in those particular ways. As a zombie story, Gakkou Gurashi speaks of survival at all costs, but merely staying physically alive is not enough to keep a human mind going. The frail order of the “group insanity” the girls establish is an inhomogeneous set, with each member accepting their own degree of psychological compromise.

The creation of reality through human will. Great stuff.

#2 Shirobako

You know, in Girls und Panzer, Mizushima Tsutomu focused on a highly detailed and faithful portrayal of tanks to establish a firm sense of reality, then went on to do all kinds of crazy stuff with the tanks that you would never see in a live-action movie. Those “cool lies” can only work because their meticulous execution makes them indistinguishable from reality.

Shirobako is a repeat performance here, with some parts of the setting potentially aggrandized, but with the viewer none the wiser. The people, the problems, all of it rings true. Which is why the messages have depth and the over-the-top sequences work as humor.

Shirabako had a nearly perfect two-cour run, with several different episodes feeling ending-worthy. I think it did stumble a bit during the director and manga company clash – those crucial scenes were all metaphor and no meat, not what the series has us used to – and the final episode was more a quiet epilogue than anything else. But altogether the series remains a tremendous accomplishment. Shirobako would easily take the top spot on the yearly list had it aired in 2013 or 2014. It would have taken this year, too, except for…

#1 Hibike! Euphonium

If Shirobako had a near-perfect run, Euphonium went the whole way. It was a pleasure to go along with the series’ deliberate pacing, trusting it to take you where it will.

Many people who enjoyed this bring up their musical past, but I could never play an instrument to save my life. I think I played the xylophone in primary school for a few weeks or something. I was class representative for many years, though, and it were the school faction wars presented here that felt all too familiar.

Alongside Death Parade this year, Euphonium is one of those shows that tell you a lot about the viewer. Many people were satisfied to see this as a story where a skill-based meritocracy slowly earns its deserved position and provides the results desired. But the Kitauji compromise the series presents is a much richer canvas, and characters on all sides are humbled by the time the curtain drops.

Visually, the series was breathtaking, but never gaudy. Starting from the color scheme, Euphonium is all about restraint. This doubles the impact during the short moments when the series does go full-out, like during Reina’s phantasmagoric confession scene.

Euphonium might also well be close to my ideal of an anime adaptation. I expect many would be surprised at how the essence of the show was optimized for the new medium without changing the outwardly visible structure. It is a delicate balance, and something that was beautifully preserved here.

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Here’s hoping for another good year! Feel free to share your own 2015 favorites.

Full list of titles watched below. The * mark is for the many shows I took a look at but never finished.

1. Absolute Duo*

2. Aria the Scarlet Ammo Double A*

3. Assassination Classroom *

4. Blood Blockade Battlefront*

5. Chaos Dragon*

6. Charlotte*

7. Chivalry of a Failed Knight

8. Death Parade

9. Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan*

10. Dog Days S3

11. Etotama*

12. Fate/kalleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz!

13. Fate/say night: Unlimited Blade Works

14. Gundam Build Fighters Try

15. Himouto! Umaru-chan*

16. Kantai Collection: KanColle

17. Kuroko’s Basketball S3

18. Lance N’ Masques*

19. Log Horizon S2

20. Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid

21. Maria the Virgin Witch

22. Mikagura School Suite*

23. My Love Story!! *

24. Non Non Biyori Repeat

25. Overlord

26. Parasyte -the maxim-

27. Plastic Memories*

28. Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace*

29. Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers

30. Rolling Girls

31. School-Live!

32. Seiyu’s Life!

33. Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX

34. Shirobako

35. Show By Rock!! *

36. Sound! Euphonium

37. The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls

38. World Break: Aria of Curse for a Holy Swordsman

39. Yatterman Night

40. Yurikuma Arashi

41. Yuru Yuri San Hai!

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What’s In A Name – Shirobako

Shirobako mostly lacks “anime names”. Instead for meaningful names full of foreshadowing, the show opts for a more down-to-earth and realistic take on the issue. Ema does get the kanji for “drawing” in her name, and plenty of the side characters are humorous takes on real-life people, down to their names, but otherwise Shirobako does not try too stand out too much.

Which is not to say there are no tasty parts at all. Our protagonist’s name, Aoi, is currently a very popular girl’s name, duking it out for first place against Yui throughout the last few years.

Miyamori has her name written all in the meaning-neutral hiragana (a popular choice for girl names in general, as the round shapes of hiragana characters are considered very feminine). That need not stop us from guessing, though. People who know a bit of Japanese will point out that one common meaning of aoi is the color blue. But the word actually covers various shades of blue and green, as the two were not considered separate colors in Japanese tradition.

There is a metaphorical meaning to the English green shared by the Japanese aoi. As unripe fruit tends to be green in color, so the young and inexperienced in any field can also be called green. And this is exactly Aoi’s function throughout the first cour of Shirobako – to make mistakes and ask questions, so that we can learn about the studio and what is necessary to make it work. Aoi works as our perspective character exactly because she is inexperienced in the field.

Of course, every novice eventually gains experience and becomes better at their job, like Aoi does. But as we get deeper into the second cour of Shirobako, we learns that the people in the industry can be broadly divided into two categories: those who wake up from their dreams about the industry, and those that never do. If the stories of the veterans presented in the show are any indication, many of the greatest works are crafted by those in the latter category. As we see in the later episodes, Aoi herself is still far from waking up from her own dream. And that enduring innocence is another meaning contained in her name.

  

Another interesting, and much more light-hearted name choice is Takanashi Tarou. As  Anime Diet’s Gendomike puts it, “it’s a shame that we all know a Tarou in every office”. Which is exactly the intention behind this character’s name – Tarou is the stereotypical male name, the Japanese John Smith.

Of course, to complete the cliché, you would normally use a very common last name – preferably Yamada. What we get instead is Takanashi. Maserbeam complains about the overabundance of Takanashi characters in anime when discussing Tarou, and he does have a point. Chuu2koi, Working!, PapaKiki, Black Rock Shooter and other anime titles seem to be in love with this surname, not without reason.

The 小鳥遊 variant of the surname is famous because while it actually exists and is in use in contemporary Japan, it is one of the country’s most unreadable last names. Taka-nashi can be taken to mean “no hawks”, and the surname is written with kanji for “small birds playing around” (completely ignoring traditional readings of the kanji), the logic apparently being that small birds only play around in places with no hawks. This is most likely an odd remnant of the times when the Japanese language was not so much a tool of universal communication as a toy for the noble-born to play around with and use as a barrier between them and the uneducated. At one point, everything could be written in the word puzzle style described above, for art and beauty. (And then nobody could read a text 10 years after it was written, as nobody remembered the author’s witty jokes and puzzles.)

So the last name is weird and cool, and just perfect for your fictional character. Except that in Tarou’s case, while the last name might be pronounced exactly like the “cool” Takanashi, it is instead a variant written with perfectly ordinary and boring characters. This Takanashi is written with the kanji for “tall pear tree” (高梨), and read in a standard way.

I am not sure which joke the writers were aiming for here: “we wish all the Tarous of this world were just fictional characters… but they’re not”, or maybe “this guy wishes he were special… but he’s not”.

Or maybe just both.   

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From Hand to Mouth – Shirobako

Ema is the first Shirobako character to worry not only about keeping her job, but also getting by even if she has one. Some exact numbers help put things into perspective.

The above graph combines survey data on average yearly salaries of various occupations in the anime industry. From left to right:

Animators 1 100 000 yen (92 000 yen/month)

University students 2 000 000 yen (166 000 yen/month)

Freeters* 2 180 000 yen (182 000 yen/month)

Assistant Producers 2 280 000 yen (190 000 yen/month)

CG Staff 2 610 000 yen (217 500 yen/month)

Directors (Effects) 3 330 000 yen (277 500 yen/month)

Directors/Storyboarders 4 950 000 yen (412 500 yen/month)

Animation Directors 5 130 000 yen (427 500 yen/month)

Producers 7 540 000 yen (628 000 yen/month)

Superstar Seiyuu 70 000 000 yen (5 833 000 yen/month)

*Freeters – people living from part-time jobs. Replaces “Novice Seiyuu” in this chart, since beginners in the seiyuu trade get very little job offers and initially mostly rely on a “secondary occupation”. University students also tend to live from part-time jobs, which is probably why there is little difference in the average incomes of the two groups.

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Now, almost every major animation studio operates in Tokyo, which just happens to be known as the most expensive city in the world. Average rent for a one room apartment hangs at around 60 000 yen a month, and if you happen to eat food like any other mortal being, you will need another 30 000 yen for that.

Whoops, there goes an animator’s salary. That is, provided they do not own a cell phone, always wear the same clothes and commute to work on foot or by bike (this is where Ema’s bicycle comes in).

I think it is important to see how an animator’s work will often add up to nothing to understand where Ema is coming from. After a month of effort, you are either back to square one or in the red, and nothing seems about to change. So you either get really good really fast, try to break through to a more humane (and lucrative) position or just give up.

A large part of an animator’s salary is made up of a per-page bonus, so the more pages you can churn out a day the better off you are. I can see why you would try cutting down on precision work to increase speed. But of course desperate measures tend not to work out in real life (and this anime).

I wonder how Shirobako intends to answer this dilemma next week. Young animators getting worked down to the ground and burning out is a real problem with no obvious solution in sight. Ema seems to be a promising talent, and so she might get over her personal crisis just by grinding her teeth and waiting patiently for her five minutes. But on a larger scale, it is a discomfiting thought that the series we enjoy are built upon so harsh a foundation.

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