Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor 2 the Movie

The Animation Film Award (アニメーション映画賞) is an award given to the best animated feature film at the Mainichi Film Awards. The award was established to reward large scale cinematic animation, enabling the Oofuji Noburou Award to focus on shorter pieces. This award was first presented in 1989 for Kiki's Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Critics & Connoisseurs was a club that was founded in 2008 and ended club activities on the 31st of 2022.

The goal of the club was to come up with a list of highly recommended quality shows that are exemplary either within its genre or universally. An anime needed a 70% approval rate in our voting to get on the relation list. The following anime are all part of said list.

You can see the club page here:
https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=2913

Anime Relation List Part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/328
Manga Relation List: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/334

An ongoing list of my favorite and personal anime movies.

Updated 9.12.2024

If there's any person who defined the archetypal 80s anime character art style, Akemi Takada would be a strong contender. Debuting in the industry as a guest character designer for Ippatsu Kanta-kun, Takada would be assigned as the main character designer only a year later for the sequel of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, a show she was a fan of during her university years. After four years of working for Tatsunoko, Takada went freelance and truly hit her stride with her involvement in the adaptation of Urusei Yatsura, adapting Rumiko Takahashi's art style to an anime format (she was responsible for turning Lum's rainbow-colored hair into the trademark teal it is known today). Takada would later work on another Takahashi adaptation, taking after Yuuji Moriyama stepped down from the character designer role in Episode 28 of Maison Ikkoku.

Takada has a quite interesting evolution in her art style over the years. One way of comparison is through how different her character design of Lum looked from Episode 1 in contrast to her appearance in the later episodes of the series. Over time Takada's style would get more individuality, her characters more model-like, their eyes getting softer and gentler, their fashion sense more pronounced and elegant. This is most evident in her character designs for Kimagure Orange Road in 1987, which can be considered a culmination of her style and possesses many of the features that her characters have had ever since.

Like other interest stacks I have created, the following list is a selection of her most important works in chronological order. She is one of my favorite character designers ever, so I hope you consider checking them out. Or at least buy one of her artbooks.

Halcyon Realms's La Madonna artbook review - http://halcyonrealms.com/anime/la-madonna-takada-akemi-art-book-review/
Character design sheets for Maison Ikkoku - https://www.catsuka.com/gengal/artworks//maison_ikkoku
Lum's character design + a podcast about Urusei Yatsura in the thread - https://twitter.com/bunnycartoon/status/1260227769298026503

Hands up, don't shoot! Here some of the best titles on a police theme I can think of. Most of them take place in the future and there are even police mechs in one of franchises!

"Elitist" has been a very generic and broad term to generalise many types of not-so-mainstream or "deep" anime, so this list is very diverse and it's criteria are not always clear cut and objective. Nonetheless I try to provide a proper explanation for why each entry is included. Generally speaking these are shows that fit one OR more of these adjectives: Experimental, Avant-Garde, Psychological, Philosophical, Obscure, Classic, Critically Acclaimed, Artsy, Old, etc...

Some shows here are not necessarily obscure or underground at all, but they are still here because they have been stereotyped as "elitist" by the community over time, due to their experimental or artsy nature. Similarly, some shows here are not necessarily artsy or experimental in nature, but their old/underwatched/obscure nature gives them a reason to be here. Not all aspects have to be checked to be included. Only one per franchise.

I have personally watched the great majority of the anime in this list, but there are a couple which I haven't. Still added them because of how strongly they are stereotyped as "elitist" or have fitting characteristics to be classified as such. I know my list still lacks many essential classics, I will continue to add and expand into this list as I watch those personally.

For more recommendations, go to my other Interest Stacks, "Elitist Anime 2" , "Elitist Anime 3" and "Elitist Anime 4", whose links are:

- https://myanimelist.net/stacks/4256
- https://myanimelist.net/stacks/4756
- https://myanimelist.net/stacks/10188
- https://myanimelist.net/stacks/15961

SBS - the free to air channel with actual international content that everyone either spends 5 minutes watching or 3 hours watching, no in-between. They used to air a fair bit of anime alongside their normally scheduled programming, and you might even be able to catch a few Ghibli films every now and then today.

Anime with morally gray characters

OVA/Movie Timeline:
Patlabor: Early Days
Patlabor: The Mobile Police
Patlabor 2: The Movie
WXIII: Patlabor The Movie 3

TV Timeline:
Patlabor: The Mobile Police - On Television
Patlabor: The Mobile Police - The New Files

Reboot Timeline:
Mobile Police Patlabor Reboot

Collection of series that feature, provide commentary and explore themes heavily related to Cultural, Political, Religious, Sociological or Economic fields and the impact that those fields and processes that they contain have to the general population.

Japan has waged countless wars within its territories and beyond her shores for thousands of years now, and in anime we can see some of the perspectives, interpretations and depictions the Japanese people have developed with regards to this topic.

In this stack list I have gathered what I consider to be the essential anime with the theme of war, whether they show it from the perspective of the soldiers who fight them or from the experience of the bystander civilians who have to endure its effects on society and the environment. War is a theme that comes up, even tangentially, in most of everything, so I can't really make a list of every good anime that has some reference to war in it, so here I tried to put shows that either have a direct focus on war as a core theme, or shows whose main focus isn't war and only have war related elements in certain limited sections, but still do provide an interesting and valuable perspective on it when the theme of war eventually comes up.

I don't necessarily agree with all of these shows' views on war (I actively disagree with some), nor do I believe every show here is good. I just think that all of these could offer interesting insight on the different perspectives about war that come up in Japanese animation. You decide which view of war you agree with the most or find most emotionally genuine and politically nuanced.

Anime that feels absent and empty, due to it's deafening silence and overwhelming atmosphere by which it permeates.

Rendering a state without people nor narrative action, yet somehow convey the sense of their being within the space — a lingering life force as if someone has just departed or is about to arrive. A quiet, strange moment is swallowed by the emotional power of absence, or a mystery that is brewing with undercurrent of danger, hopelessness and the unknown.

50 different series from 50 different years. While most of these are my favorites from year to year, I have included some I thought should get a bit more of a spotlight on. It actually took me a lot longer to put this list together than I thought it would, some years had a lot of good picks and it was hard to pick out either a favorite or one that should be highlighted.

Note there are a few years I have not seen a show from (a few years from the 70s) so I will add some from my PTW or that were impactful.

Mamoru Oshii is a popular creator and has been involved in several anime in both major and minor roles.

This stack is intended as a guide to specifically just his own creative works, all anime listed here were either directed by Oshii or created by him.

Entries not directed by Oshii have a note explaining his involvement.