Seikai no Monshou

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 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/324
Manga Relation List: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/334

Anime Unleashed was an anime block that was broadcast on the American cable TV network G4. Anime Current is its Canadian counterpart. The block is notable for having a unique catalog of sci-fi anime including popular titles such as Serial Experiments Lain and rather obscure titles such as Betterman. In my opinion, this is one of the strangest but also coolest block of anime to air on American TVs.

What I look for the most in an anime above everything else is high-quality writing. That's not to say that manga, visual novel, and light novel adaptations are written poorly; in fact, there are some that have incredible, masterfully-crafted storylines. I have simply personally found that some of the most unforgettable series for me have been novel adaptations.

Given that there currently exists no anime search option for this, the basis of this interest stack is to provide a list of full-length novels that have been adapted into series or movie format.

*Disclaimer: not enough space to add children's classics to this, go check out Nippon Animation's studio page if you want more!

Every superhero has an origin story ... and so does every anime otaku. While I got exposed to anime when growing up, my own journey only really took off in the early 2000s as digital fansubs became widely available and I took full advantage of the fast (for the time) internet provided by my university accommodation.

My anime watching activity dropped off a cliff as I got older and life got in the way, but by that point I'd already lived through the first decade of the 2000s and watched quite a lot of what came out during that decade. Enough, at least, to make a decent stab at this.

This first decade of the 2000s was transformational for the anime industry, particularly with respect to accessibility to western English-speaking audiences.

Legend has it that before this period, anime fansubs used to get distributed physically via VHS tapes. It was a pain in the ass for fansubbers, distributors as well as the consumers so only the hardcore got involved. However, around the turn of the millennium, the rise of DVDs (allowing high quality rips) and faster internet (enabling tolerable download times) killed off VHS fansubs and ushered in the digisubs era. And with this dramatic lowering of the accessibility bar, fansubs exploded across the internet, bringing in a legion of new fans. (Fun fact: MAL itself came into existence during this early period of digi-fansubs.)

It's not just the illegal side of anime viewing that took off though. Kids' series like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon were great international success stories in the late 90s and early 2000s, and people realised there was an appetite for anime in western market. More shows started getting licensed, DVD sales boomed and some non-kids anime like Cowboy Bebop even got exposure on TV.

Anime production in Japan ramped up in the first half of the decade, though I'm not sure how much of this is to do with its growing following in the west given it was still dominated by the domestic market. But in the very least, success in the west was beginning to have a significant effect on anime production. One notable anime, The Big O, was allegedly made with western audiences in mind. While in Japan it flopped so badly that only half of the originally intended 26 episodes got made, its international success eventually led to the production of a second season.

As more and more anime titles became available to western English speaking audiences, the industry grew into a bubble. Companies started licensing anime almost indiscriminately and the Japanese companies demanded sky high licensing fees even for shite scraped off the bottom of the barrel that some dog did a number two in. A lot of stuff didn't sell nearly enough to make up the cost and this was exacerbated by a declining DVD market, widespread piracy and, later on, the Great Financial Crisis. Inevitably, the bubble burst in the second half of the decade: US licensors like Geneon and Central Park Media went bust, retailers like Suncoast went bankrupt, and Cartoon Network's anime-focused block Toonami got cancelled.

It's worth noting that anime wasn't the only industry in trouble: the whole bricks and mortar business was in decline, as was the DVD-driven entertainment business. And just like in other entertainment industries, the business paradigm was shifting. From the ashes of the anime crash grew shoots of new life. As the decade drew to a close, Crunchyroll (you may have heard of them), which started life in 2006 hosting user-uploaded pirated content, moved towards exclusively showing legally secured titles. The age of anime streaming had begun.

***

On the anime production side, when the decade started, I distinctly remember 26 episode was considered a standard season for TV anime, with quite a few shows going up to 52. As the decade wore on, 26 episode series became increasingly rare and anime around half that length became the norm as the shorter seasons reduce the financial impact of flops while holding the door open to extensions for successful shows. You can really feel the difference this had on the pacing: early 2000s shows with 26 episodes were generally slower with frequent episodic side stories thrown into the early stretches of the series to pad out the story and/or develop the characters.

Animation wise, digipaint became the norm in the early 2000s, replacing the old analogue method of cell animation. As with all transitions, there were some initial teething problems. For example, early digipaint anime were done in lower resolution as full HD wasn't much of a thing back then. These kinds of issues means that anime made in those early years have aged about as well as milk, and not even remastering can do much to salvage them.

While there'd been plenty of light novel anime adaptations before, the popularity of these adaptations hit new heights during this decade. This probably owes a lot to the ludicrous successes of Bakemonogatari and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Towards the end of the decade, adaptations of light novels with long titles that double as plot summaries also started taking off.

This wasn't just a good decade for light novels adaptations, but also visual novels, including eroge aka hentai games. This can be seen as part of anime's increased focus on catering to the otaku subculture. The shift in focus is also evident in trends like the rise of late night anime and, much to my dismay, the dreaded moe. It's not all bad though. In the case of late night anime, it also gave birth to Fuji TV's noitaminA block, which aimed at an atypical anime demographic and produced a string of critically acclaimed shows (spoiler: some of them are in this stack).

***

Anyway, enough rambling on anime history; now onto the stack itself! I came up with a complicated system to determine the potential candidates for this list. Those who aren't crazy enough to be interested just need to note that I consider all the entries to be at least great (9+/10 on MAL or 2.0+ on my personal scale) and that I'm only including one anime from each franchise (usually the earliest one that provides a good jumping in point). Let me also slap on the disclaimer that I haven't seen a lot of these for well over a decade, so I don't know if they all hold up. Feel free to skip the remainder of this section and go straight to the entries.

The main thing that people might find a bit odd about this stack is that it appears to contain entries prior to the 2000s as measured by the more commonly used metric of starting year. This is because I consider an anime to be from the 2000s if it aired DURING this decade. But that's not all! Things get more complicated for franchises. For these, I'm including multiple entries as a single entity if the storyline are closely connected, e.g. in the case of multiple seasons of a show. This results in the inclusion of series that, while did not air in the 2000s, are closely connected to sequels that did (I prefer this over the alternative of putting in some random middle season of a franchise which is not helpful for anyone wanting to start their exploration).

Finally, when judging whether these multi-entry entities are good enough to actually make the cut for the stack, I try to decide based on the merits of the entries that aired during the 2000s as a whole. To illustrate this with a real example, the reason why the Kara no Kyoukai movie series did not make the cut is that while they included a great movie in Paradox Spiral, I don't consider the entries released in 2000s to be great as a whole. Similarly, even though Cowboy Bebop qualified for this list due to the Knocking on Heaven's Door movie airing in 2001, the movie itself fell short of being great so the franchise didn't make the cut (though it would if I were making a 90s stack).

Confused? Good. It wouldn't be my stack if it weren't built on top of a convoluted system! But hopefully things will become clearer as add case-by-case clarification in the controversial entries themselves (disclaimer: it may lead to further confusion).

Anime made by the first generation of anime fans.

I’m coining the term Anime New Wave in reference to the French New Wave and the Japanese New Wave in film canon. Like both of these movements, the first generation of creatives to achieve any kind of mainstream success were establishing the medium themselves and were drawing inspiration from outside their art form, such as how Osamu Tezuka was inspired by the work of Fritz Lang or how Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Lupin III was deeply entrenched in film noir and Golden Age Hollywood aesthetics. With the rise of an otaku culture punctuated by the first doujin anime and the development of Studio Gainax, anime began to have its ideas and themes codified into a replicable series of cinematic references. Dezaki’s beautiful use of intense lighting and postcard memories, Tomino’s frantic paneling and action set pieces, Takahata’s evocative pastoral landscapes and slow takes, the language of anime was being written one word at a time. In the late 80s we saw the rise of talented creators who speak that language as their first tongue, and the results were inimitable and immediate.

Some directors I am considering under the term include Hideaki Anno, Shinichiro Watanabe, Kunihiko Ikuhara, and Satoshi Kon, just so there’s a point of reference here. I’m trying not to include directors who are usually lumped in with others on this list but were actively working as primary creatives in the studio system in the 80s, such as Mamoru Oshii. Lastly, I’m trying to keep the list centered on the initial wave of anime created even though plenty of these creatives have gone on to work on other things, just so I don’t have it be too confusing to look at. Arbitrary, I know.

Feel free to post comments on my page if you have any suggestions.

title

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.

This is a part of a series of stacks that are about artistic tendencies in anime (and that border the fine line between sophisticated and pretentious).

This stack is a work in progress.

Bibliography:
Clements, Jonathan. "The Brown Screen: Trended change in Japanese animation 1966–83." Anime: A History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 154-155.
Condry, Ian. "When Anime Robots became real." The Soul of Anime. Duke University Press, 2013. 117-119, 122-127.
Hack, Brett Anthony. "Screens, Clichés, and Revolutions: Code Geass and the Mediated Imagination of Change." Anime and Social Imagination: Media Fictions in Japan’s Age of Neoliberalism. 2021. Nagoya University, PhD thesis. 160-162.

The most acclaimed anime series of all time, compiled from 57 lists. Last updated October 2022.

The lists come from many different sources, mostly blogs and forum polls, as well as a few lists made by critics, animators, and journalists. I used both old and new lists, and I avoided lists that focus on a single genre or a single decade.

The list is ranked by points. An anime receives points for each list it appears on. For polls, an anime receives points proportional to the number of votes, with weights adjusted to prevent individual polls from having too much influence. All anime in the top 100 appear on at least 5 lists.

1-50: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/16403
51-100: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/16406
101-150: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/16407

Below is the list of sources.
http://shuffly.net/zoop/and-now-for-something-vaguely-nostalgic/
http://wrongeverytime.com/2014/03/31/top-30-anime-series-of-all-time/
https://animerurouni.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/top-25-favorite-anime-2017-edition/
https://annaloguetokyo.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/30-best-anime-series-that-i-love/
https://asimplelotus.wordpress.com/2019/01/10/my-50-favorite-anime/
https://beneaththetangles.com/2020/08/12/twwks-top-30-anime-series/
https://blog.draggle.org/my-favorite-anime/
https://brandonoyouknow.wordpress.com/2020/06/11/my-top-anime-all-time/
https://caraniel.wordpress.com/top-50-anime/
https://deluscar.wordpress.com/all-time-favorite-lists/all-time-favorite-anime/
https://floatingintobliss.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/top-30-anime/
https://furansujapon.com/manga-anime/top-meilleurs-anime-tous-les-temps/
https://ghostlightning.wordpress.com/about-wrl/ghostlightnings-most-favored-anime-top-30-all-time-as-of-2011/
https://goldenrealist.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/personal-best-anime-series-of-all-time/
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.anime.gundam/c/GA4z32gCGJk
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.anime.misc/c/0lNHr_ydx7o/m/KuHOPSLj9KUJ
https://kiddtic.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/my-top-50-anime-of-all-time-50-26/
https://mabiesomeday.wordpress.com/2020/02/14/personal-list-top-26-anime-series/
https://mageinabarrel.com/top-anime-of-all-time/
https://medievalotaku.wordpress.com/about/my-50-favorite-anime-series/
https://openranka.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/my-top-50-anime-list-updated-for-2012/
https://otakulounge.net/2014/06/25/my-top-20-anime-of-all-time/
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/YasashiiDia/top-anime-series-as-voted-for-by-rym/
https://redundantcolors.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/top-40-anime-series/
https://rocklobsterjwt.wordpress.com/2015/11/01/my-top-20-favorite-anime-series/
https://samui26.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/my-40-most-favorite-anime-series-part-1/
https://shinmechaguignol.com/top-30-anime-series-of-all-time/
https://starcrossedanime.com/my-top-20-favourite-anime/
https://starkfyre.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/top-25-greatest-anime-series-of-all-time/
https://thecartdriver.com/inushindes-top-30-anime-2-0/
https://thecartdriver.com/scamps-top-30-anime/
https://thecartdriver.com/shinmarus-top-30-anime-tags/
https://thelimitlessimagination.wordpress.com/category/top-anime-list/
https://thenullset.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/my-top-20-anime-of-all-time-20-to-11/
https://vraikaiser.com/2019/01/03/vrais-top-20-anime-redux-part-1/
https://watashiwabucho.wordpress.com/my-top-30-anime-2/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150930142642/http://animeboards.com/archive/index.php/t-51432.html
https://www.animeimpulse.com/blog/2017/10/24/top-50-anime-series-of-all-time
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=44259
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2001-07-16/wizard-lists-top-50-anime
https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2021/01/20/recs-top-30-anime-of-all-time-according-to-cdawgva
https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2021/11/23-1/recs-top-30-anime-of-all-time-according-to-gigguk
https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2012/12/31/50-masterpieces-for-50-years-of-tv-anime
https://www.icheckmovies.com/lists/icm+forums+favourite+tv+series/mathiasa/
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/11/25/top-25-best-anime-series-of-all-time
https://www.listal.com/list/digibros-top-27-anime
https://www.nishikata-eiga.com/2010/10/laputas-top-150-japanese-and-world.html
https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/list/best-anime-of-all-time/
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/6z2spq/top_anime_and_anime_directors_voted_by_japanese/
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/d58ycg/the_results_of_the_ranime_classics_of_anime_poll/
https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2014/03/18/top-50-classic-anime/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEVKkzP-sm0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9LVtXdkb_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Wnxy7ooik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya3guHgPTNg
https://zenpiesama.weebly.com/animanga/my-favorite-animemanga-to-date-2018
A compilation of 136 anime bloggers' favorites

EN: Anime that aired on Polish television programming block Hyper (later Hyper+)

PL: Anime nadawane na kanale Hyper (później Hyper+). Lista na bazie https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper+

Since Mecha/Space animes is somewhat not appreciated nowadays by the general people, i'm making a list to someone who want to see more than the surface of what it offers.

So my list will be filled unpopular Mecha/Space that is worth watching.

You may or may not like these anime, but you should definitely try them.

From late 90s to early 2000s. Organic animation with a hint of depression, existentialism, cynicism, semi-realistic artstyle, fear/ embrace of technology after the economic bubble burst of Japan in 80s.