Ayakashi: Japanese Classic Horror

Fuji TV's noitaminA (ノイタミナ) late night programming block which currently broadcasts on Fridays from 00:45 to 1:45.

list of psychological, strange and experimental anime.

This list has a part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/3795

Anime either based on, heavily influenced by or drawing key aspects from folklore. Folklore encompasses the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, people or culture passed down through the generations by word of mouth and later often recorded in written form.

While the majority of works listed in this club have their origins in East Asian folklore (for obvious reasons) also included are examples of folklore ranging from portrayals of the mythology of Ancient Greece, stories featuring local spirits, legendary folk heroes, adaptions of Brothers Grimm fairy tales and narratives featuring the Gods of the Norse pantheon as characters. Modernised interpretations and retellings have been largely excluded.

As MAL currently sadly only allows a max of 50 entries on interests stacks this list prioritises the stand out and most high quality examples of folkloric anime. For a more comprehensive list which also includes manga, I direct you to my accompanying folklore club of the same name.

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.

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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).

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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).

In this collection, I tried to highlight titles in which the emphasis is not just on Japanese folklore and culture, but on the mysticism associated with it.

This is not exhaustive collection of titles that have Japanese folklore wibes, it's just my collection of essential titles I would recommend to anybody who will ask me for recommendations.

one per year, and once per licence (to the best of my abilities)

Series referring to mythologies and religions.

Don't have time? These are the anime for you! Anime with less than 6 episodes. Their stories are complete (you won't feel like it ended with a cliffhanger) and really enjoyable. For people who love anime but don't have too much time to watch them.
*Ayakashi includes 3 short horror stories (separate from each other). I recommend the 3rd one (episodes 9-11).
*Aoi Bungaku includes 6 short stories (separate from each other). You can watch either one and you will enjoy it.
*The Grimm Variations includes 6 short stories (separate from each other). You can't really go wrong with classic Grimm fairy tales.
*Anime classified as movies are less than 30 minutes long.
*All Itou Junji anime include smaller short horror stories (separate from each other). Most are of decent quality for a casual watch. (Also, give the World of Horror game a try, you'll be surprised)

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

A collection of japanese folklore. From youkai to yousei and from present to the past. The japanese folklore is rich of weird and wonderful beings.

Animes with the horror, paranormal and supernatural genres.

Anime that were dubbed in its entirety by Ocean Productions, a Canadian based dubbing group in Vancouver, Canada.

There are some rare cases like Megaman NT were dubbed but not fully and I decided to exclude those. Dragonball Z was also dubbed by Ocean Prod. at one point in time but they didn't dub episodes 68-122 (To stay ahead with Funimation's dub). Z Kai also has a full dub but that will never see the light of day so I won't include that on these lists either.

There seem to be a lot of ways to watch anime but sometimes there are certain outliers that don't make their way to any legal streaming service OUTSIDE OF JAPAN (these criteria are mainly made using LiveChart.me as they list official streaming services to view anime and The Streamable), this stack aims to shine a light on these series, however, some rules are to be followed:

•No 'Kids' demographic, there's a reason MAL makes the distinction for those series, sure they're anime but I don't expect streaming services to lump them with other 'anime' and drown their servers with thousands of episodes (Ojarumaru, Anpanman, Nintama Rantaro). As well as other long-running series that don't fit the demographic rule fully (Sazae-san, Doraemon, Chibi Maruko-chan).
•Avoid recommending retro anime to be added to the stack, we're not counting physical releases or that they used to air in some regions, just that they're currently available in a streaming service (Kinnikuman, Kochikame). Feel free to do an interest stack about them, I'm thinking this one can only go as early as the 2000s for the anime on the stack.
•No lost media, there are better interest stacks for that.
•No series uploaded to Youtube by unofficial channels (Official channels count as legal streaming services, again, outside of Japan that don't require a VPN to view).
•No unofficial doujin anime/fan-made anime.
•No commercials and ads.
•No OVAs or specials, not every OVA such as Hellsing: Ultimate or TV Specials make its way to streaming services as sometimes they're bundled to specific manga volumes, other media, or sold separately from a series.
•No short anime, 5 minutes or less (Gag Manga Biyori, Popee the Performer, Gregory Horror Show).
•No ONA or web anime (Gift ±).
•No donghua (Chinese animation), aeni (South Korean animation), and animation that isn't from Japan, yes we all know many works are outsourced to different studios and animation outside of Japan but this is to make the stack not as loaded and confusing more than it is.
•Sequels not on any streaming services allowed.
•Movies are welcomed albeit sometimes have a similar problem to OVAs, I don't expect things like Gothicmade to ever be on a streaming service let alone outside of Japan. And well... not planning on oversaturating the stack with them.
•Series available as purchase only are not counted on the stack such as Supernatural The Animation: https://thestreamable.com/shows/supernatural-the-anime-series-2011
•If a series seems to be available but it redirects you to a 404 page or simply doesn't appear to be on the streaming service it's eligible for the stack.

Why do I use The Streamable for the "Marked as Unavailable" tag? Well, it actually sometimes shows the episode's name and thumbnail so it helps to know if at some point they're available or if there's a record of them being in an streaming service. And it helps a lot in knowing where some shows are available (like Kobato. is in Peacock of all places).

I do not know every anime not on a streaming service and may commit mistakes so please help this stack grow if you know of any series and feel free to call out any and all mistakes I make, I may make changes to the stack in the future as well. This already seems so messy so please bear with any slow progress to the stack and sorry for the inconvenience.

The process to add an anime: Look at LiveChart.me and The Streamable for available streams and purchase-only options (This isn't a promotion of either site in any way they just serve as tools for the process of finding anime not on streaming services), look at ANN for any physical release outside of Japan (if I miss this one let me know), and look up the Japanese title to see if it's available on the region's streaming services (this one is an extra, usually LiveChart tells you if it's on Japanese Amazon, Hulu or Netflix). If a series gets added to an streaming service it's off the stack. The stack aims to be a mix of different genres and stories so I won't overstuff them with a particular franchise, but rather highlight some series and spread a big franchise not on streaming over other parts of the stack.


Part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/29610
Part 3: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/35755
Part 4: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/49195 (made in collaboration with eblf2013)
Part 5: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/52751 (made in collaboration with eblf2013)

List of Anime with 11 Episodes or Less

Notes:
1. TV only
2. Movie, ONA, OVA, and other type are not included
3. 1st Season/Part 1 only

Previous: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/32253
Next: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/32395

This stack lists anime that are about buddhism/shintoism or frequently reference at least one of the named religions/philosophies.

Some of the listed anime are surprisingly good and offer a insight into japanese/eastern history, traditions and mythology. Some might be unapologetic propaganda.

List from Digibro's† video "Can You Spot A Unique Anime Series By Its Episode Count?"
https://archive.org/details/can-you-spot-a-unique-anime-series-by-its-episode-count

Plus a few others