2018 was a…year for anime, I’ll say that much. There was a lot of anime I did quite like, especially comedy anime for which it turned out to be a bumper year. It ended up being quite difficult to...
2018 was a…year for anime, I’ll say that much. There was a lot of anime I did quite like, especially comedy anime for which it turned out to be a bumper year. It ended up being quite difficult to round out my top 10 and I ended up dropping anime I genuinely enjoyed off my list like Hero Academia S3 or Grand Blue Dreaming. But at the top end of the pile it was a rather forgettable year for the 9/10, 10/10, all time favourite anime list. My top 2 on this list are miles ahead of the third place anime, and both of those technically started several years earlier and only got around to finally finishing this year. But hey, let’s celebrate what was good and count down my top 10 anime of 2018!
2018’s 2019 Anime of the Year
Attack on Titan
I’m not doing random awards this year, but I will do my traditional “best anime that hasn’t ended yet” award. With the next season of Attack on Titan coming out in Spring, it would feel weird to put it in a Best of 2018 list. A little part of me wanted to ignore my somewhat arbitrary rules and stick Attack on Titan season 3 down as my favourite anime of the year anyway, because this was the year I felt like I really fell in love with the series. Maybe it’s because it’s no longer the new cool kid on the block and everyone prefers My Hero Academia now, but this season I really appreciated all the things Attack on Titan does well. It’s unique setting and phenomenal design of its world. Anytime Titan would introduce a new plot point that I would raise an eyebrow at, it would manage to work it into the story and justify why they felt it was worth including. I’ve kinda taken Attack on Titan for granted before, but now I kinda want to just sing its praises. Maybe next year.
10: A Place Further Than The Universe
Place Further Than The Universe is about as far from the kind of series I usually like. Bunch of teenage girls hang out together and get emotional on their coming of age journey is not my kind of thing at all. So the fact it made my top 10 is a testament to how good it is. It is still One Of Those and I still did have my eyes glaze over during some of the more dramatic moments, but I genuinely liked the characters and loved watching them try to get their way to Antarctica and grow along the way. It’s heart-warming, funny, treats its characters with respect and lets them express themselves and grow, while also have a degree of self-awareness to mean I bought their development and emotional outbursts in a way I usually don’t for these types of anime.
9: Skeleton Faced Bookseller Honda-san
This felt as much of an anthropological study as it did an anime. This silly little flash animated thingy was about a bloke with a skull for a face working in a book store and essentially acted for me as a view into the world of publishing and the retail industry. How Japanese retailers reacted to foreigners and how they viewed foreigners, from their loud enthusiastic attempts at speaking Japanese to their strange sense of wonder Japanese people have when they see the delight foreigners get when seeing anime and manga. There’s a relatable quality to all the stories as well as a familiarity to the writing style that made me really like the author. It’s short, enjoyable, and you come out the other side feeling like you learned more about the world, which is always a nice feeling.
8: Chio’s School Road
I don’t think 2018 was a particularly great year for anime, but it was good for anime comedy, of which Chio’s School Road was one of the highlights. It’s about a girl walking to school and eventually succeeding. More specifically, it’s a girl obsessed with playing western video games who finds obstacles on her way to school and lets the imagination in her game-addled brain come up with the solution. It’s about that little chuunibyou part of our brain that, when we climb over a fence because our preferred method of reaching a location was blocked, suddenly starts playing Mission Impossible music in our head and you get the intense urge to direct a colleague to the locations of objects using clock face signifies. It’s an anime about that part of us that feels embarrassed at how excited you briefly got because you made a dramatic leap to catch a falling flowerpot.
7: Megalobox
If you are one of those people who laments that they don’t make real anime anymore and only this cutesy crap (do these kinds of people still exist?), then boy do you need to check out Megalobox. It’s about cyberpunk underground boxing as one underdog kid rises to the top while getting entangled in a high stakes conflict over the future of a mega-corporation. The story isn’t much to write home about and you can probably predict the entire anime from the first episode, but the style in which gets there is so far above everything else this year. The dramatic camera angles, impressive backgrounds, use of music, slow motion. The contrast of the grime of the underworld with the gleaming ring in the highest stakes matches. The story is fine and does its job in getting you excited for that final confrontation the whole show builds up to, but you are here for those visuals, that directing, and how stylish it is in everything it does.
6: Cells At Work
An anime that got way more mileage out of its gimmick than I thought I would. It’s the inside of a body where all the main cells take the form of anthropomorphised characters. It manages to transpose the actions of the cells within your body into various anime tropes in way that makes you desperate to see what the anime would do with different situations. I want to see what happens in this world when the body drinks too much alcohol. Does our cute main character red blood cell find her delivery routes disrupted by drunken colleagues? Why it works outside the gimmick though is whenever something happens that you yourself have found yourself imagining, it delivers and then some. The cancerous cell that forms a sort of tragic monster, determined to destroy a world that won’t accept it. The blood transfusion where suddenly our main character is surrounded by red blood cells with slightly different uniforms and an odd accent. It’s works way better and for way longer than it had any right to.
5: Asobi Asobase
Perhaps the best way to sum up what Asobi Asobase was going for is to contrast the OP, which featured our girls in plain white dresses dancing through fields of flowers, to the ED, where abstracted scribble art of our girls screech through some death metal. It took the mundane situations of playing children’s games and then pushed them through a filter of insanity with increasingly horror-inspired faces as all hell broke loose. Tossing shoe contests turned into hurtling a bike off the edge of a cliff. A game where you pretended you were a radish being pulled from the ground became a slasher horror monster dragging away its latest victim. It didn’t all work…oh boy it definitely did not all work. But so often it left me in a combination of breathless laughter and utterly gobsmacked that this thing just did what it did. I love it, shogi butt lasers and all.
4: Lupin III Part V
Turns out Lupin III as a character and story concept works surprisingly well when you throw him into a world with the most modern technology. He was always using ridiculous gadgets anyway and now the series actually shows Lupin 3D printing his face-masks and infriltrating the world of the dark web to take down a bitcoin hoarder. Where his enemies make Lupin a meme so people update him on his location constantly, and Lupin counters it by becoming one of those people who constantly posts on instagram so everyone gets bored of him. It’s watching the characters of Lupin III interact with these modern technologies that it is at its finest, and those multi-episode arcs are some of the best anime this year. It was shockingly successful modernisation of Lupin that lost none of what made it good and dropped a lot of what felt dated (I do wish it dropped more though, because boy some of the Fujiko episodes felt so backwards).
3: Hinamatsuri
Hinamatsuri wasn’t the comedy I laughed at the most this year, but it was the best because it felt like the smartest comedy of the year. It put layers of thought and careful buildup into its jokes and punchlines which meant they felt like they had more lasting impact as a result. I will forever remember watching our bartender schoolgirl pour out drinks for depressed salarymen with a look of dazed acceptance, the face of the scrap collecter as the girls bought a TV so they could sell it to him for a fraction of the price, or the many layers of lies deep our yakuza lead had to go to not tell his family he was housing a psychic child. It was as imaginative and creative as sitcoms go with a fantastic amount of hugely varied characters that all helped funnel into the jokes hitting that much more.
2: Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin
It finally ended! Long after Sunrise had originally planned, but now I can finally put Gundam the Origin on an Anime of the Year list, despite starting in 2015. This 6-episode OVA is not quite the best Gundam ever (I’d still put War in the Pocket ahead of it), but it absolutely the best introduction to the franchise you could ask for. It’s a prequel telling the story of Char and how he grew up into the asshole ace-Zeon pilot that he did, although early on it is as much a story of his sister and her struggles trying to get by in a country tearing itself apart from the inside. It is also equal parts a story about how a nation can slide into fascism and the intense nationalism can take over. It’s beautifully animated, still maintaining a cartoony sensibility in its visuals and characters while telling this very human story about flawed people. While I would recommend this series to anybody, if you are a newer anime fan or have just never watched a mainline Gundam before, possibly as you are reluctant due to the older animation style, this is absolutely where you should start.
1: March Comes In Like a Lion
Another series that finally ended this year and boy was it an emotional trip. The story of a depressed shogi prodigy and the people in his life around them doesn’t sound like the world’s most instantly enticing plot description, but there is a realness and a rawness to the emotion and journeys of these characters that made you feel each small twist in your gut. It was this feeling of desperation that you just wanted these people to succeed in life and anything that got in their way felt as horrifying watching it approach as even the most terrifying titans in Attack on Titan. It’s the delivery of these moments that makes it work as phenomenally as it does, with the directing being right up there as the best Shaft has ever done, really helping emphasise both the fluffy family scenes with the sisters and the gut-wrenching moments. It had it ups and downs in quality as it meandered from character to character, but with it over (for now), I can finally look back at the whole thing and realise what a truly great anime taken together March Comes In Like a Lion is.