• Ah! My Goddess (first season)
• Oh! My Goddess (the Ah! My Goddess remake more closely follows the manga, which means it runs into the problems I describe here; Oh! My Goddess neatly sews everything up in a half-a-dozen episodes)
• Alien Nine (elementary school kids saving the Earth from an alien invasion; warning: the anime ends right smack dab in the middle of the story)
• Angelic Layer (basically "Rock 'Em Sock 'Em" robots with really cute marionettes; one of those rinse & repeat sports/mecha series, but it works)
• Ceres, Celestial Legend (mediocre animation, great story)
• Elfen Lied (the opening ten minutes may be some of the blood-spatteringest ever, but I still recommend it)
• Ergo Proxy (quite honestly, I lost track of the plot about halfway through, but it's still compelling)
• Eureka Seven (a sort of mecha version of Last Exile)
• FLCL (proving just how far outside the box an animator's mind can operate)
• Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU (proving just how fun dumb can be)
• Gankutsuou (nee, The Count of Monte Cristo, 2-D CG at its inventive best)
• Geneshaft
• Genshiken (an actual "adult" comedy--that is, a comedy about geeky college students who mostly act their age; compares well to CBS's Big Bang Theory)
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (both seasons and the SAC movie)
• Gokusen (these "reformed gangbanger" series are very popular, but create the impression that Japanese society is about 1000 times more violent than it really is)
• Haibane Renmei
• Hellsing (original series; imagine that "evil Angel" worked for the good guys)
• His and Her Circumstances (one of the best high school romances ever, until it self-destructed over what I've read were creative differences between the writer and director)
• Ikki Tousen
• Initial D (first season; repeats itself thereafter)
• Kamichu!
• Kanon (an ingenious reinvention of the harem genre as psychological drama)
• Kodocha (season one)
• Last Exile (any kid who loved the dogfighting sequences in Star Wars will love this; similar "look and feel" to Castle in the Sky)
• Mahoromatic (I actually didn't mind the ending, though it's clear nobody knew how to end it)
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (I hope they include the whole dance routine as a future DVD extra; update: they do)
• Midori Days
• (Seirei no) Moribito (an alternate Heian Era universe with an honest-to-goodness adult female protagonist)
• My Hime (stay tuned for the hilariously ribald fan service extras at the end of each episode)
• My Otome Hime
• Noein (a serious treatment of time-travel causality and the quantum many-world hypothesis, though it tries a bit too hard to qualify as "hard" SF)
• Patlabor (old and new and the movies)
• Ranma 1/2 (first season)
• Samurai 7 (yes, based on the Kurosawa classic)
• Scrapped Princess
• Sherlock Hound
• Shingu, Secret of the Stellar Wars
• Simoun (does a good job of creating a convincing single-gender universe, with some time-travel causality thrown in)
• Someday's Dreamers (I love the idea of treating witches as ordinary social workers on the government payroll)
• Strawberry Marshmallow (don't let the cute title and cute characters dissuade you; it's plotless and character-driven, but great fun, often poignant, and insightful)
• Tank Police (original series)
• The Twelve Kingdoms
• This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (more fan service from the people who brought you Mahoromatic, but a smart plot makes it work)
• Tweeny Witches
• Video Girl Ai (in which the hero literally craws across cut glass for love)
• Witch Hunter Robin (more witches as government employees, though with a darker X-Files vibe)
• Witchblade (the Japanese version gives us an over-the-top sexy supermom with a kid and pulls it off; the relationship between Masane and Rihoko is the best part of the series)

Labels: anime reviews, personal favs