Jun Maeda turned the visual novel game studio Key VisualArts into a synonym for true-to-life melodramas infused with a large dollop of magical realism. In Angel Beats, his latest anime series, he skips right past the realism and goes straight for the magical. Or rather, straight for the eschatological.

In the first scene, Yuzuru Otonashi wakes up in the afterlife and promptly gets killed again. He doesn't die because he's already dead. Which is a good thing, because he's fallen in with a gang of like-minded teenagers who have decided they do not want to "go gentle into that good night," and have armed themselves accordingly.

That means fighting Angel, who's gotten very good at killing them in turn (getting killed here is like a painful time-out in the penalty box). Angel's ungentle job it is to see that they do go gentle into that good night. And that means being good students instead of a bunch of delinquents.

You see, Angel is the student council president. Purgatory is a Japanese high school. And Angel has appointed herself Charon, the ferryman.

Refreshingly, these rebels really are a bunch of delinquents, and despite all the scheming by Yuri, their bad girl leader, they're not good at being bad. Otonashi admits he would have joined whatever group approached him first. All they know is the current status quo, so that is what they defend—to their repeated deaths.

Though following Jun Maeda's reliable formula, this is executed with a good deal of dark humor that at times is quite funny.

Helped along by the fact that Angel isn't a mindless antagonist, and this hapless gang—who admit they don't really know what they're rebelling against (to quote Marlon Brando: "Whaddya got?")—aren't necessarily the protagonists. Because the only true enemy is the self.

Yeah, I know, that's about as trite as truisms get, but stick with it. It pays off.

There's an element of The Matrix here. The red pill students know they're dead but alive in an unreal world, while the blue pill students remain completely oblivious. Except here Maeda fills in the gaps that The Matrix misses, by giving all parties compelling, even moral, reasons for their opposing choices.


Though in substance and message, Angel Beats! reminds me more of Haibane Renmei, Yoshitoshi ABe's subtle and sublime meditation on grace and redemption. ABe's protagonist is Rakka, who is reborn into an afterlife that resembles a semi-rural village in mid-20th century Eastern Europe.

In the pastoral world of Haibane Renmei, there is no god to rail against, no highway to heaven, no sign posts pointing the way. Their only job is to live out their afterlives in the community while "working out their salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).

While Haibane Renmei is quiet and meditative, Angel Beats! is loud and obvious. It's the garage band version, with the volume turned up to eleven. Literally, as one of the gang's tools of subversion is a student rock band that stages illegal concerts to distract Angel's minions during their ammo resupply raids.


Angel Beats! also has a distinctly Buddhist slant. ABe created a purposely Catholic version of purgatory for Haibane Renmei. In Angel Beats! Christian salvation isn't in the cards. Whether you move onto the next world is purely a product of self-realization or satori, and only you can hold yourself back.

On this score, Joseph Smith would agree.

For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us; and in this awful state we shall not dare to look up to our God; and we would fain be glad if we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from his presence (Alma 12:14).

Everybody in this purgatory is terrified of resurrecting the memories of who they were before they died, and instead are obsessed with what could have been versus what actually was. As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." So the dead stay dead until they face that examination directly.

Still, it wouldn't hurt if someone could figure out these eschatalogical truths first and then point the way to everybody else. Eventually joining forces, that is what Angel and Otonashi end up striving to do, until the only job left to them is to save themselves.

Related posts

The catechism of Angel Beats!
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry
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Angel Beats! (Crunchyroll)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, fantasy, haibane, jun maeda, lds, religion, shinto, your name

Tracing the provenance of an anime title can get tricky at times. Anime titles often originate in manga and light novels, though sometimes the anime comes first and the manga follows. A third important source is the visual novel.

In the U.S., the visual—or interactive—novel is the medium of the future, and always will be. But it's been well-established in Japan for twenty years (there's a lot of cultural information in that fact that deserved a Ph.D. dissertation). One of the big players in visual novels is Key VisualArts.

Co-founder and scenario writer Jun Maeda is largely responsible for Key's first three titles, Kanon, Air, and Clannad, which established Key's own sub-genre of magical realism fused with operatic melodrama.


Kanon and Clannad (that's the two-part anime series, not the New Age Irish band, though they're not bad either) are two of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers in any medium. Hope Chapman does a good job analyzing how  Jun Maeda pulls it off in "Why Clannad Made You Cry."


The paradoxical reason, Chapman points out, is not because "life sucks and then you die." Even done well, that approach is only depressing and ultimately silly and self-indulgent.

If a likable character dies in a story, that's sad. If a likable character dies and their loved ones suffer for it, that's sadder. If a likable character dies, their loved ones suffer for it, and then they get killed in a freak accident right after a messenger runs up to tell them that their family dog has also kicked the bucket, you've started spinning a bad comedy routine.

Rather, the exact opposite. "Make 'Em Laugh," as Donald O'Connor argued. And so, "For every five minutes of weepiness in Clannad, there's at least twenty minutes of comedy (and that's a conservative estimate)."

This joy—far more than suffering (Tolstoy was largely wrong on this point)—draws us into the lives of the characters and builds the expectation that more good things can and ought to keep on happening.

Just as importantly, though, when the good things stop happening, they can't stop happening forever or we're right back to nihilism. As Chapman puts it, with Maeda, "Karma Always Comes Through." The scales of justice balance, even if it takes a bit of magical realism to make it work.

Maeda uses magic to express his own feelings about the unfairness of reality, by "breaking" it just enough to give his characters what they've earned. If tragedy is usually absurdly unfair, why can't triumph come from equally absurd fairness?

C.S. Lewis noted the ("educated") human propensity to infuse more "authenticity" in the negative than the positive, even when the one is no more factually substantive than the other. And when it is that essential faith in the "happy ending" that accounts for the human will to exist in the first place.

The joy of the happy ending, or more correctly of the "good catastrophe," the sudden joyous turn (for there is no true end to any fairy tale)—this joy, which is one of the things that fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist." It does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure, but it denies universal final defeat, and thus is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy.

Tolkien's word for this was eucatastrophe, "the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom." Like Lewis, Tolkien applied it not only to fiction but to theology.

The universality of the eucatastrophe has fashioned it into a framework on which solid storytelling can be constructed. It shows up across the spectrum of style and genre, from thoroughly westernized fairy tales like Disney's excellent Tangled to anime like Scrapped Princess and Madoka Magica.


The pervasiveness of the form and the formula is easily criticized as "convention." But the key word in the "same only different" is the "same." That sameness exists for a reason: ignoring convention is a good way to create uniquely bad art.

His respect for, and mastery of, the formula is what makes Jun Maeda a storyteller whose work always deserves a second look.

Related posts

Angel Beats!
Clannad
Kanon

Labels: anime, jun maeda, light novel, movies, personal favs, pop culture, religion, social studies, television, thinking about writing, writing

As Kate recently pointed out, a fictional narrative must have structural integrity in order for the reader to buy into the twists and turns wrought by the author's manipulating hand. This structural integrity matters more than real-world facts. A good example is the "cozy" mystery genre:

Despite their illusory nature, Agatha Christie's carefully planned murders work as stories. The murder plan is the structure upon which each narrative is organized. That structure keeps it from running off into digressive pointlessness and gives the narrative a sense of "reality" even when it isn't much.

Likewise, the high school setting lays down "specific restrictions and expectations"--about what everybody is doing there; why they have to be there--that don't have to be explained. As long the reader accepts those assumptions, the verisimilitude of the setting is practically assured.

This structure becomes problematic when those assumptions strain the suspension of disbelief--as in ageless vampires perpetually hanging out in small town high schools (sounds like purgatory)--or don't quite span the cultural divide.

Imagine a Japanese audience trying to deconstruct the American legal system by watching American cop shows (and then watching Japanese cop shows that try to copy the "look and feel" of Hollywood cop shows). That pretty much sums up the problem of figuring out what's "real" about Japanese secondary education from anime and manga.

As with shows like Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, NCIS and the CSI franchise, Japanese television takes often a barely plausible bundle of facts and situations and expands them into whole genres. What bundles of facts and situations can be quite revealing about the social tensions behind them.

Here are a few examples from Japanese dramas with high school settings.

1. Class

A popular subgenre of teen romantic comedies has a poor student winning a scholarship to an exclusive high school populated by rich snobs (as in Scent of a Woman), and wins the heart of BMOC. The Story of Tarô Yamada cleverly turns this formula upside down: the poor girl falls for the young prince, who turns out to be even poorer than she is.

These rich kids invariably live in gigantic mansions (with butlers and maids) that don't exist anywhere in Japan. Okay, I'm sure there are mansions in Japan, and perhaps some of them have butlers and maids. But I'd expect most mansions, like the most exclusive, private schools, to be managed extremely conservatively.

The flip side of this genre has a rich kid (or teacher) ending up at a reform school at the bottom end of the scale, no more realistically depicted (i.e., in apocalyptic terms) than the exclusive schools at the top of the scale.

The anime version of Gokusen, for example, is about as "realistic" as the genre and plot will allow (it's one of my favorites). But the television version was broadcast from never-never land, West Side Story meets The Road Warrior. It was hugely popular in Japan; I found it too excruciatingly awful to watch.

2. Freedom

I suspect many of these fantasies are shaped by Hollywood's version of the American high school, which, as Peter Payne observes, strikes the average Japanese teenagers as a libertarian wonderland. School rules (kôsoku) govern every aspect of a student's life, in and out of school. Compared to Japan, America truly is the "land of the free."

Most Japanese kids growing up today won't get a driver's license until their late twenties, if then.

There are trade-offs, to be sure. Drug use isn't widespread. The teenage pregnancy rate is close to zero. But bullying (ijime) is a chronic problem. Teachers just putting in the time aren't unheard of either. Which is why a good student who wants to get into a good university will spend hours every day at a cram school, no matter how smart he is.

3. English & Exams

Like Korea and China, in Japan entrance exams are the sole means of determining matriculation at the high school and college levels. Thanks to the mantra that English is a necessity in today's global economy, English shows up big time on those examinations. The problem is that "natural, living English has no place on a Japanese-style test."

The test-based "escalator" system and exams that have little to do with the real world make true study abroad impossible. Spending that much time outside the "system" without falling off the escalator is a sure sign of privilege, extraordinary intelligence, or indifference.

On Japanese television dramas, you know a character is super-smart (well-traveled and effortlessly bilingual) when someone says, "He attended Harvard."

There's a funny twist on this in Strawberry Marshmallow, in which a blonde, blue-eyed girl from England who's grown up in Japan can't speak English any better than her classmates and desperately tries to hide that fact.

4. Switching schools

One plot device that is plausible in Japan but not in the U.S. has the father getting transferred, the mother going with him, and the student staying behind to house-sit and attend school. Parents who have gotten their child into a decent school dare not risk pulling him out. High schools often take borders for this reason, another well-used trope.

This makes the "transfer student," meaning a student who has switched schools mid-term, very exotic and laden with all kinds of mysterious subtext.

Although the vast majority of teenagers attend school, mandatory education ends with junior high. Students can drop out or parents can pull their children out of school without legal consequences. We get a two-for in Cat Street. Keito is both a child star and a hikikomori, who at seventeen is socially maladjusted and barely literate.

It's a cautionary tale and a not implausible one. On the brighter side, off the top of my head, Strawberry Marshmallow (elementary school) and the first half of Clannad accurately depict student life and school government, as does Kanon, despite the fantasy elements. And the anime version of Gokusen isn't entirely divorced from reality.

Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, jun maeda, television

Clannad (reviewed here) by itself is pretty good. Together with After Story, the writer/director team of Fumihiko Shimo and Tatsuya Ishiyara, together with Key Visual Arts and Kyoto Animation, have again (as they did with Kanon) produced a real work of art.

Granted, tastes differ. You've got to like big-eyed moe. You've got to like melodrama. Let me rephrase that: you've got to like MELODRAMA. And the shameless yanking of heartstrings. A healthy toleration for an interminably ailing heroine also helps (paging Dr. House).

But beneath the super-cute surface and emotional manipulation (though it's so transparent it's not) shines a compelling story with keen insight into the human comedy.

While Clannad labors mightily to tell everybody's backstory (remaining true to its interactive, "visual novel" roots) and gets a bit lost in the weeds at times, After Story eventually pushes all the supporting characters to the side and focuses on Tomoya and Nagisa.

The story begins on a light note, wrapping up the loose ends as high school graduation nears. The next several episodes comprise a straightforward depiction of the bright kid who's blown his chance at college getting his act together and landing a job in the trades as an electrician.

(The favorable depiction of the trades in popular entertainment is an unfortunate rarity outside "reality" or DIY-type shows like American Chopper and This Old House.)

From there we move into family drama territory, with Tomoya and Nagisa getting married and moving into their lower-middle-class digs. Then things turn dark, and a pair of achingly tragic story arcs follow--hardly surprising given all the foreshadowing, but still terribly wrenching.

I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's advice to writers: "No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them--in order that the reader may see what they are made of." And so Tomoya is plunged into the refiner's fire.

I mentioned previously that I missed Fuko after her storyline is apparently resolved in Clannad. As with Kanon, this first and rather odd foray into magical realism turns out to define the narrative for the rest of the series. Fuko's reappearance signals that reality is not all it seems.

The haunting and poetic "lonely robot" sequences that begin in Clannad are finally given purpose and knit together. As with Kanon, the ending clarifies the substance and structure of the middle. What was simple and obvious at first turns out to be considerably more complex.

Shimo and Ishiyara never point a finger at it. As with Kanon, it's up to us to get the subtext. Nagisa articulates the theme early on, but it's easily dismissed as glib philosophizing. By the end of the combined 48-episode series, Shimo and Ishiyara have given that glibness heart and soul.

Call it the Heisenberg principle of dramatic development: the universe evolves to meet our expectations of it. Tomoya's self-involved despair is not an independent variable. Rather, the way he sees the world orders (and disorders) the world. After Story turns this idea into an existential reality.

Rest assured that things do end happily, and the drama is leavened by quite funny comic relief. We're taken through a gauntlet to get there, though.

After Story concludes with a pair of "alternate world" episodes that posit two different "what if" beginnings to the series. Neither equals the alternate world episode at the end of Clannad, which could stand on its own as a brilliant short film. They do qualify as pretty good Jack Weyland material.

And then the series ends a second time. The first "ending" left me a tad dissatisfied. The second ties up the frayed threads and pays off completely, impressing me at just how good melodrama can be when skillful hands know how to give the transcendent its moment on the stage.

Related posts

Dying for art
Clannad
Kanon

Labels: anime reviews, jun maeda, kyoani, magic, personal favs

The interminably hospitalized or ailing characters in Air, Clannad and Kanon (both of which have two) remind me of the dying heroines in operas like La Boheme, who manage to expire while everybody's singing up a storm. "Mimi! Mimi!"

The "dying kid" theme shows up a lot in Japanese melodrama. A large part of it is dramatic convenience, but there's actually a medical reason behind it. Despite having the world's longest lifespans and some of the most modern medical technology in the world, Japan does very few cadaverous organ transplants.

Most transplants are live-donor organs such as kidneys, and weighted for population, Japan does less than a tenth as many as the U.S. Only eleven heart transplants were performed in 2008. This has led to "organ transplant tourism," such as the three yakuza lieutenants and a yakuza oyabun who received liver transplants at UCLA.

EU countries have long complained about this, and only U.S. hospitals still place Japanese nationals on heart transplant lists. Cadaverous organ transplantation was formally legalized in 1997. A bill passed the Lower House in June 2009 intended to bring Japan's medical ethics laws into line with World Health Organization guidelines.

This doesn't really "solve" the problem, as the definitions of "brain death" and the legal concept of "consent" remain far from settled in the public mind. As the Mainichi Shimbun opined about the bill:

It doesn't appear that thorough deliberation of the various proposals has taken place, nor does it seem that Diet members and the public have reached a real understanding of the issues.

What makes this all the more interesting is that abortion is legal in Japan and is little debated. Japan is one of the few developed countries besides the U.S. that has a death penalty and regularly uses it. It is also little debated.

When it comes to surveys showing how "atheistic" Japanese are, it should be remembered that a belief in a Judeo-Christian deity says little about people's beliefs when it comes to life-and-death matters such as transplantation and cancer. Japanese doctors still regularly (as high as 70 percent) hide diagnoses of cancer from patients.

They do so even in the face of studies showing that the decision to conceal the "true diagnosis was not related to the presence of psychiatric disorders in Japanese cancer patients" (informed patients had a lower rate). Doctors are acting upon religious and cultural beliefs, not science.

I believe that at the heart of the matter is the firm hold Buddhism still maintains over all aspects of funerary culture in Japan, including Obon, the second most important holiday after New Year's. (On the other hand, faux Christian marriage ceremonies have become more popular than the traditional Shinto rites.)

In fact, after I wrote the above paragraph, the aforementioned bill passed the Upper House (13 July 2009). This is a "sea change," explains Mari Yamaguchi of the AP, "because of Buddhist beliefs [that] consider the body sacred and reject its desecration."

So the languishing patient remains a very believable possibility in Japanese melodrama. Another good example is My Hime, in which Mai's little brother languishes away for the entire series before going to the U.S. for a heart transplant in the happy ending.

Labels: anime, buddhism, health care, japan, jun maeda, politics, religion, shinto, yakuza

Like space opera and romance, the "harem" anime genre is easy to make snooty fun of because most of it is so bad. Sometimes on purpose, often unintentionally. But just because the bulge of the bell curve ranks high on the kitsch index doesn't mean there's nothing on the "amazing" meter a few standard deviations out.

At one end of the harem spectrum, for example, is Elfen Lied, a blood-spattered S/F horror series. And at the other is one of the most poignant romances—and most complex psychological dramas—I've ever seen, with a demanding, multi-layered narrative structure that indeed deserves to be described as "literary": Kanon.

The story has a long and twisted pedigree (though not that uncommon in anime), having originated as an "adult" video game in 1999 (a "visual novel," for which there is no counterpart in the U.S. gaming market), then a G-rated version, and consequently as a light novel series, a manga series, a drama CD, and two anime series.

But it was the latest—2006—version produced by the innovative Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo (who penned three episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), that molded it into an authentic work of art. Voice actor Tomokazu Sugita also deserves a lion's share of the credit.

Sugita is probably better known as Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the straight man to the frenetic Haruhi, the grounded center of whatever maelstrom she's cooking up next.

Haruhi's world is so unhinged that it's all Kyon can do to keep it from flying apart. In the process, though, we don't have many opportunities to invest ourselves deeply in the fate of the characters themselves. As in any madcap sitcom, we always expect some crazy rabbit to get pulled out of the hat by the time the credits roll.

That's a good part of the fun, but at the end of the fourteen-episode run, it seems more that the writers wrote themselves into one too many corners than the story came to a carefully scripted conclusion. Like a Mobius strip, you could feed the last episode into the first one and start the whole thing all over again.

I highly recommend the series for its quirky exuberance, Sugita's straight-man performance, the dance number in the opening credits, and because its general craziness inspires equally inventive fan analyses. The individual parts aren't only greater than the whole, they're often downright brilliant.

Kanon, though, exists as a completely realized artistic effort from beginning to end, where the characters are so changed in the process that there is no going back. It may not seem that way at first, as Yuichi's unflappability comes across as too nonchalant, given the quirky, illogical nature of the events around him.

But this is on purpose. Nothing in Kanon happens for lack of a better idea at the time.

As the story begins, Yuichi Aizawa (Sugita) has moved to snowy Hokkaido to live with his aunt and niece while he finishes his senior year in high school. He initially comes across as an unusually normal teenager, more a counterpart to John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything than the typical teen romantic lead from anime-land.

Unlike the neurotic, clinically introverted, "lesser male" harem protagonist, Yuichi has reasonable good sense of himself, is prone to reflection rather than panic, and doesn't turn into a tongue-tied imbecile around girls. He's pretty much a rock, if a slightly cynical one, a more extroverted and involved "Kyon."

To be sure, few teenage boys of any stripe are that calm, cool and collected. The neurotic "lesser male" of harem comedies is probably closer to reality. But as Ron Rosenbaum quips in Slate, "I hate characters I can identify with. I read to escape myself; I'm tired of my identity."

However, it does turn out that Yuichi has one thing very wrong with him: he's forgotten practically everything about the last time he lived there. Still, he treats this massive case of amnesia with suspiciously good cheer as he becomes reacquainted with a half-dozen girls who know him for important reasons he can't remember.

The series proceeds with a series of interlocking stories about how each of their screwed up lives (varying from "somewhat" to "a lot") relate to Yuichi. Little by little these experiences pry open the lid of his memories and the tragic truth we suspect lies at the heart of it. And the brilliant gem of hope that resides there also.

Uniting these stories is the series-long arc about the mysterious Ayu Tsukimiya—who runs through the closing credits wearing a knapsack sporting a pair of wings. She shows up at first as comic relief, but as the other variables fall away she moves closer to the center of the story, just as Yuichi moves closer to the truth about himself.

To be sure, a staple of the Hollywood melodrama, from Rebel without a Cause to Ordinary People to Good Will Hunting is the angst-ridden young man with the troubled past who works through his "issues," usually with the help of empathetic shrink and a faithful girlfriend.

Not to denigrate the genre (I liked the aforementioned movies), but it's awfully solipsistic stuff, all about how tough it is being me and how much I deserve to be loved because nothing bad that ever happened to me is really my fault. As the credits roll, we cheer the resurrection of the protagonist's self-esteem.

There's not a shrink to be found anywhere in Kanon, which argues instead that the one effective way to work through your "issues" is to do good by others. I know, even writing that it sounds saccharine. This is where Fumihiko Shimo's script and Tomokazu Sugita's performance carry the day.

Like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House, Yuichi doesn't run around doing good because he's a selfless altruist brimming over with charity for his fellow (wo)man. Rather, like House, he's drawn to the people he ends up helping out of curiosity about their plights and about his own curious mental state. And does more good as a result.

"Well, this is an interesting development," you can all but hear him thinking. So when the ninety and nine finally band together to care for the one, it comes across as authentic. In fact, the whole series could be read as an argument for why, in the final episodes, a bunch of teenagers should act so selflessly.

Kanon ultimately only makes sense after you've seen it. The pieces won't fall together until they're all there. Along the way, it can be treated as fantasy, magical realism, or straight psychological drama. In comparative terms, Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys springs to mind, as does The Sixth Sense.

Like The Sixth Sense, Fumihiko Shimo relies on the viewer jumping to the wrong conclusions. Still, he tips his hand early on with an updated version of "The Fox Wife," a classic Japanese fairy tale. This story-in-a-story creates the lens through which the rest of the series should be viewed.

If you would forgive the spoiler, what we have been watching all along are the stories Yuichi told Ayu while she was in a coma at the hospital. Except that, aside from one key scene, the points at which the surreal invades the real aren't clearly delineated, and that's fine with me. As Fox Mulder would put it, I want to believe.

Storytellers who build castles in the air and then preen as they shoot them down annoy me. If the castle's floating in the air, I know it's a castle in the air. As a case in point, does Mai possess healing powers, or is that a literary device too? Or another story-in-a-story? Hey, stop overthinking everything!

There's no overthinking the message of Kanon, though. Contrary to the assurances of the pop psychoanalytic culture, a true understanding of the self comes not from discovering your inner whatever, but from looking outwards at the rest of the world and examining why it is there and what it has to say and dealing with it.

Related posts

Dying for art
Clannad
Clannad: After Story

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, jun maeda, kyoani, magic, magical girl, personal favs, romance

Sorted alphabetically and not a definitive list. I'm referring only to series and movies that fit into the arc of the series.

• 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)
• Clannad (another fine addition to Kyoto Animation's line of game-based Y/A psychological melodrama; should be watched along with Clannad: After Story)
  
• 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)
• 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) and Second Raid.
  
• Gankutsuou (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; best cyberpunk series ever, worth watching for the Tachikoma segments alone)
• 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)

Why some series didn't make the cut.

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Labels: anime reviews, haibane, hellsing, jun maeda, personal favs, robots