I feel like the article is extremely subjective, so I figured it’d be more fun to post your own top 10 good/bads.
I’ll start with mine.
- Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle
- Dark Gathering
- Ya Boy Kongming!
- Great Pretender
- Summertime Rendering
- Miss Shachiku and the Little Baby Ghost
- Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater
- Uncle from Another World
- Digimon Adventures (2020)
- Muteking the Dancing Hero
I tried thinking of anime that I’d suggest to friends who are already fairly active watchers, but for some reason or another had them slip through the cracks.
I tried to split my list genres so there’d be a bit of everything, but I definitely agree with most of yours. My only gripe is trigun.
I understand how they took the source material and completely warped it to attempt to fit a new story and give it a whole new life of its own, and minute to minute the show is fine, it’s when you look at the whole story being told at once that things start falling apart and giant plot holes start showing up. Particularly in the first half of the season. The makers wanted a spectacle more than anything else and they delivered on that.
I haven’t read the manga, which my understanding is what the reboot was following. I watched it now out of curiosity, due to the original anime being one of my main gateways to anime as a whole.
If I hadn’t seen the original multiple times, I probably would have been lost at multiple points in the reboot. Characters seemed to pop up out of nowhere for unknown reasons.
My girlfriend had never seen the original, and she originally wasn’t paying attention as I watched this on my own, but after a few episodes she got pulled into it as well, so it seemed to make enough sense to someone unfamiliar that they’d at least be curious.
I enjoyed it mainly because it got me to think so many new things about one of my early favorite anime universes. It filled in a few gaps I had, such as I liked how we got to spend more time with Project Seeds and learned more about the Plants species and Knives’ overall goals.
It made my list because it exceeded my expectations as I was not looking forward to CGI animation and I was concerned about them “ruining” the story I had in my head, but the animation was beautiful, VA was great, and I think about the universe of the story more than I have in years.
It’s totally subjective what anyone else will take away, but everything else on the list I went into blind, with no expectations. Trigun I came into very biased due to my love for the original, and expected eww to meh, but as a whole, it gave me a great time.
It definitely set out and met what it was attempting to do. I can’t fault it for that. Watching it one episode spaced a week apart it is a glorious reboot. They definitely did more work on the world building aspects. It feels much more like a place that is alive more than the original which was more or less just barren wastes unless plot device.