It’s as if you are there in the audience watching this, being asked to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. Instead of cutting away to flashy animation of the story, the show sticks with the performer on stage, carefully performing the act. The show gives its characters time to perform elaborate rakugo. It’s a heartbreaking but beautifully told story made better through great performances and animation. It quickly delves into his past, revealing how Kikuhiko came to the craft, and how it ultimately led to the tragic death of his best friend and rival. The anime follows the life of the fictional famous rakugo performer Kikuhiko, beginning in the 1970s when he is an old man taking on a former prisoner as an apprentice. Rakugo is Japanese performance art in which a person presents a story while sitting alone on a stage, only using a fan and piece of cloth as props. It’s sad, sometimes dark, and often life affirming.ĭrama: Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (13 episodes) It is a stressful show, purposefully so, where characters are pushed to emotional extreme, and then get judged by how they react. The show explores human nature, particularly what it means to be human, through the transient soils. Yes, the bar is purgatory, and it’s the bartender’s job to judge where the souls should go. In order to remember the bartender has them play a game against each other. Patrons don’t remember how they arrived, or often other aspects of their life. Set in a bar, each episode explores the lives of the two new guests. Instead, the show asks, if you could go back and change someone else’s life for the better, would you? And exactly how do you do that when you are an elementary school kid? Death Parade (12 episodes) Unlike other “redo part of your life stories,” Satoru doesn’t intend to improve his own life. After his mother is murdered, he finds himself sent back to his childhood, where he has to unravel how his mother’s murder in the future is connected to the disappearance of children from his hometown. His time warp is triggered when a life-threatening situation happens nearby, sending him back just far enough to save whoever would be killed. Satoru can travel back in time, but has no control over how or when it activates. They don’t come with a lot of baggage in terms of length or requiring a literacy in the medium to enjoy. So, I’m recommending some newer shows (compared to the classics loved by relapsed fans) as entry points for newcomers.
The one remaining barrier of entry, in some cases, is the understanding of Japanese culture, or at least the anime medium, its history, and its tropes. And the quality of shows, in terms of both animation and storytelling, is arguably greater than it has ever been. Today, it’s far more accessible, with a number of different streaming services like Crunchyroll and Hulu offering new episodes within a day of it airing in Japan. These days, a program spans 12 or 13 episodes.įor Westerners, the form used to be limited, requiring access to expensive VHS tapes and DVDs. Modern anime is known for shows like Naruto and One Piece, which span hundreds of episodes. Creators tap into a smorgasbord of genres from slapstick comedy to political thriller, from murder mystery to family sitcom. There’s something for everybody within the form. It’s not unlike how “comics” is often used as a shorthand for DC / Marvel superhero comics, rather than a rich collection of styles, ideas, and stories.
Top anime 2017 shows full#
But unfortunately, anime is often presented as a genre in and of itself, instead of a medium full of a number of different genres. To paraphrase the original Crunchyroll fan: anime contains multitudes. For others, anime is the avatar image of a Twitter troll. For some people it’s gritty cerebral action movies, like Ghost in the Shell and Akira. It’s Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and the collected works of Studio Ghibli. Anime has many meanings, depending on who you are.Īnime is lazy childhood afternoons watching Dragonball Z, or getting up early before school to watch Pokémon.
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