The 2010s produced anime like never before.
Tales of love, magic, and betrayal flooded the airwaves on all manner of devices, reaching
all manner of people.
Here's to the best anime of the decade, and to another ten years of ice skating, ping
pong, and magical girl deconstruction.
Madoka Magica might be a franchise that spans mobile games, multiple movies, and a wealth
of spin-off manga, but its earlier success came from its economy of story.
At only 12 episodes, the original series is a succinct marvel; no plot is extraneous,
all foreshadowing pays off, and the pacing is steady and certain.
There are no skippable episodes of Madoka, no moments that don't matter.
It is a journey that has to be taken step by step, into a forest that grows steadily
darker.
Much has been made of this darkness.
And it's true that Madoka gained early fame as a deconstruction of magical girl stories,
and still stands out against a field of imitators.
But it's here too that Madoka's brevity shines, and where it can be seen with the greatest clarity.
Madoka grows from a naive young girl into a terrified pawn, but only for a couple of episodes.
It's then, in the depths of despair, that she realizes her power, seizes it, and changes
the world forever.
The momentum this creates is felt on the most visceral level, catapulting the viewer from
horror into awe within one episode.
For all the talk of deconstruction surrounding the series, at its core, Madoka is that greatest
of magical girl stories: it looks cruelty in the eye, spins its magic wand, and tells
it to take a hike.
For all its splendid animation, One Punch Man's most famous moment is probably its simplest:
This set of armor used to seal in my immeasurable, irresistible power...
...has been broken.
Ok.
We love watching Saitama him absorb punches from undersea monsters.
We love watching him take out hyper-advanced robots.
But we love his deadpan reactions to the bizarre world around him even more.
That's because it's emblematic of what makes One Punch Man so special: it absolutely loves
making fun of superheroes.
Now, One Punch Man loves superheroes, and specifically, being a superhero series.
But its love is flexible, as devoted to jaw-dropping moments of action as it is to the goofiness
of animal-themed bad guys.
You have your dudes like Genos, who genuinely looks awesome most of the time, but you also
have villains like Crablante, walking around like a lobster in tighty-whities.
There is no contradiction between the two in the world of One Punch Man, they're all
part of the same bright, bizarre tapestry.
Superpowers, robots, ninjas, mad scientists are all there to be loved, feared, and made
fun of, and in so doing, One Punch Man has more fun with them all than most other series
of its ilk combined.
Saitama is the guy of the meme, the guy of the wickedly cool fight compilations, and
the guy who loves a weekly sale at the grocery store.
He, and his anime, contain multitudes, and that's why we love them.
Describing Ping Pong: The Animation is a fool's errand, but here's what we can tell you for
sure: Ping Pong is about high school boys playing ping pong.
If you're at all interested, and maybe even if you're not, it's worth watching the 11
episodes that make up this bizarre, brilliant, bewildering gem of an anime.
Adapted from the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, Ping Pong retains its distinctively weird,
ungainly look, but that's the point: weird, wondrous experimentation.
It takes a delirious sort of delight in alienating its viewer, using everything from jarring
amounts of negative space to superimposed comic panels to keep its audience adrift in
a sea of the unexpected.
Ping Pong is about the towering possibilities of animation, the ferocious thrill of sport,
and the power of art to confuse viewers as readily as it clarifies.
It is also about ping pong.
Somehow, it makes sense, and in so doing, it triumphs.
Nerds had a good time in the 2010s.
Video games rocketed to new heights of sophistication, superheroes dominated the box office, and
everything from She-Ra to Blade Runner got a reboot.
Still, many nerds still languish on the margins as weirdos, geeks, and outcasts.
The women of Princess Jellyfish, clustered together in an all-woman boarding house for
unmarried "nuns," as they call themselves, live very much within this societal shadow.
They are awkward, obsessed with trains, utterly terrified of social situations, and more interested
in talking about Legend of the Three Kingdoms lore than dating.
When a gorgeous new neighbor upsets their lives, quickly followed by the threat of neighborhood
developers seizing their home, they find they have to change, but they have no idea how.
What makes Princess Jellyfish so special isn't how keenly it observes the lives of its shut-in
heroines, but how deeply it empathizes with them.
Sure, the series indulges in a few makeover sequences, but the makeup comes off at the
end of the day, and no one has to give up their doll collection.
These characters aren't forced into new situations because they deserve anxiety, but to show
them that they can endure it, and that they were stronger than they realized all along.
They are who they are, and that's the source of the show's humor, but it's also the heart
of the series, only grown larger by its end.
Little Witch Academia captures the magic of being a child on the edge of adulthood, in
addition to quite a bit of literal magic, with a rare and thrilling joy.
The story of an academy of girls learning the art and science of witchcraft, Little
Witch Academia never loses sight of that breathless moment when a kid realizes the world is far
stranger and more vast than they'd ever before realized, and that their role within it might
take them to places they've never even imagined.
I can be!
I will be an amazing witch through my own hard work.
This is especially remarkable when one remembers just how many elements the anime encompasses.
In just two seasons, Little Witch Academia manages to squeeze in stories about fire-breathing
dragons, competing academies, fairy laborers on strike, the ancient lineage of magic, and
literal nuclear warfare.
Taken in full, this isn't just a collection of delightful tales but a verdant garden of
story, far greater than the sum of its parts.
The world of Akko, Diana, and all their friends and teachers feels real because it is comprised
of so many different parts, appropriately, as Luna Nova is, after all, a school of magic
that brings in international students from many different walks of life.
The anime that results is an endlessly entertaining tale of youth's possibility, which might just
be the greatest magic of all.
Anime in 2010 was dominated with an endless parade of little sisters, schoolgirls, pre-teen
vampire queens, and otherwise idealized child-women.
That's the landscape that Panty and Stocking were lobbed onto like a grenade.
Here were two characters who had literally been expelled from heaven for being unladylike.
Sure, they aim to get back in, but not by changing their ways: They end the series as
lascivious and dessert-loving as they began it.
They're just planning to smash enough bad guys down on Earth that the man upstairs decides
to look the other way.
Inspired by everything from Cartoon Network's greatest '90s hits to tokusatsu tv shows,
Panty and Stocking wears its shape-shifting heart on its sleeve.
Some episodes combine the lowest lowbrow gags with genuine romance.
Demons are thwarted by a total commitment to lustful abandon.
An episode-length parody of the Transformers franchise manages to tell an actual story
about sibling rivalry.
It's a glorious, explosive mess of a series unlike anything else of its era.
Panty and Stocking are creatures of appetite and altruism in equal measure, and their anime
adores them for it.
They are, like the series itself, bizarre, crude, loud, and heartfelt, and the decade
is better off for containing them.
Kids on the Slope
Kids on the Slope was always going to be notable, even if it had ended up an utter failure.
It brought Shinichiro Watanabe, legendary anime director, and Yoko Kanno, equally legendary
composer, back together for the first time since the iconic Cowboy Bebop.
It could have used its pedigree to slack off.
It could have settled for mediocrity.
People still would have watched Kids on the Slope, probably even praised it.
It did not really have to try.
But it did.
Kids on Slope doesn't just succeed, it dazzles, and in an entirely different way than Watanabe
and Kanno's previous collaboration.
Centered around a group of teenagers living in 1966, the anime is a soulful slice of adolescent
discovery, postwar reconstruction, and the transporting power of music.
It's tempting to call the story slow, but that isn't quite right, but Kids on the Slope
is unhurried.
It's a true pleasure to lose one's self in its mists of teenage longing and jazz standards,
but when taken as a whole, what emerges is a story of uncommon emotional force.
Like the music it loves, the series wanders on its way to where it's going, losing itself
in spirals of emotion and art.
But when it gets there, the viewer realizes the journey was as important as the destination,
and all the more meaningful for its unique rhythms.
Will anything exemplify the 2010s more than the superhero?
Movies, TV, toys, video games, and of course, comic books, spent the decade in a passionate
embrace with that most 20th century of genres.
Anime is no exception; My Hero Academia is one of the 2010s' greatest success stories.
In combining superheroes with high school, it didn't just strike gold, but also made
the whole world wonder why this hadn't happened before.
Teenagers with powers, fighting evil and decorating their dorms?
It's everything anime and comic nerds ever needed.
But My Hero Academia has proven over and over again that its success goes far beyond the
chemistry of its premise.
In making its hero Deku, a boy who is never guaranteed any win, it's managed to capture
the sort of magic that defined American superhero comics' Golden Age.
Deku doesn't watch All Might videos over and over again just because they're cool, he watches
them because he loves the moment the people in crisis are told that everything will be
all right.
He rejoices when he's granted fabulous abilities, not because he can now heft a dump truck,
but because he can now become that person who takes away fear, worry, and pain.
I want to be the greatest hero, like you!
My Hero Academia is about superheroes in their purest form: people with the power to keep
others safe.
In centering that, it has become an anime that will be loved far beyond this one cape-crazy decade.
Figure skating is the sort of world that practically begs for an anime.
Sparkly costumes!
Opportunities for dramatic animation!
Attractive people thrust into highly tense situations!
Yuri on Ice had no shortage of story opportunities to pick from, and it savored each and every one.
Tears were shed, lots and lots of tears, in fact.
Emotions were expressed through axels and Salchows.
International relations were threatened by drunken faux-pas.
It was, from beginning to end, an absolute delight.
But Yuri on Ice never settled for mere spectacle.
Its moments of indulgence, extravagant routines, scantily-clad athletes, flamboyant costumes,
were all in service to the tender love story at its core.
Yuri and Victor's relationship blooms in the cracks between punishing practice and high-stakes
competition, threatened at all times by failure, skill gaps, and the inexorable march of age.
But it cannot be quashed, and indeed, by the end of the series, it has overtaken the obstacles
in its way like they weren't even there to begin with.
This is an anime about giving your life over to something and finding it never loses the
capacity to surprise you.
Sometimes you end up with a case full of awards.
Sometimes you end up in love.
Yuri on Ice is about both of these things, and all the beauty, magic, and adventure one
finds in between.
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