If you liked 5 or more anime TV series in a given year and still think that year was a bad year for anime then you are probably watching too much anime.
Here’s my five:
Durarara!! – despite a second half with a serious writing problem, this was a great mix of offbeat urban fantasy and energetic animation.
Kuragehime – Takahiro Omori’s second show of the year might be even better than his work on Durarara!!, and displays the diversity of his talents with this josei comedy.
STAR DRIVER – finds the common threads in magical girl and mecha shows and sews them together in a slick looking package.
Panty & Stocking w/ Garterbelt – Imaishi steamrolling chumps. If you don’t like this, then maybe cartoons aren’t for you.
Tatami Galaxy – Clever fleshing out of novel into a jigsaw puzzle of a cartoon from Masaaki Yuasa.
I shall write about these at length on a later date. Well, apart from Durarara!! as I’ve done that already. Really should have had something up for Tatami Galaxy already but got distracted by Red Dead Redemption and then Fallout New Vegas. Shame on me.
Honourable Mentions
Giant Killing – the strengths of the manga shine through DEEN’s perfunctory animation and some serious mangling of foreign languages.
HEROMAN – Great looking animation and concept hampered by pacing problems.
Hetalia World Series – The gay innuendo is becoming an obvious crutch now, but when it sticks to historical comedy its great.
Gag Manga Biyori + – No one’s translating, but looks like its keeping the high standards set in the first three series.
Squid Girl – bursts of Tsutomu Mizushima brilliance show up (spot the obligatory Sam Raimi shots in episode 1), but it’s a little too safe and the characters too bland for my tastes.
There’s a bunch of other shows that might be just as good as the ones I’ve mentioned that I’ve not seen due to either time or waiting for the DVDs. And there’s a load I’ve seen a couple of episodes of that were mediocre to terrible, and they don’t deserve a mention. Or were so odd they might get a post of their own in the future.
The original novel of Tatami Galaxy isn’t a light novel, but a literary novel. It’s published in a different system, following different conventions. Not that there’s anything inherently superior about the lit novel system.
That’s what comes of writing posts half asleep at 6am!