I took some time recently to look at my favorite anime and suss out a top 20. Always an enjoyable exercise. Also included some brief comments on each one, for anyone who’s curious about that sort of thing.
Lists Are Fun to Make: Top 20 Anime
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Tag Archives: Akagi
noitminA Has Nothing on the Nihon TV Tuesday 24:50 Slot
One of the fruits of digging into the adaptations of manga produced in 2011 has been a treasure trove of TV anime ratings data. Which, in turn, holds heaping helpings of unrelated but utterly fascinating information.
My favorite tidbit so far? Timeslots that get designated to run a certain kind of show are much more prevalent than I, at least, had thought. People may deify noitaminA for its stellar pre-Fractale record, but if you want to talk anime-focused timeslots with godly 7-year runs, there’s at least one very prominent contender. The Nihon TV 24:50 timeslot (plus/minus 10 minutes, depending on the quarter) hosted the following shows from 2000 to 2011:
Show Title (Airdates) (Ratings for First Episode)
Hidamari no Ki (2000-04) (3.2)
Hajime no Ippo (2000-10) (4.8)
Tenchi Muyo GXP (2002-04) (4.3)
Hanada Shounen-shi (2002-10) (3.1)
Air Master (2003-04) (4.4)
Captain Harlock [TV Airing of Endless Odyssey OVA] (2003-10) (3.4)
Gokusen (2004-01) (3.8)
Monster (2004-04) (3.2)
Akagi (2005-10) (2.4)
Ouran High School Host Club (2006-04) (2.1)
Death Note (2006-10) (3.4)
Buzzer Beater (2007-07) (2.5)
Kaiji (2007-10) (3.2)
Real Drive (2008-04) (2.0)
One Outs (2008-10) (2.5)
Souten Kouro (2009-04) (2.6)
Kimi ni Todoke (2009-10) (2.8)
Rainbow (2010-04) (2.2)
Kimi ni Todoke [cut reair] (2010-10) (2.1)
Kimi ni Todoke Season 2 (2011-01) (2.1)
Kaiji Season 2 (2011-04) (2.3)
Chihayafuru (2011-10) (2.4)
Note in particular the period from 2004 to 2011. That’s some serious all-around ass-kicking, a double whammy of ratings that aren’t bad (especially for 12:50 in the morning) and maximal critic-pleasing potential. By all accounts, this timeslot is currently plugged; Chihayafuru’s second season aired at 25:59, and I can’t find anything currently airing in it. But still, phenomenal run. I guess I’m adding timeslots to the list of industry-related things that really ought to be looked into.
Edit: Corrected the title to reflect the actual day of the timeslot.
Manga Chapter of the Week: Diamond is not Crash Chapter 30 (Let’s Go Out for Italian, Part 3)
I’m a sucker for a good cooking manga. I’m even more a sucker for it when it’s pulled out of nowhere in a superpowered battle series and yet feels totally welcome. It’s why Toriko is so balls-on amazing under normal circumstances. And why it’s so lackluster now, when nary a character has had their muscles restored by a delicious cake in over half a year. So I’ve been satisfying my hunger* with a number of manga, most notably the raws of an almost-finished Akagi and the charmingly-amateurish classic Duwang scans of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. This week’s featured chapter comes from the latter, not for the unintentional comedy, but because this spaghetti looks really, really good:
Animetics Podcast: Kickstarting Anime and Speculation
In the long-delayed second episode, we talk about Kickstarter. More specifically, we start by discussing anime and manga it’s funded already, and use what numbers we have (mainly myanimelist statistics) to wildly speculate on what else might be a viable candidate for a Time of Eve-style international BD release.
Show Length: 59:40
(Timestamps for each segment in parentheses)
Kick Heart (1:01)
http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/animation/most-funded?ref=more#p1
http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2013/05/27/video-latest-kick-heart-anime-trailer
Time of Eve (4:07)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/693293489/time-of-eve-the-movie-on-blu-ray/posts
Kickstarting Manga (6:20)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kansaiclub/limited-edition-translation-of-osamu-tezukas-the-c
Other anime realistically kickstartable (7:29)
-Refer to list after break for data
The “Almost Certainly Would Get Funded” Group (9:02)
The “Maybe But Maybe Not” Group (21:48)
The “Probably Not Actually Happening” Group (44:00)
Anime Sols and the viability of other sites to crowdfund anime (52:14)
http://animesols.com/series?search%5Bmeta_sort%5D=popularity.desc
Lists Are Fun to Make: Favorite Anime Episodes by Title
Full Disclosure: I like making lists. This particular list is the result of an afternoon of me sitting down and trying to list all the anime episode titles I remember. This correlates pretty well with my actual favorite anime episodes, because I’ve seen most of them enough times to remember their titles. When making this one, I set myself a limit at 60 and reached it fairly quickly. After making the list, I actually ranked them. So yeah, had a lot of fun with this one.
Introducing Unnecessary Terminology: Pacing and Energy Level
Arata Kangatari’s 7th episode was delayed this week thanks to a pan-Asian Table Tennis tournament, so I was going to write a post celebrating rapid-fire tennis comedy Teekyu. But a certain phrase kept popping up in that post, so I thought I’d address that first. And really, I’ve tossed around the terms “fast pacing” and “high energy” a whole awful lot over the past couple of months. I think it’s only fair I define both terms, since I’ll be using them a lot in the months to come.
Final Review: Ten – Tenna Toori no Kaidanji (10/10)
Ten-Tenna Toori no Kaidanji (hereafter referred to as Ten) is a manga that ran in Monthly Kindai Mahjong for a 14-year period from 1989 to 2002, and the work that catapulted the award-winning mangaka Nobuyuki Fukumoto into the Japanese spotlight. Though it is less well-known in western circles than the author’s other works (Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji, Akagi), it is by no means an inferior product. Indeed, it is in many ways his best work, a sublime combination of the author’s trademark gritty, greasy yakuza storylines with dynamic storyboarding and a quasi-religious journey through the author’s philosophy on life.
Animetics 