Juuni Kokuki

Worldbuilding - "the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe." These kinds of shows are usually set in a fantasy and/or sci-fi world, and excel at establishing & showcasing the rules/history/economy of their fictional universe. List was created through collective data from multiple websites of people's answers as to what shows are considered to have great world building.

Critics & Connoisseurs was a club that was founded in 2008 and ended club activities on the 31st of 2022.

The goal of the club was to come up with a list of highly recommended quality shows that are exemplary either within its genre or universally. An anime needed a 70% approval rate in our voting to get on the relation list. The following anime are all part of said list.

You can see the club page here:
https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=2913

Anime Relation List Part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/328
Manga Relation List: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/334

Canal Sur Andalucía is a public broadcasting TV station based in Andalusia, Spain. This TV station aired different anime series in the programming block for kids known as "La Banda" or as a standalone series.

Some well known series and sequels of already listed series have been removed to fit the stack limit.

Anime set during medieval times or with a medieval feel.

Fantasy anime that are less about slaying a demon lord and more about managing a kingdom or business.

Anime either based on, heavily influenced by or drawing key aspects from folklore. Folklore encompasses the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, people or culture passed down through the generations by word of mouth and later often recorded in written form.

While the majority of works listed in this club have their origins in East Asian folklore (for obvious reasons) also included are examples of folklore ranging from portrayals of the mythology of Ancient Greece, stories featuring local spirits, legendary folk heroes, adaptions of Brothers Grimm fairy tales and narratives featuring the Gods of the Norse pantheon as characters. Modernised interpretations and retellings have been largely excluded.

As MAL currently sadly only allows a max of 50 entries on interests stacks this list prioritises the stand out and most high quality examples of folkloric anime. For a more comprehensive list which also includes manga, I direct you to my accompanying folklore club of the same name.

A collection of my favorite Isekai series.

Avoided a bit of the really obvious ones (The Big 3 and Death Note) and some that were really similar to something already present on this list. Also, enjoy your life a bit more by watching these gems.

Anime aired in Spain's TV channels (public or private), listed with the Spanish title. Might be missing some or be messy: I wanted to add the most important but also the less obvious. Excluding most sequels & movies.

IMPORTANT: Check part 1, 2, 4 and 5 + OVA.

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ES: Anime emitido en los canales públicos o privados de la televisión de España, con sus títulos en español. Pueden faltar algunos animes o estar desordenados: he querido añadir lo más importante pero también lo menos obvio. Excluyendo secuelas y películas.

IMPORTANTE: Ver parte 1, 2, 4 y 5 + OVA.

key words: canal sur, animax, k3, tve, neox, clan, tele5, jetix, buzz, boomerang, tvc, cuatro, lasexta, antena 3, cartoon network, castilla la mancha tv, televisió de catalunya, canal plus, autonómica, local, canal 9, locomotion.

part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/7348
part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/7353
part 4: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/7562
part 5: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/8140
OVA: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/8137

Every superhero has an origin story ... and so does every anime otaku. While I got exposed to anime when growing up, my own journey only really took off in the early 2000s as digital fansubs became widely available and I took full advantage of the fast (for the time) internet provided by my university accommodation.

My anime watching activity dropped off a cliff as I got older and life got in the way, but by that point I'd already lived through the first decade of the 2000s and watched quite a lot of what came out during that decade. Enough, at least, to make a decent stab at this.

This first decade of the 2000s was transformational for the anime industry, particularly with respect to accessibility to western English-speaking audiences.

Legend has it that before this period, anime fansubs used to get distributed physically via VHS tapes. It was a pain in the ass for fansubbers, distributors as well as the consumers so only the hardcore got involved. However, around the turn of the millennium, the rise of DVDs (allowing high quality rips) and faster internet (enabling tolerable download times) killed off VHS fansubs and ushered in the digisubs era. And with this dramatic lowering of the accessibility bar, fansubs exploded across the internet, bringing in a legion of new fans. (Fun fact: MAL itself came into existence during this early period of digi-fansubs.)

It's not just the illegal side of anime viewing that took off though. Kids' series like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon were great international success stories in the late 90s and early 2000s, and people realised there was an appetite for anime in western market. More shows started getting licensed, DVD sales boomed and some non-kids anime like Cowboy Bebop even got exposure on TV.

Anime production in Japan ramped up in the first half of the decade, though I'm not sure how much of this is to do with its growing following in the west given it was still dominated by the domestic market. But in the very least, success in the west was beginning to have a significant effect on anime production. One notable anime, The Big O, was allegedly made with western audiences in mind. While in Japan it flopped so badly that only half of the originally intended 26 episodes got made, its international success eventually led to the production of a second season.

As more and more anime titles became available to western English speaking audiences, the industry grew into a bubble. Companies started licensing anime almost indiscriminately and the Japanese companies demanded sky high licensing fees even for shite scraped off the bottom of the barrel that some dog did a number two in. A lot of stuff didn't sell nearly enough to make up the cost and this was exacerbated by a declining DVD market, widespread piracy and, later on, the Great Financial Crisis. Inevitably, the bubble burst in the second half of the decade: US licensors like Geneon and Central Park Media went bust, retailers like Suncoast went bankrupt, and Cartoon Network's anime-focused block Toonami got cancelled.

It's worth noting that anime wasn't the only industry in trouble: the whole bricks and mortar business was in decline, as was the DVD-driven entertainment business. And just like in other entertainment industries, the business paradigm was shifting. From the ashes of the anime crash grew shoots of new life. As the decade drew to a close, Crunchyroll (you may have heard of them), which started life in 2006 hosting user-uploaded pirated content, moved towards exclusively showing legally secured titles. The age of anime streaming had begun.

***

On the anime production side, when the decade started, I distinctly remember 26 episode was considered a standard season for TV anime, with quite a few shows going up to 52. As the decade wore on, 26 episode series became increasingly rare and anime around half that length became the norm as the shorter seasons reduce the financial impact of flops while holding the door open to extensions for successful shows. You can really feel the difference this had on the pacing: early 2000s shows with 26 episodes were generally slower with frequent episodic side stories thrown into the early stretches of the series to pad out the story and/or develop the characters.

Animation wise, digipaint became the norm in the early 2000s, replacing the old analogue method of cell animation. As with all transitions, there were some initial teething problems. For example, early digipaint anime were done in lower resolution as full HD wasn't much of a thing back then. These kinds of issues means that anime made in those early years have aged about as well as milk, and not even remastering can do much to salvage them.

While there'd been plenty of light novel anime adaptations before, the popularity of these adaptations hit new heights during this decade. This probably owes a lot to the ludicrous successes of Bakemonogatari and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Towards the end of the decade, adaptations of light novels with long titles that double as plot summaries also started taking off.

This wasn't just a good decade for light novels adaptations, but also visual novels, including eroge aka hentai games. This can be seen as part of anime's increased focus on catering to the otaku subculture. The shift in focus is also evident in trends like the rise of late night anime and, much to my dismay, the dreaded moe. It's not all bad though. In the case of late night anime, it also gave birth to Fuji TV's noitaminA block, which aimed at an atypical anime demographic and produced a string of critically acclaimed shows (spoiler: some of them are in this stack).

***

Anyway, enough rambling on anime history; now onto the stack itself! I came up with a complicated system to determine the potential candidates for this list. Those who aren't crazy enough to be interested just need to note that I consider all the entries to be at least great (9+/10 on MAL or 2.0+ on my personal scale) and that I'm only including one anime from each franchise (usually the earliest one that provides a good jumping in point). Let me also slap on the disclaimer that I haven't seen a lot of these for well over a decade, so I don't know if they all hold up. Feel free to skip the remainder of this section and go straight to the entries.

The main thing that people might find a bit odd about this stack is that it appears to contain entries prior to the 2000s as measured by the more commonly used metric of starting year. This is because I consider an anime to be from the 2000s if it aired DURING this decade. But that's not all! Things get more complicated for franchises. For these, I'm including multiple entries as a single entity if the storyline are closely connected, e.g. in the case of multiple seasons of a show. This results in the inclusion of series that, while did not air in the 2000s, are closely connected to sequels that did (I prefer this over the alternative of putting in some random middle season of a franchise which is not helpful for anyone wanting to start their exploration).

Finally, when judging whether these multi-entry entities are good enough to actually make the cut for the stack, I try to decide based on the merits of the entries that aired during the 2000s as a whole. To illustrate this with a real example, the reason why the Kara no Kyoukai movie series did not make the cut is that while they included a great movie in Paradox Spiral, I don't consider the entries released in 2000s to be great as a whole. Similarly, even though Cowboy Bebop qualified for this list due to the Knocking on Heaven's Door movie airing in 2001, the movie itself fell short of being great so the franchise didn't make the cut (though it would if I were making a 90s stack).

Confused? Good. It wouldn't be my stack if it weren't built on top of a convoluted system! But hopefully things will become clearer as add case-by-case clarification in the controversial entries themselves (disclaimer: it may lead to further confusion).

Who doesn't want a strong lead, and a female one at that? I mean, people stereotype A LOT in this day and age, so who doesn't want this type of unique character once in a while? Note: I tried to avoid shoujo romances as they are seen as common tropes, although there are some that I thought were personally good on the list.

Anime that have a female main character that is strong. This can include: strong willed, an intellectual, physically strong, magically adept or a mix of those traits. Most of the time they are portrayed as mature and respectful.

These traits makes the character(s) heads above the average female portrayal in the anime medium.

For this list, the character[s} are:
-- Strong (of course)
and
-- A Woman (adult female / mature for their age teen)
and
-- A Main Character
or
-- Not main but appears often in the anime (not a one episode cameo character)

Please let me know if there are others out there that I have yet to have the pleasure of viewing, or left out by accident.

Thanks!

Suggested by GreyStoneFlinger

Black Rock Shooter (TV)
Futari wa Precure
Otherside Picnic
Show by Rock
Belle
Princess Connect Re:Dive
Urahara

Collection of series that feature, provide commentary and explore themes heavily related to Cultural, Political, Religious, Sociological or Economic fields and the impact that those fields and processes that they contain have to the general population.

This is a part of a series of stacks that are about artistic tendencies in anime (and that border the fine line between sophisticated and pretentious).

This stack is a work in progress.

Bibliography:
Clements, Jonathan. "The Brown Screen: Trended change in Japanese animation 1966–83." Anime: A History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 154-155.
Condry, Ian. "When Anime Robots became real." The Soul of Anime. Duke University Press, 2013. 117-119, 122-127.
Hack, Brett Anthony. "Screens, Clichés, and Revolutions: Code Geass and the Mediated Imagination of Change." Anime and Social Imagination: Media Fictions in Japan’s Age of Neoliberalism. 2021. Nagoya University, PhD thesis. 160-162.

title

None of the titles in this stack take place in real locations, but they all have settings inspired by a specific Asian culture or mix of cultures.

I understand there may be titles missing from this stack. If you wish to let me know of anime I have overlooked, please explain why they belong so that I can add them.

Japan has waged countless wars within its territories and beyond her shores for thousands of years now, and in anime we can see some of the perspectives, interpretations and depictions the Japanese people have developed with regards to this topic.

In this stack list I have gathered what I consider to be the essential anime with the theme of war, whether they show it from the perspective of the soldiers who fight them or from the experience of the bystander civilians who have to endure its effects on society and the environment. War is a theme that comes up, even tangentially, in most of everything, so I can't really make a list of every good anime that has some reference to war in it, so here I tried to put shows that either have a direct focus on war as a core theme, or shows whose main focus isn't war and only have war related elements in certain limited sections, but still do provide an interesting and valuable perspective on it when the theme of war eventually comes up.

I don't necessarily agree with all of these shows' views on war (I actively disagree with some), nor do I believe every show here is good. I just think that all of these could offer interesting insight on the different perspectives about war that come up in Japanese animation. You decide which view of war you agree with the most or find most emotionally genuine and politically nuanced.

Def : Through the eyes of a woman, women are seen as people with feelings and intelligence. The focus isn't necessarily on what the eye can see but on what the heart can feel.

These are very safe for me. TW for Nana and Perfect Blue as it treats sensitive topics.
Hope you enjoy:))