#smokeleaf

this year what I took notice of the most were uncompromisingly ambitious series that care very little for the opinions of haters. I couldn’t come up with an order for them, so pick your own on your scorecards at home.  - qb

Hulaing Babies

Five minute anime about a Hula club that nobody watched except me, blurry kaleidoscopic fountain of pastels and homestarrunner-esque morphing at bizarre angles and judiciously excessive mouth flapping, outrageously blunt visual metaphors for emotions and a finale where everyone floats into the sky with no logical justification needed or wanted. 

I learned absolutely nothing about hula or okinawa or dancing but I loved every second.

GRANBELM (while it was airing) 

Ultimately forgettable, but a fun cross-genre experiment that was very enjoyable to unpack week by week, takes a blender to normally very structured genres for better and worse. It’s obviously obsessed with both mecha and magical girl and sincerely rams the gundam and the madoka tropes together until it appears they are kissing and one of the arms has flown off. In retrospect, it was completely impossible to predict because it seemed to rewrite its lore every week and may have been making it up as it went along. I had a completely different idea of where the show was going nearly every week, so that was pretty exciting for me. I still can’t believe that the main character was actually a magical girl tulpa who had an arc where she dealt with the existential problem of not being real. All of these questionable ingredients were surprisingly hella fun to watch while GRANBELM was airing, and reacting to this bizarre roller coaster week by week through all its twists and turns was probably my favorite discrete experience this year, even though the show itself probably doesn’t hold up. But that’s okay too, it’s alright to forget things sometimes.

I just wish I could remember the name of this girl with the pink hair and the dumb face from all my screenshots? I could have sworn she was important.

KoP:SSS / Pri⭐Chan S2 

Pretty rhythm has had a really excellent year and its dumb to lump these together but I’ll do it anyway. You can’t stop me from putting this on here

Pretty Rhythm had an amazing year with the first English license in its history, Pri⭐Chan threw off the yoke of the last season’s tendency to play it safe and got immediately weird as balls. Nijinosaki Daia is a brilliant character and is essentially Jem but good. 

The franchise has always blatantly reused remixed components like plot themes, entire characters, and full cg sequences, and Pri⭐Chan has lightest version of this, by simply copy and pasting characters from other series and having them exist with a barely different last name and an identical design and voice actress. 

However, King of Prism: Shiny Seven Stars is the ultimate, nauseatingly over the top version, imagining a disembodied council of identifiable veteran voice actors that control the idols, and by extension the pretty rhythm universe, inadvisably connecting every franchise (and some shows that aren’t even in the franchise) in a veritable corkboard of meta-cosmic nonsense that made even dedicated fans throw up their hands and go along for the ride.

Fruits Basket (2019)

The Fruits Basket 2019 reboot was a solid and consistent fixture of my year, as a diehard fan of the manga it’s simultaneously the uncompromised vision of the author and the transformative modern take I didn't know I wanted. I don’t have a lot else to say about it, Fruits Basket is one of the best shoujo ever written if not the best one, and this is a best case scenario for an adaptation. Highly recommend watching this if you’re an old fan since middle school or even if you’ve never seen it before. Second season comes out at some point in 2020. https://vanilla-blessing.tumblr.com/post/184168814234/why-you-should-check-out-that-fruits-basket-reboot

Kemurikusa

 lol they called an anime smokeleaf 

In the wake of Kemono Friends 2 being a shallow cash grab from a company that decided slaughtering their golden goose and burning the corpse was a good idea, Kemurikusa is that goose rising from the ashes like the powerful phoenix to create another awkward but weirdly competent CG anime that’s oddly endearing despite resembling nothing else in the current anime industry. It writes a lot of lore checks in the first 10 episodes and actually nails the ending without overexplaining or getting lost in the weeds of its sometimes convoluted lore. RINA GANG https://vanilla-blessing.tumblr.com/post/184018114459/why-you-should-check-out-kemurikusa

Honorable mention to: Kappa

This was a great year for cryptids, especially Kappa, between Cure Cryptid-hunter hikaru hoshina repping all UMA’s, Kappard reclaiming his less handsome brother Pissard’s naming scheme and becoming the fan favorite bad guy of Star Twinkle Precure, and Everything in Sarazanmai, 2019 was the year that brought Kappa back, unless you would argue that they never left. It’s hard to tell with yokai. Also Mob Psycho 100 s2 was the most technically impressive anime i’ve ever seen in my life but I felt it was more important to honor this caboose.

Sweet Bitterness