Top 5 anime you think are criminally underrated!
This is a really good question, and it was VERY difficult to keep myself to only 5. These are all anime that I think deserve a much wider viewership! (Plus five more!)
I ended up spending waaayyyy longer on this than I thought, I can’t imagine how much I would have written if you’d said top 10. I can literally talk about anime forever. Here’s some I wholeheartedly recommend.
1. Shojo Kageki Revue Starlight (Action, drama, romance)
This is my newest love, as of yesterday, when I binged the whole thing. The best way I can describe it is by mashing up other anime. Take Revolutionary Girl Utena, iron out about three layers of metaphor, and trim off all of the dark themes related to the Rose Bride. Then throw it in a blender with Madoka Magica and Love Live!, add half a cup of Gay Concentrate, and serve up the result: A character-driven drama about girls at a performing arts school, who settle their differences in magical-girl-fantasy duels styled as impossibly gorgeous theatrical stage-combat musical numbers. Beyond the flash and high concept, there’s a well-written cast, solid emotional core, and really engaging plot.
2. The Eccentric Family (Drama, comedy)
This show is my favorite genre of fantasy; mythical creatures living in the modern world, right under humans’ noses. In this series, humans only know tanuki as the cute little raccoon-dogs, but tanuki are really sentient shapeshifters whose goals are to outsmart the humans who live in the cities, pester the tengu who rule the heavens, live a life of freedom and trickery, and not end up on the inside of a hunter’s trap. The story follows a family of a mother and four sons whose widely-respected father was killed to end up in a human’s hot pot, as they try to enjoy their lives, live up to his imposing reputation, and unravel the increasingly suspicious circumstances of his death.
I have called this one “deceptively light-hearted” when describing it. My friend got halfway through the first season and came back to me with the verdict, “consider me fucking deceived.” This show has weight and does not pull its emotional punches, but neither does it ever stumble into becoming grimdark. Its worldbuilding is solid and the characters are all fantastically developed. Plus I wrote a whole post about one of the main antagonists(?) who I hadn’t even mentioned here.
3. Dennou Coil (Mystery, sci-fi)
Dennou Coil is a masterclass in worldbuilding, in my opinion. It’s a near-future sci-fi world, basically if Google Glass had taken off and become as common as cell phones are today. Many people don’t see the real world, they see the virtual textures of the world as they’re rendered through the glasses. Kids in one city have learned to mess around with codes, collecting tradeable fragments that break off the edges where the system glitches, chasing viruses that hide in pockets of obselete code in abandoned areas of the city where the software doesn’t get updated often. They spend their time after school saving virtual pets from being accidentally deleted by the city’s antivirus, trading tall tales about kids who get caught by the antivirus and get their glasses bricked, and spinning urban legends about ghosts waiting just behind anything that’s visibly rendered, waiting to steal kids when they least expect it. Every detail they introduce is critical to laying the foundation for the mystery that forms the show’s plot.
Everything about this world feels real in a way I’ve never seen in a sci-fi anime. It’s all grounded in a clear understanding of programming, and lives by show-don’t-tell. The stakes aren’t life-and-death; the kids tagging glitches like graffiti to distract the city’s antivirus software are only at risk of ruining their glasses, at least at first. The plot and escalation is perfectly-paced, and the mystery is so satisfying to piece together as it unfolds.
4. ID:Invaded (Sci-fi, action, thriller, murder mystery)
This show is like Psycho-Pass meets Silence of the Lambs. To catch a serial killer, you need to think like a killer, and nobody does that better than killers. A contraption called an “id well” can manifest an uncaught killer’s unconscious mind as a bizarre, unique, deadly terrain driven by stream-of-consciousness, and convicted murderers turned “detectives” dive into these wells to try to solve the mystery each well presents and discern the identity of other killers before they can strike again.
This show is a tightly-written, perfectly paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller. The two layers of mysteries inside and outside of the wells balance high-octane, big-screen action with tight, tense realism. Plus the soundtrack is an absolute banger.
5. Ping Pong the Animation (drama, sports)
Imagine if I told you that there was a show that, in 11 episodes, unpacked how patterns of relationships are repeated across generations, how the tradeoff between talent, practice, and who you are outside of your achievements can scar the spirits of kids, and what it feels like to wrestle with the tension between your core understanding of yourself and how others expect you to be. Imagine if I told you that every major character goes through massive restructurings of their fundamental sense of self and how they see others, and that every single arc comes to a well-rounded and satisfying end. Imagine if the animation style pushed the limits of both realism and absurdity, landing somewhere between rotoscoping and caricature, pushing the impact of action and stretching the character’s expressiveness without betraying faces that are animated like real human people. Imagine that it had a dub so fantastic that it sits next to Baccano and Cowboy Bebop in my mind, shows where the cast threw themselves into their roles with their whole hearts.
Now imagine that I told you that this story is told in the context of high schoolers playing ping pong, and that it’s arguably the best show I’ve ever seen. Go watch this show.
