I’m following Anime and quickly commenting them on Twitter. Anime in Japan are divided in the four seasons, each season corresponding to about 12 (weekly) episodes. Most anime are usually made of 12 or 24 episodes in total. The great thing is there are no “vacations”, so you get stuff to watch along the whole year with no summer or winter or spring breaks. There are about 10-30 brand new series every season. No scarcity of great stuff then.

So in the last year and half I tried at least to watch the very first episode of every new series. It’s fun and I got to sample some absurd stuff across all kind of genres. Anime can be quite versatile.

Making a list of the good stuff takes too much time because I can enjoy the most disparate things for a number of different reasons, so I’ll point just two that maybe aren’t even the best, but that are unique in their own way.

Arakawa Under the Bridge

Nino is just a too wonderful character and I’m in love with everything SHAFT (the animation studio) does. This is filled with quirky, bizzarre humor in a way that only Japanese can achieve. Completely batshit crazy with a wonderful direction and SHAFT-typical outrageous experimental stuff. Everything is excellent here, art, voices and songs.

Get it here: http://mudabone-subs.blogspot.com/search/label/Arakawa
(and make sure to switch to Nutbladder subs)

Kimi ni Todoke

This is instead school romance. But done in a way that makes it excellent and not trite. If you still have an heart somewhere you should watch this. It is also somewhat subversive in the way very typical situations are developed. It is made of win. Excellently done. Great characters. Also unbelievably immune to drama.

A batch is here (24 episodes total, for now): http://eclipse.speedsubs.org/projects/todoke