My Top 17 Anime of the 20tens

The sheer volume of Anime I’ve seen favors the last decade, about half of everything I’ve completed.  Probably a natural result of that it was within this last decade I started watching Anime full time.  Still my absolute favourites lists tend to favor stuff at least a little older, but that’s subject to change, I think in the future I may start considering more 2010s Anime to be 3x3 worthy once they’ve stood the test of time.  And that is all the more reason why making a list of just this decade can be useful.

I’m deciding to do this list of the decade as beginning with 2010 and ending with 2019, like most decade lists.  I am however one of those nerds who thinks Decades should perhaps properly be defined as beginning with 1 and ending with a 0,.and that's why about a year from now I may make an updated version of this list that is for that Decade.  The slight shift in which 10 years are eligible might not be the only reason it’d be different, my mind could change on especially Anime of the last couple years in that time, and simply what I’ve seen may increase, there are still some key shows of the Decade I haven’t seen yet.

The list may sometimes be arbitrary in terms of when an entire franchise is one entry and when I’m just counting a specific installment.  But there are reasons.  If so far pretty much all of that franchise’s Anime incarnation is within said Decade that helps it count as one entry.  But also whether or not the franchise is an anthology by nature matters.

I don't usually like to do Honorable Mentions.  But for this I feel the need to include Sword Art Online and Attack On Titan.  I can’t call them personal favorites but their status as two of the big mainstream Anime of the decade has made them in different ways important to my Anime journey and I’ve gained plenty of enjoyment from both.

17: SSSS.Gridman

A masterful homage to Power Rangers style shows.  And perhaps has some of the best villains of the decade.

16: YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at The Bound of This World

An interesting historically significant Anime.  Aired in the last year of this decade and indeed seems like a product of its trends, but is really an adaptation of the first truly ambitious Visual novel from 1996.

15: In Another World With My Smartphone

I still feel compelled to include this one, it’s what got me hooked on Isekai and still the best approach to Polygamy I've seen in Anime so far.

14: Engaged to The Unidentified

This show is what got me into Slice of Life/Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

13: Yuru Yuri

For this decade my favorite Slice of Life/Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show.

12: Yuki Yuna Is A Hero

This will always remain a favorite of mine, it's played a key role in how I went from just casually interested in the Magical Girl genre to it being perhaps my favorite Genre.

Movies interlude Pokemon:  I like the XY and Z movies, have very mixed feelings on I Choose You and love Power Of Us.  Haven’t seen Evolution yet.

11: Citrus

Still my favorite Yuri of the decade, I don't care if you find that offensive.

10: Symphogear

Watch it

9: Sailor Moon Crystal

Yes, I went from being pretty hard on Crystal at first to now seeing it’s true value.  Just watch the Viz Dub so you know you’re getting the BluRay rips.  I’m including all three seasons here.

8: No Game No Life

For now I’m going to rank this as the top Isekai Anime.

Movies interlude PreCure:  All but the first of the PreCure crossover movies are in this decade.  I think the best of them are still the earliest ones.

7: Hugtto Pretty Cure

This is the best PreCure of the Decade.

6: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Usually I’m not likely to actually rank Madoka as the top Magical Girl anime of the era it started.  But for a list like this cultural influence should be factored in.  And my mind does constantly shift on how to rank Magical Girl Warrior shows.

5: Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.

This is right up there with Utena as the most important Feminist Anime.

Movie interlude final:  Three of the movies from my movies 3x3 are from this decade.  But they are also all capstones on series from the prior Decade.  K-On’s movie, the Gundam 00 movie and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.

4: A Silent Voice

The only proper entry a movie has on this list.  I saw it finally in the last few months and the only reason it isn’t on my movie 3x3 yet is because I haven’t updated it and can’t decide what to kick off.

3: Steins;Gate

This is probably my favorite strictly SciFi Anime, and perhaps my favorite piece of Time Travel based SciFi in any medium.

2: UFO Table Fate/ Anime.

It’s hard for me to choose between Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works.  The former is what I recommend as the ideal normie entry point to the franchise, but it’s precisely because I’m already an Anime person that the latter often satisfies me more.  The second Heaven’s Feel movie also did not disappoint.

1:  A Certain Scientific Railgun S.

I only watched any of Raildex pretty recently, but this show has quickly climbed it’s way to the top in my reverence.  I already made a few blog posts about it in 2019.  And Railgun S is definitely the height of that franchise so far.

I'm going to try watching Cutey Honey Flash

Cutey Honey is one of those franchises I know a lot about even though I haven't actually watched much of it yet.  I just over the last 24 hours watched the Sentai Dub of Cutey Honey Universe and that is the first Cutey Honey Anime I've completed.  I once a long time ago temporarily owned the New Cutey Honey DVD but watched only the first episode where my mind perhaps read too much into some parallels to The Dark Knight.

Cutey Honey Flash aired right after the 90s Sailor Moon Anime finished, taking over it's time-slot and involving a lot of the same creative staff.  It is known for being much more Shoujo in style and presentation then the franchise usually is, because Toei wanted it to fill the shoes of Sailor Moon.

It's not a highly regarded entry in the franchise from what I've seen. I think that's partly because the very demographic they were trying to appeal to with this change in approach instead felt insulted.  Lots of women liked Cutey Honey already as she was, so it felt kind of sexist to assume you'd have to turn it into Sailor Moon season 6 to appeal to young women.

Ironically it just may be the people most inclined to like this the best of any Cutey Honey show are people like me, Cis-Het Men who are tired of patriarchal assumptions about what does and doesn't appeal to the male demographic.  I'm tired of the assumption that a female Superhero needs to be constantly objectified in order for us to be interested, and that we're only minimally interested in romantic melodrama.  I am interested in the basic premise of Cutey Honey but would like a version where she isn't constantly ogled and groped.  And the very things a lot of women are tired of being told they're supposed to be into are things I'm tired of being told I'm not allowed to be into.

My main concern as of not actually starting the show yet is the apparent insertion of a Tuxedo Mask clone.  Honey already had love interests (both male and female) they could focus on.  I like Tuxedo Mask, but his clones in a lot of other Magical Girl shows I feel often seem to be missing the point of his character.  However this issue has not yet been enough to completely break my enjoyment of one.

The thing about certain of these 90s and early 2000s Magical Girl shows being made to capitalize on the success of Sailor Moon is that they actually have some of the same key creative minds behind them as the 90s Sailor Moon Anime.

The main writer of Cutey Honey Flash, Ryota Yamaguchi, was also the head writer of Sailor Stars.  The Series Director of CHF had previously been an Episode Director on Stars, and the Series Director of Stars (who also worked on prior seasons even going back to Goldfish Warning!) was an Episode Director on CHF.  CHF also had four other Episode Directors who'd been directing Sailor Moon episodes, one of them being the director of the S and SuperS movies.  We see a similar phenomena with the Assistant Directors.

To get the common Visual Aesthetic connection we could also mention Yoshiyuki Shikano, Miho Shimogasa, Shigetaka Kiyoyama, Katsumi Tamegai, Kenichi Tajiri, Hidekazu Nakanishi, Hashimoto Kazuyuki, Taniguchi Junichi and I'm sure more. (Masahiro Ando contributed to the movie at least.)

However not all of Cutey Honey F's former Sailor Moon staff were ones who's most notable contributions were arguably to the last two seasons.  Katsuyuki Sumisawa had been a Sailor Moon writer for the first three seasons then left to be the lead writer on Gundam Wing, but then he returned to Toei for CHF.  Some of his Sailor Moon episodes are personal favorites of mine, for example he did a number of the Ikuhara directed episodes including the Lesbian Animators episode from the Nephrite arc and the episode that introduced HaruMi.  He also wrote the two parter once known in English as Birthday Blues, which were episodes I greatly enjoyed.  He also wrote a couple key episodes of the Doom Tree Saga and it's Minako and Rei spotlight/attack upgrade episodes.  And in the future he will be the lead writer of the first 26 episodes of Corrector Yui, another show I've been meaning to watch but keep putting off.

Some people make it sound like Flash has the least Yuri appeal of any version of Cutey Honey.  But one of those was a person who also seemed to think Universe was lacking in Yuri so that I can't take seriously.  I don't want to get my hopes up going in, but given Sumisawa's involvement in some of Sailor Moon's Yuri highlights, and how much Gundam Wing appeals to Yaoi fans, I would not be suprised if Flash has some queer subtext most people are overlooking.

There is one Cutey Honey Flash writer who is more notable for what they've done since then what they did before, and that is it seems also the only Woman on the writing staff.  Reiko Yoshida would go on to write much of the Maria-Sama Anime, Girls Und Panzer, Romeo x Julliet, High School Fleet, and she's on the staff of the newest Pokémon series interestingly.  But most important of all she's the writer of almost everything directed by Naoko Yamada, they seem to be a pretty good team.

Update November 2024: However as far as the continuity of the Magical Girl genre goes, it is notable that Reiko Yoshida wrote the original Manga for Tokyo Mew Mew.

The writer of Noir

I've been becoming one of those who thinks that for both American movies and Anime we perhaps sometimes give directors too much credit (or blame) and the writers not enough credit (or blame).  And I have brought this subject up before, but I figure the best way to properly introduce this idea to my blog would be by looking at the writer of my absolute favorite Anime, Noir.

Noir is a good example for this subject not just because it's my personal favorite of an entire medium.  You see while I like every aspect of Noir considering how it was handled perfect for what Noir is, I would have guessed even before checking the credits that the writing is the chief thing that sets it significantly apart from other Bee Train shows.  And the credits verified that, it has the same director as several other Bee Train shows, and Yuki Kajiura does the music for most of them, but this is the only Bee Train show written by Ryoe Tsukimura.

And Tsukimura is the only writer, a lot of other shows I've looked at there is usually one writer who does the most but still some separate writers for individual episodes.  But as far as ANN is aware Tsukimura single handedly scripted all 26 episodes and has the Original Concept credit, and his name is on the Copyright.

Looking at his other work, of what I've seen already it's all stuff I also like, but mostly not stuff I would have guessed had the same writer.  He was the head writer for Tenchi Universe (and worked on two other Tenchi projects), and while I'd observed before it kind of being similar to Noir in how it is structured as a 26 episode show, the nature and genre of the story in question is different.  Tenchi and El-Hazard get dramatic but they also have a lot of Otaku style humor that is absent from Noir.

What does perhaps anticipate the nature of Noir more is that he scripted 6 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Two of them are two of the key Juri and Shiori episodes, (their Black Rose episode and the first Ruka episode).  What perhaps shows the level of trust he had was that he's the only person besides Utena's head writer (who may be the subject of a future post) to write any of the final Apocalypse Arc, the two prater about the final Duel with Touga.

So in the future I want to watch some of his stuff I haven't seen yet.  Perhaps UFO Princess Valkyrie would be a good introduction for me to the Magical Girlfriend genre.

Update:  Well before that I decided to watch one mid 90s Hentai OVA he's credited as writing.  And there is a character in it who is absolutely the prototype of Shaoli from episodes 15 and 16 of Noir.

2022 Update: If you do want to learn more about Noir's Director check out this cool video from Trixie The Golden Witch called The Anime Director I Admire The Most.

November 2025 Update: I'm disappointed to have learned about a Blog Ryoe wrote in 2022 where he expresses that not intend the main relationship of Noir to be read romantically blaming that on the director and saying the last episodes was greatly changed from his script.

The Doom Tree Saga and the Magical Girl Warrior Genre

Earlier this year I had my somewhat chaotic post about my mind changing on the issue of comparing the Sailor Moon 90s Anime to the Manga/Crystal.  I have now come to a somewhat more coherent conclusion.

The core overall story is always more solid in the Manga/Crystal, there is a lot less (in the writing) to nitpick and some of the emotions simply land much better.  That said a lot of the "filler" you only get in the 90s Anime is still vital to why I'm a Sailor Moon fan in the first place and is material I still treasure to this day.

Sailor Moon is the founding franchise of an entire Sub-genre, the Magical Girl Warrior (Mahou Shoujo before Codename Sailor V were not warriors).  Like a lot of franchises that started genres it doesn't always fit what is expected of said genre a generation later.  Sailor Moon never feels like a Deconstruction of what the genre it created became the way some works do.  All of what I consider the core elements of the Genre are in early Sailor Moon somewhere when you combine the Manga and the 90s Anime.  But some of them are not a part of Sailor Moon as consistently as they are future examples of the genre.

That creates a scenario where something that is pure "filler" in the context of Sailor Moon could become important to the genre as whole.  And I think that is exactly the case with the Doom Tree or Makai Tree arc which spans the first 13 episodes of Sailor Moon R.

This Arc is pure Filler, it's based on nothing in the Manga and what makes it arguably not skip-able in the context of the 90s Anime version of the story could have easily been solved by a single episode.

However as an installment of the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre, it is the beginning of the redeeming of the villains being an important part of the formula.  With Sailor Moon that was never really a thing in the Manga.  And earlier in the Anime there was a redemption of sorts for Nephrite but that wasn't in any way prompted by any actions of the actual Magical Girls, it just sorta happened.

This would not be the last time Sailor Moon did it, we see something similar in the R movie and it would be done selectively with villains of the Black Moon Clan and the Death Busters.  It is mainly in Sailor Stars where Sailor Moon really starts seeming like the rest of the genre in this regard.  But we have no way of calculating how dependent these later developments were on the existence of the Doom Tree Saga.

Outside of Sailor Moon this was becoming standard for the Genre as early as Wedding Peach in 1995, the Makai Tree saga aired on Japanese television in the Spring of 1993.  And the future lead writer and co-creator of Wedding Peach wrote 3 episodes of the Doom Tree saga.

So never underestimate the value of good filler.

The Gospel According to the East

In the mid 90s Shoujo Magical Girl Warrior Anime Wedding Peach in almost every episode the title character in her proto Team Rocket Motto style speech expressing her disapproval of the monster of the week's actions declares "I will NOT forgive you".  However by the end of the episode that is proven wrong, she is actually very forgiving, even the main big bad is redeemed in the end.  And in at least one episode this alleged refusal to forgive is contradicted within seconds of proclaiming it.

The God of The Bible never expresses a refusal to forgive nearly that unambiguous, but I do think it's a good analogy for how to look at the many passages of The Bible that make people think of Yahuah as some angry God of vengeance.  The passages that make critics of my soterology think Jesus clearly isn't going to save everyone even though several key passages of Scripture clearly say He will.  Yes when He's angry He sounds like no one has ever been angrier at anyone then He is at His children.  But as Psalms 30 and 103 say His anger only lasts for a moment.

This is no where near the only time Anime speaks to my view of The Gospel and God's True Nature.  It shows up elsewhere in the Magical Girl genre like Daybreak Illusion which I talked about in early June, it's in Nausicaa of The Valley of The Wind and SSSS.Gridman and in a post I made about Higurashi.

Soterology isn't the only area where I feel Western Christianity has been corrupted by 15 centuries of mixing with Platonic Philosophy and Roman legalism.  But to critics of what I believe, me unapologetically saying I see the True Biblical Gospel more in the fiction of Japanese Pagans then American Evangleicalism seemingly proves their point.

I also have posts dedicated to proving Universal Salvation isn't Pagan, at least it's not compatible with true Ancient Paganism, (I won't speculate on how Universalist modern Wiccans, Druids, Odnists and Kemites are).  True Ancient Paganism was if anything the opposite, no one is saved, there is no hope of escape from Hades/Sheol.

And actual traditional Shinto mythology is no different, (remember even in Japan Anime is a niche interest).  Izanami and Izanagi are eternally separated with her forever trapped in Yomi.  Otaku Media and also some Shoujo media seem to be the product of a deliberate rebellion against that pessimistic theology even when seemingly working within it.

David Bently Hart in his recent interview with Peter Hiett talks about how a lot of classical Greek plays like Antigone are about a character offering themselves as a willing sacrifice for the good of the community.  He sees the Passion narrative as being like that at first, but the Gospel is the subversion, God rejects the Sacrifice by Resurrecting the Victim.  And that too reminds me of what separates a lot of my favorite Anime from most Western Superhero media.

"Where there is death there will always be Death" is a quote from Men In Black 3.  Everyone knew someone had to die in Avengers Endgame, that they couldn't just undo the Snap without any Sacrifice, I love the film even though I was hoping they'd subvert that and was disappointed when I knew they wouldn't.  The Last Jedi would have actually subverted my expectations if they didn't kill anyone.

But in Anime this is rejected often.  In Magical Girl Anime like Prisma Illya where she is constantly told she can't save both and constantly says NO to that.  As well as in Digibro's Otaku Hero's Journey premise where saying they will fix the world without anyone needing to die is a vital element.  In Steins;Gate the show seemed to be based on saying they can't save both Mayuri and Kurisu and so the character often jokingly called Cristina willingly sacrifices herself, and if it were a normal American show it'd have ended with episode 22, but it didn't.

I'm not saying Western Media never does that, but it's less common and far more likely to be criticized, unless it's Christian media doing it for an explicitly Gospel related reason.  Just imagine what a review of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe would be like from a critic who didn't know it was a Christian allegory? Aslan's Resurrection would have been labeled a cowardly copout since there were no "consequences".

So the question is, why?  If it's not natural for Paganism to be like this, yet these writers are non Christians often explicitly drawing on Shintoism in these stories.  And according to mainstream history Japan's first and still primary contact with Christianity was via Tridentine Catholicsm.  Why does this one particular subculture keep unintentionally echoing the Gospel?

It could be the same way certain Greek Pagan writings were selectively useful to Paul in places like Acts 17 (Peter Hiett's Acts 17 sermon is pretty good).  That could be the main primary reason and the rest of this post just my wild speculation.

Or maybe it has something to do with the controversial theory that "Nestorian" Christians came to Japan in the 5th-9th Centuries?

The history of the Nestorian schism is more complicated then most Calcedonians and Miaphysites want to make it sound.  It ultimately had little to do with Nesotrius and it was mainly made unfixable by Jusitnian's obsession with condemning Theodore of Mopsuesta, who taught Universal Salvation just as unambiguously as Gregory of Nysaa, but did so from a hyper Literalist rather then Origenist view of Scripture.  Isaac of Nineveh and the Book of the Bee show that this branch of Christianity was where Universal Salvation thrived during the Dark Ages of the Churches West of the Euphrates.

There is no controversy in saying that the Nestorian Church had a strong presence in China during the 7th and 8th Centuries because of the Xi'an Stele, 635 is when they were officially recognized, they likely had presence in the country decades before then.  It is also well known that during the Asuka, Nara and early Heian periods Japan had a lot of contact and cultural exchange with China, for example this is when Buddhism came to Japan (594 is when Empress Suiko and Prince Shotoku issued the Flourishing Three Treasures Edit) as well as the Tanabata festival.  And Christians have a commission to bring the Gospel to the Ends of the Earth, Nippon was as far as they knew the Eastern End.

I don't want to say anything too definitive on any of the specifics of this theory.  It often gets wrapped up in Lost Tribes theories which I'm far more hesitant to endorse.

But I notice that these theories often involve claiming certain figures traditionally viewed as Buddhist to have been actually Nestorians.  The Xi'an Stele used Buddhist imagery like the Lotus Flower, showing these Chinese Nestorians were just as okay with drawing on the local secular philosophies as the Greek Churches were (I do not think all Christian use of Greek Philosophy is bad, I just really dislike Plato and Augustine).  Both religions had a monastic tradition and both claimed to offer "Enlightenment" in some sense.  So I could see reactionary Shinto traditionalists distrustful of any foreign Chinese influence not bothering to distinguish between them.

So is it possible these tendencies of Anime I like are echos of the Gospel of Theodore of Mopsuesta?  I would need a lot more links in the chain to make that argument solid, but it's an idea rolling around in my head.

The Good Gods of Otaku Media are often Goddesses.  That could just be a reflection of Amaterasu as the usual chief Kami in Shintoism.  But I have also argued on my blogs for there being a Feminine side to the God of Abraham.

YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world.

I spent about half of this year following this show's Simuldub as it aired and didn't learn till it was over that it was based on a Visual Novel from 1996.

It seems like such a product of different trends of this Decade but it's actually something that predates every Anime it reminds me of, from the Time Loop adventures like Stiens;Gate and Higurashi to all the Haremy Isekai.

Apparently in Japan it was a big deal at the time.  But no one in the West cared about Visual Novels till a decade later so it didn't get localized, and then countless Visual Novels that were inspired by it directly or indirectly got TV Anime Adaptations first.  This was apparently the first Visual Novel with an ambitious story-line.

It did get a like 4 episode OVA in 1998, which will probably be as hard for me to find as Pretty Sammy was.  Hopefully FUNimation will decide to Dub those with this cast as like a Bonus for the Home Video release or something.

I think it's largely the visual style of Anime of this show that helps prevent people guessing how old it's source material is.   As an Anime it looks exactly as modern as the shows it aired against.

For all the ways it seems to fit in with modern trends it's also distinct.  Characters actually do have sex for example.

I saw so many people writing it off, but really this is perhaps the most important Anime of the year.

Update: I decided to document on Twitter my experience with the OVA.
https://twitter.com/JaredMithrandir/status/1196223242085777415

The Legend of Zelda Mangas need more attention.

Finally, it's been a few years since I successfully did a decent Zelda post for Zelda Month.

Did you know that Zelda is the only major Nintendo property without any Anime?  Mario's had a few Pokemon's is well known and Kirby had a uniquely popular one and even Fire Emblem got a surprisingly decent 90s OVA that was even Dubbed.  It shouldn't be hard to make a good Zelda Anime, just adapt one of the many Zelda Manga and entrust it to the same people who adapt Pokemon, or perhaps Slime Incarnation.

Legally speaking the only Zelda Manga that are available in English are the Nintendo Power Link to the Past Manga by Shoutarou Ishinomori that was done like a western comic, and the many Akira Himekawa Manga.  But unofficially others can be found translated, I've read the fascinating Yuu Mishouzaki adaptation of the original game and the start of it's Adventure of Link sequel.

The Zelda Universe Youteube Channel has a motion comic of the Link's Awakening Manga, and I think they intend to do one for the Link to The Past Manga from the same author, Ataru Cagiva, eventually.  Gaijilionaire has done a series of videos where he reads the Ranmaru Mangas for the original and Adventure of Link.

I'm clearly more interested in seeing fleshed out adaptations of the classic 2D games, the fully 3D ones are like CG cartoons already.

There are a number of interesting ways that these Manga have anticipated things the games did later.  Including having characters play the Navi role, having Zelda fire the upgraded Arrows at Ganon during the final battle, and Link's dark world form being a wolf rather then a rabbit.  The character of Roam kind of anticipated the Rito, particularly as they are in BOTW.

The tendency to treat Zelda as the real Messiah figure even though Link is the action hero is anticipated as well.  Which is one of my favorite things about the franchise.

I'm not sure which would be my first pick to make into an Anime.

The Nintendo Power one would be interesting to see done as a Western Cartoon since it was in a western style, but I haven't liked any Western Fantasy cartoons in awhile so I don't know who to trust there. 

The Akira Himekawa ones are the most popular, and Ganty/Ganti would make a great modern Anime Waifu.