After a pair of years that saw the world trapped in pandemic-driven stasis, I suppose it’s only fitting that 2022 would rally back as an Everything Happens So Much sort of year. That’s fine by me though; it’s been a tough run through these last few winters, and where I once would have felt anxious about how everything inevitably changes, I’m starting to think it might not be so awful. Twitter might now be ruled by an idiot child king, but I’m also feeling more invigorated about anime viewing than I have in years, so hey; you take the good with the bad.

Over the past several years, it has become increasingly clear that the anime industry is in a… well, I suppose “death spiral” might be overselling it, but obviously not a healthy place. Limited animators and studios are being stretched over far too many productions, foreign talent is being brought in without undergoing the training necessary to work in professional animation pipelines, and the twin forces of domestic media mix commerce and overseas franchise worship delirium ensure that even if a show is successfully produced, odds are it won’t be particularly interesting. Anime is becoming an increasingly unfriendly place for the kind of unique, creator-driven stories that tend to inspire me.

“Alright, great, I can always count on you for cynicism about art and culture, but didn’t you say something about being invigorated in your anime viewing?” Sorry, yes, I got away from myself a bit there. I include all this doomsaying preamble merely to say that while I understand the industry’s situation isn’t great, my own year in anime has been littered with reasons to hope. I’ve leapt backwards across anime history, and discovered that the early shows of Miyazaki and Takahata are just as enchanting as their film work (to say nothing of the fantastic early Toei Doga films). I’ve rediscovered the unique joy of group watching, and have munched through hundreds of episodes with my housemates cheering beside me. Hell, I’ve even watched some currently airing anime; this year lacked a “this is what I watch anime for” production on the level of Heike Monogatari, but it’s made up for that with an altogether wider spread of commendable shows, alongside One Piece’s preposterously consistent adaptation of its most ambitious arc so far.

After years of necessarily treating airing anime as a professional responsibility, I’ve now spent enough time working on independent, temporally unbounded projects to once again embrace it as comfort food. The metamorphosis into a starry-eyed, shonen-loving youth that was commenced by One Piece has been fulfilled by Boruto, which comes very close to what Naruto would be like if I wrote it: a much greater focus on domestic life and character interiority, an understanding of aging and consequence, and a tightening of the combat focus into fewer but better-executed action scenes. My house cheers whenever Team Girl Squad gets an episode, boos whenever those goddamn moon people show up, and regather without fail for the next day’s set of ninja adventures.

I’ve also been improving my mood lately by working to get out of my own head, and into the heads of thirty or forty fictional characters. Near the end of last summer, I finally took the reins of my first D&D campaign as dungeon master, and have been feverishly writing conflicts and characters ever since. Getting back to creative writing has felt like rediscovering an essential part of myself, while the unflinching metric of “are my players engaged or not” provides the interaction fiction equivalent of an open mic night, with new concepts dying or taking flight in real time within days of me conceiving them. I’ve always been a bit of a performer, a bit of a storyteller, and a bit of a game design enthusiast, and it’s a remarkable feeling to see all those passions rewarded with excitement from my players about what happens next, and when they’ll see their favorite characters again. I actually just concluded my campaign’s first act in December, and was rewarded with the indescribable feeling of being asked “can we just hang around and talk to the characters for a while longer?”

So yes, things are going pretty well at the moment. My professional status is as tenuous as you’d expect for a freelance media critic, but my subscribers have been steering me towards projects ranging from the cozy to the profound, and I’ve been having a great time with all of them. I’ve been doing my best to buckle down and reward that trust with more consistently ambitious posts, and I think it’s going well so far – I’m quite happy with my recent work on Chainsaw Man, Outer Wilds, and Girls’ Last Tour, and am looking forward to sharing more in that line with all of you. As with my dungeon mastering duties, there’s just nothing that compares to creating work that you’re proud of, and seeing that work genuinely appreciated.

Oh right, the year in anime! I almost forgot that this is technically some sort of end-of-year list, and thus I should probably run down some shows or whatnot. As with last year, restricting my selections just to anime from 2022 would present a totally inaccurate portrait of what actually inspired me this year, and I’ll instead be celebrating anything I happened to discover this year. Without further ado, here’s my Top Anime of 2022!

One Piece

Look, sometimes you just so happen to catch up on a beloved decades-long story just as it’s reaching its most ambitious climax so far, at the same time that its adaptation quality is soaring into the stratosphere, while perhaps the greatest breakout director of the next five years is simultaneously using that adaptation as their proving ground. My serendipitous journey through One Piece continued to reap absurd riches this year; Toei’s adaptation is offering spectacles you couldn’t possibly imagine out of a continuous weekly production, while Oda’s latest chapters are exhibiting all the joy and creativity of the manga’s early years. And then there’s Megumi Ishitani’s #1015, which easily counts as my favorite single episode of the year, and casually synthesizes a thousand episodes of baggage and passion into one anthemic cry for freedom. Ishitani is going to rock the world when she gets her own production; for now, I’m happy to enjoy her One Piece mini-masterpieces.

Naruto (Well, The Good Bits)

It only felt right to follow up my house’s journey through Bleach and One Piece with a stop at that third titan of ‘00s anime, Naruto. What we discovered upon this rewatch was to some extent disappointing: I remembered Naruto being poorly written, and indeed Naruto is poorly written, suffering from paper-thin characters and frequently clumsy plotting. However, while Kishimoto’s storytelling abilities are nothing special, the actual Naruto adaptation is littered with gems, ranging from the masterful episode depicting Shikamaru’s grief (Shippuden #82) to Norio Matsumoto’s transcendent Pain episode. Additionally, Naruto’s tie-in films offer plenty of their own rewards, like the somber, decidedly un-Naruto-like Blood Prison. And having trudged through the tedious excesses of Naruto’s final act, my house was furthermore greeted with a shocking realization: Naruto’s successor Boruto actually corrects nearly all the mistakes of its predecessor, boasting a charming and ever-developing cast, surprisingly thoughtful takes on family and inheritance, and consistently impressive action animation. The franchise has grown up alongside its cast, and these days I find myself welcoming each return to the new and improved Konoha Village.

The Orbital Children

Fifteen years after Dennou Coil, Mitsuo Iso returns to us with a fresh meditation on technologically augmented living. To be honest, I was at first a little surprised by how straightforward The Orbital Children is; Iso mentioned he was inspired to create it after watching Gravity, but I still wasn’t expecting “it’s basically Gravity with a rambunctious crew of adolescents.” But Orbital Children’s obvious thriller shell belies its quiet excellence, the confidence of form extending from its convincing near-future reality, to its delicate, personality-rich animation, to the nested thematic cohesiveness of its musings on AI and humanity escaping their cradle. Iso successfully packages both the hope and existential terror of humanity’s stretch towards the cosmos in a film intended to inspire the next generation, girding its technological optimism with just the right dash of intimate humanism. I’m not sure livestreaming can save the world, but Iso has me willing to give it a chance.

The Girl From The Other Side

Adapting Nagabe’s manga, with its abstract, delicate art and meditative, decidedly payoff-unfriendly pacing, could only have worked as a true labor of love, and the beauty of the resulting production emphatically attests to that. Through its shifting character designs, watercolor-evoking composition, and splashes of texture-rich painted fantasies, The Girl From The Other Side successfully conjures the sensation of a living picture book, one of those treasured stories you love precisely because they are so inexplicable, so haunted, so careless in their narrative conflation of brightest light and darkest darkness. The story of a young girl from the Inside and a shadowed man from the Outside needs no further explanation; stripped of greater context, their story feels primal and eternal, while the threats of this fallen world feel all the more ominous for their lack of explication. The Girl From The Other Side threads the difficult needle of conveying true horror in animation, and yet that’s somehow the least of its accomplishments. Like the great folk tales it harkens to, the series finds joy and sorrow inextricable, the world beautiful because it is ephemeral.

Chainsaw Man

I’m frankly still not sold on the art design style chosen for the Chainsaw Man adaptation. I feel like “Fujimoto loves movies, so we’re framing it like a Hollywood thriller” is a wildly simplistic interpretation of the material, and the production is already demonstrating the limits of applying this style to a tightly scheduled seasonal production. Yet in spite of all that, it is also clear beyond question that this team is genuinely dedicated to their vision, and doing everything possible to articulate what is genuinely, laudably filmic about Chainsaw Man: its prioritization of idle moments and tiny expression shifts, its lack of regard for gamified storytelling, and its willingness to genuinely hurt the audience. Chainsaw Man is a passion project built off the one in a thousand source material actually worthy of that passion, and in the face of laborious yet retrospectively essential additions like Aki conducting his morning routine, questions of whether this is the “ideal” adaptation seem like nitpicks. This is a very good Chainsaw Man, and Chainsaw Man is very good.

On-Gaku: Our Sound

As the engines driving anime production direct more and more of the medium’s output into cross-media branding opportunities, it falls to passionate, talented lunatics to keep this art form’s rebel flame alive. On-Gaku embodies the creator-driven heights of animation’s potential, telling a deadpan personal story about some punks discovering music that doubles as a celebration of art’s potential to inspire, unite, and transform. Writer, director, and animator Kenji Iwaisawa even blessed its protagonist with his own name, making it clear that On-Gaku itself is his version of the film’s cathartic final performance. Every formal aspect of On-Gaku evokes the combination of dirtbag teen indifference and childlike wonder that characterizes its lovable cast, and whenever that cast is driven to performance, true magic happens. An absolutely delightful film in all regards, and a comforting reminder that regardless of circumstances, passionate artists will always find a way for their song to be heard.

My Neighbors The Yamadas

Takahata’s preference for intimate, often melancholy personal stories with limited fantastical flourishes make it easy to understand why he hasn’t gained the global renown of Miyazaki, but those preferences are exactly why I love his works so much. In Takahata’s bemused assessment of family dynamics and generational change, we see the humanist minimalism of Yasujiro Ozu carrying on into a new medium, with animation’s specificity and intentionality serving as a perfect venue for closely observed human moments. So it goes for My Neighbors The Yamadas, which assembles a collection of family moments with no overarching narrative trajectory, and through doing so reveals the micro-narratives of everyday intimacy, the give and take of familial trust, and the myriad ways we shape and are shaped by the world around us. While many creators are eager to lead us to their own fantastical realities, Takahata invites us to take a closer look at our own, finding magic and mystery in every corner of the family home.

Anne of Green Gables

Just as I’m lamenting my lack of more unwatched Ghibli classics, a new door opens into a realm of lush Takahata adaptations, offering a fusion of Montgomery’s off-kilter wit and Takahata’s grounded yet romantic sensibilities. The top World Masterpiece Theater productions were a clear high point in the history of anime, and exploring Green Gables alongside Anne has been one of my most rewarding adventures of the past year. Takahata and Anne feel like kindred souls; each of them sees infinite magic in the beauty of the everyday, and each of them serve as guides to those around them, leading both Anne’s friends and the audience itself into a greater appreciation for nature’s gifts. With countless future Ghibli artists and unexpected guests like Yoshiyuki Tomino in attendance, each episode of Anne feels special and unique, perpetually reminding me that this medium’s riches run deeper than any surface appraisal could register.

Rainbow Fireflies

I’m going to take it as a good sign that my favorite “new” anime of 2022 was a film that actually came out a decade ago, and yet I’d never heard of until days before watching it. Rainbow Fireflies is one of the most beautiful and poignant anime dramas I’ve ever experienced, a triumph of art design and animation, and also a moving meditation on loss on both a personal and societal level. Following a boy who is mysteriously thrust thirty years into the past, we bear witness to the final summer of a village soon to be lost beneath the waters of a new dam. Through vividly painted snapshots of the idle adventures of youth, we gain an intimate appreciation for this community, making its depiction of childhood’s end ring with both the keening of personal loss and the mournful sigh of generational change.

Rainbow Fireflies’ form echoes its thematic intentions. The film’s loose stylistic mandate allows individual animators to express their distinctive styles and passions, as character forms shift and warp to echo the unruly vitality of youth. Through the play of these characters, we see their animators at play as well, reveling in the pure joy of movement as narrative, emotion, or simply its own reward. In the dance of their movements and the bright splashes of color that compose their town, the film’s jubilation at the freedom of this final summer feels also like a celebration of animation’s own infinite potential, and the distinct appeal of anime’s collaborative creation, wherein single animators or storyboarders can etch their unmistakable signature into some larger work. Yet this subtext never diminishes the film’s earnest surface; instead, understanding of Rainbow Fireflies’ remarkable production only aligns us more fully with its creators’ goals, their passionate desire to bring loss, grief, and renewal into animated life.

Through its patient narrative, Rainbow Fireflies assures us of the inevitability of loss and possibility of new life, cautioning against both the life not fully embraced and the life spent in regret. Through its gorgeous backgrounds and character animation, Rainbow Fireflies attests to animation’s unique power to bring lived experience to life, presenting this last summer as it is felt and remembered more acutely than any documentarian could hope. And through the simple fact of its existence, Rainbow Fireflies assures me that there will always be artists striving against all practicality to express their singular vision, aligning their talents in chorus to create works as multifarious yet cohesive as this wondrous, heartbreaking, uplifting film. So long as there is room for Rainbow Fireflies, anime will always be something special.