With Crunchyroll having just picked up Shiki’s streaming rights, I felt it was pretty much required for me to write an article hyping the show. Shiki’s one of my all-time favorites, and also one of the shows that’s least-known among those favorites. The show winds up being one of the smarter “ugly nature of mankind” shows I’ve seen in anime, but its immediate strengths were more my focus for this article. Check it out!
Why It Works: The Soul of Horror in Shiki
I’m kind of tired of vampires, you guys.
At this point, they seem just generally kind of played out. They suck blood, they sometimes turn into bats, they originally meant “fear of feminine sexuality” and now mean “sexy danger.” Sexy danger is pretty cool I guess, but if you keep using vampires to be dangerously sexy, eventually the spark fades. The current wave of trashy vampire romances certainly hasn’t helped, but vampires have always had a ceiling on their resonance as long as they stuck to the old model of what vampires really are.
Fortunately, Shiki thinks vampires are something very different.
Yep, I’ve finally put together a top shows list. As I hopefully made clear in part one and part two of my critical biases post, this is obviously my list – it represents the things I think are most valuable in stories in the way I think they’ve best been articulated. It’s also just a list of shows I enjoy – there’s no hard criteria here, so I wouldn’t stress the numbers too much. Also, it’s a bit front-loaded – I only started watching anime seasonally about two years ago, so the last couple years are disproportionately represented. Incidentally, I’m not including movies here either – I think direct comparisons between shows and films are a bit of a stretch, but if they were included, this list would certainly be somewhat different. And finally, I’m absolutely (and thankfully) certain this list will change over time – there are still piles of widely beloved shows I’ve never seen, so I’m sure the current rankings will be filled out in the years to come. So with that all said, let’s get to the list – Bobduh’s Top 30 Anime of All Time.
-edit- I have now created a Top Shows Addendum for shows that have either fallen off or just barely missed this list. Please enjoy these additional almost-top shows!