Alright I've been toying with the idea of getting into anime for a long time but the genre is vast and I'm not easily hooked. Pitch me a show or film that's really, REALLY different. Not necessarily out there for the sake of it but artistically or thematically in a class of its own.
Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers, and Satoshi Kon's other works are some of the most imaginative and strikingly edited films out there.
Ghost Stories was a pretty bog-standard anime, but they gave the English translators free reign with most of the lines, so it ended up fucking wild.
The only other anime I know is Sailor Moon cuz that cartoon has the boom anime babies that make me think the wrong thing.
a police station! thank god, I never thought i'd be happy to see one of those things
:michael-laugh:
I’ve been trying with the idea of getting into anime
:disgost: WHY
Bc it's a median for storytelling and I wanna give it a chance beyond just a few Miyazaki films
Mob Psycho 100 is about a high schooler (Mob) with insane psychic powers who wants nothing more than to get over his inability to connect with people and be 'cool'. He works part time with a conman psychic who 'teaches' him life lessons, and he constantly is torn between his desire to fit in and his desire to do good in the world with his power. It's written as a mostly light hearted series, that has a lot of great characters and deep character moments where each main character learns from each other how to be better people, each being affected by each other's views on life around them. I'd highly recommend giving it a go :)
Ghost Stories (dub version): This is my very-problematic guilty pleasure.
Touch me.
Touch me harder.
Definitely fucked up dub, still laughed.
Shinsekai yori (From the New World) (look using Japanese names is pretentious but it's also easier to find that way sometimes) - Kids grow up in a strange world where they learn how to use their psychic powers and follow the rules, and slowly learn how strange their world is. Then the status quo gets blown to bits roughly every four episodes. Definitely content warning but I dunno which.
Kino's Journey (the original is better but the new one is not bad) - Kino quietly adventures from town to town, seeing how they live their life, and refusing to judge them. Some towns are sci fi stories, some are political thought experiments.
Psycho-Pass - Futuristic police have guns that nigh-instantly psychologically profile people and refuse to fire unless they're irredeemable murderers. Problems with this idea are explored.
The Eccentric Family - An honest, down-to-earth examination of what it's like to live your life as a magical shapeshifting racoon in modern day Japan.
Kino's Journey rules. Whole show makes you feel like you're sitting serenely under a waterfall
Revolutionary Girl Utena. Incredibly stylish. About gender roles and sexuality in a way thats a lot more nuanced than most modern shows. This was the show that convinced me that that one meme about the curtains being blue was actually bullshit, because all the symbolism is super dense, with some of it being obvious enough to penetrate my teenage skull and some of it only making sense on a 3rd or 4th rewatch. My favorite anime of all time, can make me cry and cheer out loud in the same episode. Incredibly queer, if that's a selling point, though it was limited in how explicit it could be since it aired in a children's timeslot in the 90s. Ikuhara (the director) went on to direct several other incredibly unique and fascinating anime that also fit your criteria, though I don't like them as much as Utena. On youtube.
Madoka Magica has some great art direction, if you watch til the end of the first episode you'll see what I mean.
The mid 2000s Higurashi anime is a fantastic horror series with a really cool concept and some fun twists. If you like it, you should read Umineko, which is by the same guy and is a 10/10 horror mystery about a shitty rich family being slowly killed off on their private island by a 'witch' that has supposedly haunted the island for decades, while the main character tries to prove that the witch doesn't exist. It's one of my favorite works of fiction ever, but the anime is dogshit.
All of these have content warnings out the ass, so I can share those if you want.
watch utena oh my god watch utena plz do this ^^^^^^^
Planetes, hard science fiction about the day to day life of a working class debris deorbiting crew in LEO about 50 years from now
Odd Taxi: a taxi driver gets roped into a Yakuza heist
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!: 3 girls scrap together an anime for their school's film festival *(sounds like a recipe for pedo shit but the show avoids that)
Comedy:
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Asobi Asobase - three girls form a school club so they can laze about, hijinks ensue. The artstyle radically changes every now and again, sometimes to straight-up horror-looking stuff, and the voice acting is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQr0iZwNLOs However, seeing as you're getting into anime, I'm not sure if it will be as funny if you have no awareness of the tropes of the subgenre. Anyway, here's another great scene, with amazing mixing of Japanese and English to the background tune of a shitty recorder version of the US anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcLsH9ROgfo
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Nichijou - very weird style of comedy, but hilarious. If you've ever wanted to see a school principal in body armor suplex a deer, this is the series for you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Et0a8fnuw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byDglOhxmdA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z30Y572EmCk
More serious stuff:
- Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was already recommended a bunch of times. Genuinely amazing series.
- Violet Evergarden - I'm not sure if it necessarily qualifies as "imaginative", but it was very effective emotionally - I cried pretty much every episode. In fact, I just looked up some scenes on youtube to link and started tearing up again. However, it's not exactly a sad or depressing series, I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's a very cathartic kind of crying. Some people complain about it being melodramatic, but I dunno, I loved it. The protagonist is a former child soldier who becomes a ghostwriter of sorts - the setting is in a weird position where it's seen lots of technological development (seems to be roughly post-WW1, with the exception of the protagonists's mechanical arms which are kind of steampunk), but a lot of the population is still illiterate, facilitating an industry of letter ghostwriters - you go to the post office, and there's people there who can write your letter for you. The whole series is also just visually beautifull.
- Texhnolyze - a post-apocalyptic dystopia, with the remains of humanity living in a crumbling underground city. In contrast to the above, this actually is a very sad and depressing series. It's very slow paced, and incredibly dark and hopeless. I watched it some time ago, but IIRC it took like 2 or 3 episodes for the protagonist to even start speaking in anything other than pained grunts, and there was a several-minute scene of him struggling to climb up some stairs. Probably not for everyone, but it is in a class of its own. Also, it might actually fit pretty well with the current vibes of looming climate catastrophe and imperial decay, but I haven't rewatched it recently to confirm.
- Ergo Proxy - another future dystopia, starring Amy Lee from Evanescence for some reason - humanity survives in domed cities, with the world outside of them being a wasteland. They have robots called AutoReivs, which keep becoming self-aware and causing trouble. Various conspiracies and dark secrets about humanity's life in the domed cities are revealed. Lots of philosophical references get made, including people saying 'raison d'etre' many times, so people occasionally deride it for being pretentious, but I think it's alright.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - one of my favorite animes. The GitS film is a classic, but I personally prefer the series. It's structured kind of like a police procedural, with a conspiratorial plot being slowly unveiled. Lots of great philosophy, cool transhuman stuff, occasionally neat political stuff (there'a state literally called 'The American Empire' in the lore, which, it turns out, did a bunch of imperialism and outright terrorism in South America), it's one of the best cyberpunk works in my opinion. Well, it's actually sometimes labeled as post-cyberpunk, which is a genre that may or may not exist depending on who you ask, but it's precisely the deviations from typical cyberpunk fare which make me like it so much.
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Nichijou. It's slice of life starring high school girls but is not pervy at all and is super duper wholesome. It's sort of a sketch show with story continuity told through the sketches. It's...observational comedy sort of? It animated stuff like dropping a piece of food like a dragon ball Z fight scene cause that's how it feels in your brain kinda thing. It's zany as hell but also super cozy. It always puts me in a better mood and it's funny as fuck too.
I liked Trigun, it's definitely not some groundbreaking thing, I just enjoyed it. Just two seasons too iirc
I know it's like the most cliche answer, but honestly Evangelion is not only a really thematically rich, well crafted piece of fiction that's not afraid to get "out there" stylistically/thematically, but also a good series for someone new to the medium of anime. And the original series is only 26 episodes and a movie, so it's not some crazy 100+ episode long series like some shows.
