This is actually a Fall 2022 anime review but then I realized that I only watched a handful of shows this entire year and the only 2 shows of note OF THE ENTIRE YEAR that I can think of came from the Fall season so... Happy New Year, here's my entirely opinionated and overconfident assertions of what's Good(tm). There's a couple of shows I've heard good things about that I didn't watch (Summer Time Rendering, Call of the Night, Lycoris Recoil, Akiba Maid War, Isekai Ojisan, Ya Boy KongMing, Mob Psycho Season 3) either from lack of interest or time (in Mob's case the latter). And I watched a couple of good shows that are pretty uninteresting to talk about, either because they're sequels or that they are just solidly competent without being anything notable (Tatami Time Machine Blues, Kaguya-sama, Demon Slayer, SpyxFamily, My Dress up Darling) - so I wouldn't call this post exhaustive nor well-researched, but since when has that stopped someone from vomiting their thoughts onto the internet?

So I guess the runners-up to the two shows that are my AOTY are Cyperpunk: Edgerunners, which was basically Studio Trigger saving CD Project by doing everything worth doing with Cyberpunk as both a franchise and a genre- namely, criticizing capitalism in the most emotionally devastating way possible; and Gundam: The Witch from Mercury for continuing Gundam's anti-fascist sci-fi legacy into the 21st Century, AND for finally making the franchise explicitly gay AF.

Anyway, without further ado:

Chainsaw Man

The Chainsaw Man anime adaptation is pure kino.

That's both a good and bad thing, so I need to explain. And to do that I need to gush about the manga now.

CSM's manga is, no hyperbole, art. Not some ironic postmodern conception of "comic book as art a.k.a the graphic novel" (although you could make the argument that it's a postpostpostmodern deconstruction, but we're just going to get high huffing our own farts)- I'm just saying this is a piece of media that's going to have staying power. That means something. That when future archeologists dig this thing up, they'll take one look and know what our entire deal is as a civilization, and probably why we ended up nuking ourselves or some shit.

They'll know, because CSM is a story about how much life sucks under late-stage capitalism, about how alienating and dehumanizing being divorced from the fruits of your labour is, how that breaks people, about the lengths the powerful will go to to keep this system of control in place by dangling the threat of everything being taken away from us unless we comply above our heads, and about how despite all this the one sliver of hope we have is the bonds we form with the people we care about.

In a lot of way's it's this generations Evangelion, although that comparison isn't exact.

And the manga manages that by leveraging it's medium in ways that are creative and genre-pushing, by doing things on the page that people genuinely haven't seen before.

So the question is, how do we adapt that to the big screen? And the anime's director's answer was that he wasn't going to.

The CSM anime isn't Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man as it appears on the page, because perhaps such a thing cannot exist on the tv screen. It's Ryu Nakayama's interpretation of the CSM manga- where he filters the manga author's love of cinema into cinema, putting the directorial lenses of Tarantino, Raimi, Fincher, etc. behind the camera- as a conscious, deliberate choice. Whether you agree with that choice is one thing (I personally don't, and probably all 5 other manga readers watching the show weekly on Hexbear didn't either), but I can respect it, and the resulting show is something that definitely feels different- animation as though it was live-action, cinema instead of cartoon- another ironic layer atop.

So this show was basically made for anyone sick of the usual anime bullshit. It looks and sounds good, and thanks to the source material it hits hard on really mature themes and doesn't sugar coat things. It's pure kino.

BUT! But, as good as the show is, it can't compare to the source material, in the way that the manga can let images breath and soak and stick with you forever, even when you put the book down. And maybe there was no way for any adaptation of CSM to do that, so props to the anime staff for doing their best and creating something just as valid and artistically accomplished- but if you like the show, please give the manga a read if you can.

Bocchi the Rock!

Where do I even begin with this.

I think going into the fall season everyone had written off this show as another moe "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" do-nothing slice of life marketed at that awkward demographic of both pre-teen girls and pedophiles, sorry, "lolicons". After all, "Manga Time Kirara 4-koma adaptation about a girl band" already conjures up images of K-On! and everything that entails.

But calling this show just another slice of life girl band show like K-On! is...

Ok, you know what? We start with K-On!

K-On! is a wonderfully comfy show about how you need to enjoy every second of life because eventually we all have to grow up and experience the bitter-sweetness of graduating from high-school. Everything is sugarcoated to hell and diabetes inducing, but that's fine because it was 2009 and we thought we had a future and life wasn't going to be this hard.

(This is also why racist dipshits put up K-On! profile pics on social media because they gravitate to that show's idealized version of the past, but that honestly isn't the fault of the show- the ultimate message is that we all have to move on. But right wingers aren't exactly media literate, so whatever. I digress.)

BTR isn't K-On! It doesn't sugarcoat things (for the most part. We're not getting to CSM levels of darkness, it's still a comedy about a girl band). It gets how terrifying high school actually is. It gets how hard wanting to make art is, how terrifying putting yourself out there is. It gets how lonely it can be wanting people to see you and love you, but at the same time being afraid of being seen because it means that people can hurt you.

The main character has crippling social anxiety. She constantly catastrophizes the worst possible outcomes over the simplest things. She can barely function outside her house, and she's really lonely.

And her dream is to be a rock star because she thinks that's how an introverted person like her can be popular and make friends, to the point where she practices guitar for 2 years in the hopes she'll get into a band because she's still a dumb teenager who clearly didn't think things through.

And yeah, that's the basic set-up of the show. It's the irony of her dream juxtaposed against her reality, and that instinct to laugh when we look in the mirror and realize just how cringe we are because otherwise we'd cry. And although Bocchi's catastrophizing is the lynchpin of the show's humor, it never punches down at her. All her fears have some grounding in some trauma from her past (real or imagined), it's just that her personality twists the worst possible outcomes into the funniest, most ridiculous extremes, and her growth as a character is literally about her fighting her own worst instincts. (She also doesn't miraculously somehow becomes "fixed" at the end, it's a slow painful process. But what she gains for putting herself out there is a support network of friends who love her for who she is and want to support her- and look, I know not everyone gets that support no matter how hard they try, but there's hope in escapism right?)

And the thing is- the people adapting the show clearly love the source material and are having fun, because they've poured everything into this adaptation. If the CSM anime is pure cinema, BTR is pure animation- they break out everything from live action footage to CG to a fucking 3d zoetrope to convey just how deep of a break from reality Bocchi is suffering through. And mixed-media absurdist meta-humor isn't exactly new to anime, Nichijou and Pop-Team Epic both did it before, but BTR does it's ironic shitposting in service to the story- which makes it's humour incredibly sincere.

But that's only half the story, because the other half is the music- because BTR is basically a giant love-letter to classic J-Rock bands like Asian-Kung Fu Generation, and the show goes above and beyond to portray the musical performances. You'll know it when you hear it, but you can basically hear each character in the performance reflected in their instrument musically- which wraps around into the story because each characters instrument reflects their personality and role in the story, and you can literally hear their individual character setbacks and triumphs as they grow as characters and as a band.

And that's it, that's why the show is so good. It's a neat little story about personal growth lavished with such incredible love and attention to detail that we as the audience know exactly what headspace the main character is in, and can empathize with her on an incredibly deep level, and laugh along with her at her own misfortunes, because her misfortunes are our misfortunes.

And there we go! If you're only going to watch 2 shows from last year, I'm personally recommending Chainsaw Man and Bocchi the Rock!