Top Anime of 2020
2020 is long since dead and gone (thank God), but I'm still pretty proud of this retrospective I wrote at the start of 2021. Here's hoping you get something out of it over a year later. Enjoy! - R
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Time to get this out of the way: 2020 sucked, 2021’s shaping up to be only slightly better, and we’re all doing our best just to get by. Let’s get along with the feeling of hopelessness. I have now fulfilled the baseline requirements for a 2020 year-in-review article introduction. Okay? Okay.
This is normally where I’d talk about my honorable mentions, but, uh, like I said, I didn’t exactly have a lot of those. So rather than waste time talking up inoffensive fluff like My Life as a Villainess, I’d rather spend some time talking about something I actually did: rewatches. The best show-watching I did this year was spent revisiting old classics and perennial favorites, so to kick things off, here’s a mostly unranked pre-list list of my favorite rewatches:
Top Rewatches
Ever since its first season came out in 2013, OreGairu has maintained a reputation as one of the best romances in the anime scene. And for good reason—the show, adapted from a series of light novels by Wataru Watari, has an acute knack for loaded dialogue and teenage social dynamics, and is rivaled perhaps only by Monogatari and Toradora! in its portrayal of high school adolescence. I revisited it in preparation for its long-awaited (and subsequently delayed) third season, and I was more than happy to find that the trials and tribulations of the Service Club still hold up. The character writing is uniformly excellent, bringing overt charm and subtle interiority to a cast that feels several steps more believable than the anime par. Its observations on society, love, and loneliness are as sharp as ever, filtered as they are through the intelligent but broken Hachiman. And in the shift from its more cartoony first season to its more emotional second, the show really finds its footing as a pure romantic drama, interrogating its characters’ worst aspects while demonstrating their consistent growth. It still has a few too many light-novel-isms for my liking, but despite not being perfect, it’s still one of the most piercing and influential looks at high school out there.
Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket
The Mobile Suit Gundam franchise has, at least to some outsiders, developed a reputation of being mostly concerned with hot-blooded mech action and figurine sales, probably a result of campier entries like Wing and Seed. The reality is that Gundam has always been a story about war, and never more obviously than in its 1989 OVA War in the Pocket. Despite an unassuming 6-episode run, the show has more impact than most of its mecha contemporaries thanks to its powerfully efficient script, which sympathizes you to its cast in all the right ways before exploding into a devastating, inevitable conclusion. War in the Pocket is a sad and angry show that sets its sights squarely on the sort of culture created to worship the military and its machines, and is one of the few genuinely anti-war stories that refuses to glorify its own violence. It’s lost none of its power in the thirty years since it came out.
Now this was an interesting show to watch in 2020. When the first season of Gatchaman Crowds came out in 2013, I was swept away by its portrayal of a society that used gamified social media as a way to facilitate mutual aid, an optimistic vision of the near future that posited humanity only needed a harness to direct its empathy in order to evolve. But now, in a post-Gamergate and mid-Trump world, that vision of the internet is starting to read less as optimistic and more as naïve. The first season is as buoyant and empathetic as ever—radically empathetic, you might say, to the point that it handwaves internet harassment, selfish politicians, and even near hit-and-run accidents as problems that could go away if people just had a better way to connect. There are still sharp observations about the nature of heroism in the modern age and how the internet can bring people together, but Crowds’ ultimate answer to its season-long violent conflict is to give the general public access to dangerous, anonymous weaponry, and then to pretend that they’d use it only to help others. As some critics pointed out when the show first aired, Crowds has its heart in the right place, but it’s blind to how the internet actually works.
It sure is a good thing that Insight, its second season, exists now. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Insight is a necessary sequel: it’s a sharp, measured rebuttal of the first season’s untempered optimism, and a near-perfect season of television to boot. You can tell the show’s creators realized the problems inherent to Galax and CROWDS at some point, because here they take those things to their logical conclusions, starting with a group of terrorists using the first season's wonder-tech to attack innocents, and eventually devolving into the Japanese public ceding power to an authoritarian ruler. It’s not only a remarkable look at decentralized democracy and the knee-jerk reactionism that mass media and the internet enable, but it’s perhaps the show that best predicted the modern era of horrible American politics—all in a superhero show set in Japan. Insight is a much less cheery show than its first season, but by delving deeper into the hardships and turbulence of the modern era, the truths it arrives at are all the more poignant and real.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Okay, this one’s cheating a bit. Despite being largely animated by a Korean studio, Avatar was ultimately planned by, produced by, and made for Americans, which makes it very much not anime. But Avatar is obviously influenced by anime from top to bottom, from its exaggerated facial expressions to its high-flying fight scenes—to the untrained eye, only its distinctly western sense of humor sticks out as a Nickelodeon product. The other main difference is that, unlike the majority of anime I’ve seen, Avatar is nearly perfect. Its worldbuilding is fascinating, consistent, and compelling, bringing gravitas and history to a premise that could otherwise come across as comic-book-y. Its martial arts animation is clear and fluid, practically industry-best for a long-running series. Its plotting is peerless from top to bottom, with individual episodes regularly one-upping themselves throughout the run and its grander arcs giving it an unmatched sense of scale and closure. And most importantly, it has some of the best character writing to grace an adventure show, with characters like Zuko and Aang having some of the most satisfying, complete journeys of characters in any show. I already knew how great Avatar was going in, but it was wonderful rediscovering it along with the rest of the country when it dropped on Netflix.
Avatar: The Legend of Korra
Adventure Time
Okay, this one is really cheating. Not only is Adventure Time as far away from anime as possible, but at time of writing, I haven’t even finished my watch-through! But I do think that Adventure Time deserves calling out here because, along with its sibling Steven Universe, it’s one of the best cartoons from the past ten years. Its early seasons are mostly absurdist slice-of-life romps, although that shouldn’t discount them—more than any show this side of 90s Nicktoons, AT nails its absurdist humor, playing with viewer expectations and toeing the line between goofy, unsettling, and specific. One early episode involves Jake being sucked into a witch’s butt. Another involves a psychotic deer with human hands. Or for a truly great example, take the ending of “It Came from the Nightosphere”: after Finn and Marceline go on a surprisingly emotional solo adventure, the episode ends with Finn revealing that Jake has been riding in a shirt pocket the entire time—at which point Jake turns around and farts at the camera. Cut to credits. The show isn’t afraid to play with form, even for its lowbrow jokes, and it’s better for it.
But that last example also points to the show’s other great strength: in its own aimless way, Adventure Time starts to wander into increasingly poignant territory as it goes on, especially starting in the fourth season. Much of that is thanks to Steven Universe’s own Rebecca Sugar, who is an absolute powerhouse at imbuing the show’s goofball characters with achingly human motivations. Case in point: “I Remember You,” the first Ice King and Marceline backstory episode, which paints a picture of their current strained relationship and the Ice King’s declining mental health through an odd, beautiful piece of musical improv. This is also the point where the show begins to explore Finn’s journey through puberty in earnest, and outside of FLCL, it’s one of the best portrayals I’ve seen. Adventure Time is an inconsistent show, to the point that I think I prefer the more guided hand of the cartoons it inspired, but in that inconsistency also lies a madcap willingness to experiment that makes its best episodes stand out even more. It’s a well-deserved landmark cartoon.
Cowboy Bebop was one of the first shows that got me into anime almost ten years ago, but despite loving it at the time, I’d never gone back to rewatch it. Part of that was because, over the years, it somehow mutated in my head to being little more than a good action show with a cool soundtrack. Perhaps that was due to seeing it listed time and again as an “entry-level” anime alongside more juvenile shows like Death Note and One Punch Man. Or maybe it was a side-effect of Shinichiro Watanabe’s good but imperfect recent directorial efforts, like Carole & Tuesday or Terror in Resonance.
Whatever the reason, I was pleased and surprised to be reminded that Cowboy Bebop isn’t just a good show—it’s a great one, a flabbergasting feat of animated ingenuity executed at a level of craftsmanship very few TV anime are allowed to reach. Its action and comedy highlights are wonderful, with a variety of tones that the show unerringly executes quite well, but Bebop also has a keen grasp on its characters, with their desires and interpersonal issues driving the conflict of every episode. It also possesses one of the best uses of episodic vignette structure that I’ve seen, with most of its episodes steadily doling out character growth while reiterating its themes of death and loneliness, time and again building to the show’s inevitable conclusion. And although it gets brought up in every discussion, its visual style and soundtrack are simply out of this world, blessed with a creative team and level of control that feels miraculous by any decade’s standards. When it all comes together, it leads to peaks like the late episode “Hard Luck Woman,” which combines montage and an insert song to create a dialogue-free emotional peak so poignant that it feels like it has no place in a kung-fu sci-fi show.
But that’s the glory of Cowboy Bebop: it reaches for the stars and nails almost every one of its ambitions. Outside of a few writing nitpicks and some casual 90s racism and transphobia, Bebop is essentially a perfect show, and one of the few titans of the industry that truly deserves its reputation. Anime can suck all it wants in the 2020s, but as long as art like this is still out there, I think we’ll be okay.
There’s a reason I mentioned this list was mostly unranked. I would call almost all of my rewatches great shows and indisputable classics (sorry Korra), but Hunter x Hunter is easily the best show I saw this year, and towers over all of them as a staggering accomplishment. I knew that going in; ever since the Chimera Ant arc blew me away in 2014, this show has been an easy inclusion in my all-time top 10, one of the most ambitious and rewarding long-form watches in the medium. But even then, the rest of the show was a bit of an unknown quantity. How would the early material, which I mostly found inoffensive in my original watch, hold up six years later?
The answer is excellently. Hunter x Hunter definitely peaks during Chimera Ant, but its biggest secret is that its early arcs are practically just as good—it just applies that quality in different directions. The Hunter Exam arc comes across as a fairly generic shounen at first, but from the beginning, Togashi distinguishes the material through subversively smart battle mechanics, distinct power differentials, strong plotting, and an easily likable cast. Perhaps his greatest strength is writing economy; for a show so dedicated to the grandiose—big fights, half-series-long arcs, a cast of dozens—it sure is amazing at minimalism, using just the briefest of strokes to sympathize us to its characters. It’s to the show’s credit that the Hunter Exam would function just as well as a self-contained television series.
But, of course, the show didn’t stop there. Heaven’s Arena introduces nen, one of the better shounen power systems that grounds the rest of the fighting material after. Yorknew City applies the full might of Togashi’s writing skills to a truly dangerous side-cast, and its early climaxes are some of the best in the series. Greed Island successfully reinvents the show as a card-collecting game and features some of the series’ densest yet breeziest adventure plotting. And then, with the Chimera Ant and Election arcs, the show pivots into its darkest and most rewarding material yet, breaking its characters in an effort to arrive at real emotional truths about humanity and the relationships we build. Hunter x Hunter maintains and builds on its base quality throughout the series, and it’s improbable that its TV adaptation managed to replicate that consistency over the four straight years that it ran. It’s the best show I watched this year, and one of the best anime of all time.
Top 10 of 2020
10. Akudama Drive
Screw CD Projekt Red, this right here is the best cyberpunk thing to come out of 2020. With striking character designs, neon-soaked color palates, and regularly great action scenes, Akudama Drive is easy on the eyes, a trait that goes a long way towards forgiving its other flaws. It’s true that the writing, which calls to mind the B-movie likes of Mirai Nikki rather than the pointed commentary of William Gibson, won’t be winning any awards. But if you’re in the market for propulsive action spectacle, it’s tough to beat the show where a bunch of hypercriminals rob a train and then start class riots.
9. My Hero Academia 4th Season
Damn, this really aired this year, huh? With My Hero Academia’s fourth season crossing cours from Fall 2019 to Winter 2020, it definitely got relegated to the pre-pandemic Before Times in my brain. But that’s not a slight against MHA—this season maintained and sometimes exceeded the show’s already well-established excellence, if not by the largest of margins. Its first major arc was a testament to mangaka Kouhei Horikoshi’s excellent grasp on battle-shounen plotting, and the Red Rocket and God Hand episodes were elevated by bonkers production to become some of the show’s best setpieces to date. Its second arc finally crafted sympathetic villains, Gentle Criminal and Aiba, and in the process introduced some much-needed moral complexity to a world that was increasingly seeming black and white. I’ll be honest that this season wasn’t a particular standout—it seems like the story and production are never quite going to match the highs of Season 2’s tournament arc—but this was perhaps the most consistent MHA has ever been across a 25-episode run. For a show that’s already cemented itself as one of the best modern shounens, that’s not too bad.
This was a good year for flawed yet interesting character dramas, and in some ways, Adachi and Shimamura is perhaps the most consistent of that bunch. Centered on a lesbian romance between its two titular characters, AdaShima possesses some remarkable dialogue chops, with its first episode handily demonstrating its leads’ voices and chemistry within the first few minutes. From that excellent starting point, the show proceeds to nail all sorts of highlights common to slice-of-life romances, with some elegant internal conflicts arising as the leads become closer and some adorable gay panicking to balance out the drama. I do think the show indulges a bit too much, whether that’s in the form of leery storyboards, romantic wheel-spinning, or a particularly annoying alien side character. Yet despite that, the show’s core strengths never let down. I can’t say it had much competition, but AdaShima was definitely the best LGBTQ+ show I saw this year, and it’s an easily recommendable romance by any metric.
They did it. After years of trying, they finally made a good gacha-game adaptation. And who better to crack the code than Takaomi Kanasaki, the director who arguably did the same for isekais with KonoSuba? Princess Connect! clearly reflects a lot of the director's existing appeal, with its abrupt comedic timing and fantasy-action-but-not-really premise making it feel almost like KonoSuba's spiritual sequel. But truth be told, I think I actually prefer PriConne to KonoSuba—it’s the Parks and Recreation to the latter’s It’s Always Sunny, and its warm regard for its characters and their friendships made it one of the most reliably comfy shows I watched all year. To cap it all off, this is also one of the year’s prettiest shows, with a polished aesthetic and miraculous compositing that could almost trick you into thinking it wasn’t an ad for a mobile game. For pure, fluffy entertainment, not much this year could beat PriConne.
All this time and I’m still not over that ending. Rikuo did what? Shinako ended up with whom? The finale was a truly bizarre choice, one that flew in the face of almost every thematic point the series had dramatized until then, and one that made its romantic developments feel like a bunch of useless wheel-spinning in retrospect. It’s sad, because that made it easy to forget how, at least for nine or ten weeks, Sing ‘Yesterday’ for Me was one of the most astute, remarkable character dramas we’ve gotten in years. Based on a manga that began its run in the 1990s, the show’s scene-setting details like landline phones and film cameras may feel anachronistic, yet its reflections on post-college life and young adulthood are more relevant than ever in today’s stagnant, late-capitalistic job market. The writing can also feel outdated at times, but it ultimately rises above its occasional gender stereotypes with nuanced, multifaceted characters that feel only steps away from real humans trying to make it in the world. Yet what truly makes this whole thing tick is the way it’s told: gentle, muted, and with some of the year’s most delicate character animation, Sing ‘Yesterday’ truly feels like a story animated with every ounce of grace and passion available to it. It’s a shame all that dedication couldn’t have led to an ending that more ably tied the story together, but for me, its reflections until that point make the journey well worth it.
5. Kaguya-sama: Love is War 2nd Season
If Sing ‘Yesterday’ is a mumblecore romance gone slightly wrong, Kaguya-sama: Love is War is a populist blockbuster gone very, very right. Like some of my other favorites this year, Kaguya-sama is more or less a known quantity: its first season was already one of the better rom-coms of the past few years, and its second brings back the same core team to adapt some fan-favorite arcs. But somehow, in doubling down on the things that made the first season tick, this second season winds up being even more remarkable than the first. Its experimental visual style is pushed to new extremes, with its frequent animation highlights and ambitious, surreal detours somehow unaffected by the pandemic. Its source material dives into more emotional territory, finding unexpected poignancy in its exploration of the lonely Yuu Ishigami. And most importantly, the show brings its main couple together harder than ever, with each episode maintaining their adorably flustered status quo while pushing their relationship and mutual understanding to a more stable place. I think what I’m most getting at here is consistency: while it aired, Kaguya-sama was a genuine source of comfort for me, and one of the most reliable things to put a smile on my face week after week. In a year like 2020, that meant more than it ever has before.
I knew that Appare-Ranman would be right up my alley the second I saw its promo art, with its golden-age-of-Gainax character designs and intriguing Wild West aesthetic. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be one of the better-written shows we’ve gotten in years. Starting out as a racing competition set in an anachronistic late-1800s America, the show eventually morphs into an action-adventure serial a la The Fast and the Furious, a move that seemed to have cost it some goodwill among fans who were hoping for a steampunk Initial D. But despite the complainers, Appare-Ranman nails all of its genre shifts with grace and style abound due to its excellent character writing, which keeps a brisk pace while instilling its huge cast with clear goals, distinct voices, and fulfilling arcs. This show is a testament to the fact that as long as you have fundamentally strong characters, you can do pretty much whatever you want with the actual plot.
If that weren’t enough, this show is also blessed with pulse-pounding music and phenomenal visual design, which came out mostly unscathed despite pandemic delays. The only real caveats I have are for its hammy final villain and its racist character designs (making everyone a stereotype doesn’t mean that no one’s a stereotype); yet even then, this is the only recent anime I can think of with an explicitly feminist subplot and a sympathetic Native American central character. Appare-Ranman was the dark horse of the year, and it was somehow one of the most perfectly realized shows of 2020. A must-watch if you’re in the market for great popcorn.
3. Deca-Dence
The anime industry has had plenty of troubles in recent years, but if it’s done one thing right, it’s in bringing director Yuzuru Tachikawa to the forefront. Between Death Parade, Mob Psycho 100, and now Deca-Dence (plus episodic credits on modern classics like Flip Flappers and Steins;Gate), it’s abundantly clear that he’s one of the brightest visionaries actively making TV anime, with a propensity for beautifully stylized animation and an ability to execute his remarkable ambitions. And now, he has the distinction of making two of the best shows from 2019 and 2020 back-to-back. That’s a serious achievement.
In a lot of ways, Deca-Dence was the show of 2020: a searing-hot critique of capitalism, classism, and escapism filtered through the language of high-flying shounen adventures and classic anime sci-fi. To say any more would be to spoil one of the most incredible sleight-of-hand twists that I’ve seen a show pull off in its first quarter, but if any of the premise sounds like a downer, rest assured that it’s anything but. The show makes societal critique fun, with remarkable 2D/3D hybrid action highlights showing up on the regular, and all of this undergirded by one of the most likable original casts of characters to come out this year. My only reservations are for its ending, which delivers a decent resolution for its characters but stops just short of burning down its own fictional systems, going at odds with the thematic underpinnings it spent the whole series building to. But even then, this is one of the most thoughtful, entertaining bangers in recent memory. Anime-original or no, whatever Tachikawa has in store for us next, rest assured that I’m 100% on board.
If it wasn’t clear from my retrospective up top, OreGairu is a legitimate modern classic, and the five-year wait for its finale did nothing to diminish that. If anything, it may have only cemented the show’s reputation—high-school romances are a dime a dozen, but practically nothing in the intervening years has come close to the level of genuine insight and wit that OreGairu contains in every line of dialogue. And none, save perhaps Monogatari, have managed to bridge the gap between popular and critical acclaim the way this one has.
So with that pedigree, is it any wonder that the third season feels almost like a victory lap? For a show that’s famous for its dense, subtext-filled conversations, this may be the most straightforward it’s ever been, with characters expressing their feelings directly to each other and the audience alike, their complicated motivations clearer than ever. It’s also a season of fanservice (of the indulgent writing variety, not the “boobs-and-thighs” kind), with season-one gags returning in full force, fan-favorite bit characters getting spotlights they might not quite deserve, and the story lingering on a couple heavily telegraphed beats that could’ve been wrapped up quicker. If any show’s earned the right, it’s this one.
But even considering all that, I think I’m underselling just how good this season is, and how good it is in a different way from its predecessors. It may lack the focused dramatic heft of its stellar second season, but the end effect of all those choices is that the show finally gives its characters room to slow down, breathe, interact with each other, and genuinely feel like friends in a way that hasn’t been true for literal years since it started. Even considering all of the angst, it’s a much warmer season overall, a lighter watch that is still so chocked full of endearing character moments and well-deserved payoffs that I can’t complain. And through all of the changes, OreGairu preserves its central voice and intelligence. There just aren’t shows this well written on TV most years. It’s a good ending for a fantastic series, and it’s every bit worth the wait.
*1. Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (TIE)
I don’t just mean that in a subjective sense—although it truly was a special thing to me personally. Eizouken came out at the beginning of an awful year, intersecting with both the start of the pandemic and some personal troubles, and during that time became something of a rock for me. Every Sunday, before I dove back into a job that relentlessly drove me to exhaustion and a life that seemed more uncertain by the day, I’d turn on the show and smile for twenty-two minutes, taking in the wondrous background art and little animation details. Months later, as I went for walks near my apartment as way of forcing myself to get outside, I’d listen to “Easy Breezy” and match the hand claps every time. 2020 often felt like a festering wound, but Eizouken, even in a small way, was a balm.
But like I said, the show’s brilliance isn’t just subjective, because I was far from the only person it spoke to. I frankly haven’t seen an anime take off like this with critics of every stripe in all the years I’ve been watching. Sure, it didn’t reach Attack on Titan levels of saturation, but I also haven’t seen people from such disparate ends as r/anime forum-goers to actual film directors getting this passionate about a Japanese cartoon before. It’s the sort of show that can engage women and marginalized people starved for any representation in cartoons, just as easily as it engages bunches of teenage boys who’ve never seen an art film before. To that end, I can’t think of a single anime that’s wound up on the year-end lists of both The New York Times and The New Yorker, but there’s a reason Eizouken did. It's comforting, intelligent, and ambitious, all captured in a way that’s easy to digest. It's an animation enthusiast's show that's accessible for everyone.
And yet, the show’s specialness still doesn’t end there, because if there’s one thing I suspect above all, it’s that this may just have been most special to the people who created it. That’s not exactly a surprise; it’s an anime about making anime, an indulgent passion project if there ever was one. But the actual passion behind the team was evident in every frame, every piece of expressionistic movement, every fantastical background and perfect sound effect, every piece of the animation process that was painstakingly rendered. This was Masaaki Yuasa’s last TV project he completed before he stepped down as CEO of Science Saru (Japan Sinks was finished first even though it aired later, which thankfully means we can forget about it), and I can’t think of a better project to go out on. It was a love letter to a medium he spent years exploring; it was a love letter to life, and to everyone who watched it; and it was the best show of 2020.
*1. Chainsaw Man (TIE)
Okay, I cheated again.
It’s absolutely true that Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! is the best anime that aired in 2020, and one of the best shows from the last five or so years. But in terms of my favorite new anime-related thing of the year? The Japanese property that I got the most invested in over the course of 2020?
It was the story about a guy who can grow a chainsaw out of his head.
Yes, Chainsaw Man is currently just a manga, but it ran in Shounen Jump and clearly plays in the same space as anime and manga’s most influential hits. Its basic premise, about a government bureau that makes pacts with devils in order to fight even worse devils, calls to mind action hits from Hellsing to Attack on Titan to Demon Slayer. And yet despite that, no original story in recent memory has felt quite so original. Part of its early pleasure lies in its satire—its hero Denji is a parody of every annoyingly horny shounen protagonist, a teenager whose literal motivation for risking his life is to cop a feel, and his naïve viewpoint is dunked on at every turn. The manga is legitimately funny, with its negative-INT-score main cast charming their way through adventures by the sheer force of their stupidity, and it has a couple of the medium's greatest gross-out gags. In spite of that, it’s also a complete action powerhouse, with crazy, inventive fight scenes that regularly one-up themselves for absurd fun. And that’s the key word here—the manga pulls you in because it’s really, legitimately fun.
But Chainsaw Man’s greatest secret is that, beneath the insanity, it’s actually telling a serious story. Fujimoto is a madman of a mangaka, barreling through plot points and switching between tones on a dime, which makes it all the more striking when the manga pulls back to show the real emotional consequence of what’s been going on. There is an uncommon sense of scale and weight to this story; demon powers level entire cities in an instant, in ways that irreparably affect the cast, and that cast will then turn around and destroy themselves in order to fight back. This is a manga without a status quo, where battle scars never fade, where characters die suddenly and never return, save for the impressions they’ve left on the survivors’ memories. Changes happen frequently. All of them matter. Most of them hurt.
It’s utter chaos, yet somehow, the madness is grounded. I am a writer and I don’t quite understand how. But like I’ve mentioned about many of my favorites here, Fujimoto has an absolute gift for writing economy, and he routinely uses it to clarify his characters’ motivations, to weave even the briefest of poignant moments to endear us to them, all before he takes it away. It’s as if FLCL’s Youji Enokido came up with an outline that Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho scripted and Evangelion’s Hideaki Anno illustrated—and if any of that sounds remotely interesting to you, you owe it to yourself to start reading immediately.
Who knows—maybe at the end of 2022, I’ll be writing another one of these things, and the Chainsaw Man anime will appear on my best-of list then. Or maybe, as I suspect, the manga’s appeal won’t translate to a medium known for tight deadlines and cut corners, and it’ll wind up as a flop. Either way, this is one of the best manga I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Out of all the new media I consumed, it might just be my favorite thing of 2020.
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