Top Twenty Anime of 2021

If there’s one word to describe the best anime released in 2021, it's ambition.  

I think that’s important because modern anime tends to be homogenous and insular. If production committees aren't releasing as many isekai adaptations as possible, they're often greenlighting quick genre ripoffs to cash in on the latest trends or churning out rushed sequels to proven properties. It’s not so different from what happens in other mediums, but anime has a weird specificity to its mass-produced power fantasies, idol show knockoffs, and gacha-game tie-ins.

But 2021 felt different.

To be more specific, 2021’s top shelf contained the most jaw-dropping assortment of shows I've seen since I started watching anime seasonally. I’d seen enough great shows by halfway through the year that I’d already filled a top-ten list—and then they just kept coming. There were amazing shows of every stripe: impassioned war stories, Lynchian arthouse dramas, emotive slices-of-life, muted romances, noir-tinged thrillers, futuristic sci-fi… even, uh, sports. And if none of those piqued your interest, 2021 also marked the return of seminal favorites like Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and My Hero Academia. No matter your tastes, there was plenty to keep you well fed.

What 2021's anime industry also brought—and what the industry increasingly has been bringing for years—was overwork. Anime’s dirty secret is that it’s long been supported by an underpaid labor force, going back to its Tezuka-led boom in the 1960s. Now that global popularity and streaming have increased demand, there are too few animators spread thin across too many projects, meaning last year saw a concerning rise in collapsing productions and employees falling victim to horrid work conditions (and that’s not even counting the disruptive impact of COVID). If there’s any silver lining, it’s that social media is now enabling employees and critics to speak out, causing a rise in public discourse to match. Whether public or internal pressure will force these companies into living wages and humane hours is still an unanswered question. 

It’s a weird position to be in, writing and enthusing about an industry that is exploiting the people making it. As an American fan, it feels like simply “spreading awareness” is no real solution, but if all I can do for now is to listen to and enfranchise these discussions, maybe it's something. And although I don't want to shy away from the pain this abusive system has caused (I can't not bring it up; there is at least one show on this list, as there have been in years past, that literally put someone in the hospital), I also want to say some nice things about the work that these thousands of passionate creators brought to us. That, too, is not a solution, but it’s something.

So with that in mind—even with twenty main entries, there were just too many anime I wanted to shout out. Here's to the following most honorable of mentions:

To Mars Red, for enhancing its Meiji-era vampire story with excellent dialogue and a bold aesthetic;

To Bakuten!!, for elevating its boilerplate sports-show premise with sumptuous animation and two whole exclamation points;

To Takt op. Destiny, for having a bait-and-switch first episode so stupidly good, I almost forgave the rest of the show for being boring;

To So I’m a Spider, So What?, for being mediocre in ways I personally found interesting;

To Attack on Titan: The Final Season, for dedicating an entire subplot to people drinking some guy’s spinal fluid;

And to Tropical-Rouge! Precure, for daring to let a decade-long franchise be a fun cartoon again.

Top Anime of 2021

20. Love Live! Superstar!!

After being disappointed by 2020's beautiful but hollow Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, I was a little worried about the future of the Love Live! franchise. Turns out there was no need to fret, since Superstar marks the return of Takahiko Kyougoku, director of the original School Idol Project series and one of the most talented creatives in the anime industry (see Land of the Lustrous, one of last decade’s best shows). Under his steady hand, Superstar!! avoids most of the melodramatic idol show pitfalls he himself helped create while reaping the rewards of effective character development and ambitious direction. Newcomers to Love Live! will find this an easy entry point thanks to its giddy humor and much-improved performance scenes, while veterans from the μ’s days will appreciate its pared-down focus on a smaller cast. It’s simultaneously a return to form and an exciting step forward for the series. “Wow wo wow,” indeed.

19. Fena: Pirate Princess

Let’s start with the bad: Fena: Pirate Princess ends on the weirdest note possible, pivoting in its final episodes towards grandiose plot points and themes that the series prior never hinted at, much less earned. 

And now here’s the good: everything else! 

Fena is a classic adventure show with a ninjas-and-pirates twist, and in its twelve short episodes, it often rivals the globetrotting pleasures of bigger franchises like Fullmetal Alchemist, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Pirates of the Caribbean. The character dynamics are satisfying, the comedy frequently lands, and the show has a wonderful visual presentation with seamless compositing and generous animation. Before the ending sucks the wind out of its sails, Fena is simply a blast to watch; and even at the end, the animation almost makes the derailment worth it. As the old adventure story cliché goes, the journey really is more important than the destination.

18. Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song

Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song ostensibly gets away with combining two disparate anime-favorite genres—idol shows and sci-fi action—but to level with you, the idol stuff is just window dressing. Vivy is about an AI singer trying to avert the apocalypse by rewriting history, so despite the insert songs, it’s full of speculative worldbuilding and timeline shenanigans and good old fashioned fight scenes. It’s the type of oddball premise that could’ve wound up forgettable if not for two things: its massive scope, with arcs taking place over literal decades; and the phenomenal animation from Studio WIT, who crafted some of the best fight scenes of a very competitive year. Action aside, Vivy uses its formidable production both to sell the burgeoning humanity of its lead character and to comment on the commingled growth of society and AI, which is an impressive trick. That’s not to say its writing chops don’t get a little, uh, choppy—I felt similarly mixed about series composer Tappei Nagatsuki’s most famous show, Re: Zero—but the show still has a nice sense of dramatic heft and some great worldbuilding touches. Not every one of Vivy’s punches landed for me, but I couldn’t help but admire it the whole way through.

17. Shadows House

As an anime, Shadows House looks unlike most shows on the market today. Its titular family of shadows are sooty, featureless silhouettes, smoothly animated against gothic architecture and dim corridors. Yet its story—about the “living dolls” who tend to those shadows and their capricious whims—winds up being the most arresting thing about it. The show’s a slow burner, starting out somewhat predictably with new doll Emilico adjusting to her life as a servant to her shadow mistress Kate. But as it gradually raises its stakes and compounds its worldbuilding, it also smartly expands on its central cast, ultimately investing the audience in every single side character by the time its mid-season competition arc ends. Beyond that, the show’s got subtlety in spades, with central revelations turning its narrative into equal parts class critique and action-adventure. Shadows House is a lot of unusual things, and it has the audacity to be unusually good at them, too.

16. Komi Can’t Communicate

Adaptations of manga gag comedies are tough to pull off, but Komi Can’t Communicate makes it look easy. The gimmick is this: the titular Komi, a beautiful girl with social anxiety so bad that she can’t speak to her classmates, wants to make 100 friends with the help of awkward protagonist Tadano. Rather than Komi being an outcast, though, she’s the object of worship for the rest of the school, who misinterpret her stone-faced anxiety as graceful confidence. It’s the type of show that could easily coast on (and wear out) that one thin joke, but fortunately, its execution consistently rises above that. The whole production looks stunning thanks to the strong style of Ayumu Watanabe (director of 2018’s best show, After the Rain), and it’s full of wonderful composites, clever directorial tricks, and some of the funniest reaction faces of last year. It also has a lot of empathy for its anxiety-ridden title character, meaning jokes about Komi’s struggle to do simple things like order coffee or understand school games are well meaning instead of mean spirited. It’s a shame that empathy doesn’t extend to the side cast, who are mostly portrayed as one-dimensional cretins and perverts (on that note, content warnings for uncomfortable asides about trans people and stalking). But while not every joke is a winner, the show sells most of them with a panache that makes the good ones really land. In that sense, Komi is one of the most successful adaptations of the year—an anime so good that it keeps me watching a story I probably wouldn’t have liked otherwise.

15. Ms. Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S

This year marked the grand return of Kyoto Animation to TV anime, and as returns go, there was hardly a better choice for them than a continuation of their 2018 hit Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. If you watched the first season, you know what you’re in for—this is fundamentally the same blend of slapstick humor, slice-of-life shenanigans, and weirdly problematic subplots, even if staffing changes necessitated by the studio’s 2019 tragedy mean there are subtle tweaks to the formula. If anything, the show is more beautiful this time, bolstered by its old-guard directors overseeing teams of rising stars. It’s the sort of show where you can see the passion for the material and exuberance for the craft in every key frame and in-between, and it’s worth checking out highlights on that alone. KyoAni has made a name for themselves by mentoring incredible in-house talent and treating them humanely—they could’ve released actual dogshit this year and I would’ve been ecstatic for them. That we got Maidragon at all is a minor miracle.

14. Horimiya

The first thing you’re likely to notice about Horimiya is its striking artstyle: delicate linework, gorgeous lighting, and the occasional impressionistic background to reflect its characters’ emotions. The second thing you’ll probably notice is just how dang charming of a romance it is. Focused on the titular Kyouko Hori, an intelligent high schooler who spends her off-time caring for her family, and the also-titular Izumi Miyamura, an introvert who dresses like a delinquent outside of class, the story is about their turn into the unlikeliest of odd couples when their after-school lives collide. The two make for a nuanced, easy-to-like pair, and the same goes for the rest of the show’s excellent ensemble. Horimiya is unfortunately not a perfect adaptation—it compresses a sixteen-volume manga into thirteen scant episodes, meaning it sometimes feels more like a greatest-hits relationship reel than an actual story. But thanks to the ridiculously talented team behind this (director Masashi Ishihama, character designer Haruko Iizuka, art director Yasunao Moriyaso), all of those best-of moments are given the weight and subtlety they deserve. 2021 may have been a light year for romances, but Horimiya was certainly my favorite of them, and it would’ve stood out from any pack anytime.

13. SK8 the Infinity

Many great sports shows are focused on grounded, tactical battles of wits and athleticism. Not so for SK8 the Infinity—between its lack of grounding and sheer homoerotic energy, it’s the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure or Symphogear of sports anime. SK8 is camp incarnate, with skaters who call out special moves while riding down cliffsides, illegal races where participants throw cherry bombs, and a flamboyant villain who zapateado dances on a deck shaped like a coffin. The fun is executed confidently, and even though the show’s main focus isn’t on psychological drama, the more dramatic moments are surprisingly solid, built upon fundamentally good character writing for its two protagonists. Plus, I mean, just look at it—the colors are infectious, the animation’s sumptuous, and the character designs are cheesy anime perfection. No matter how you slice it, SK8 is a rollicking good time.

12. SSSS.Dynazenon

In 2018, Studio Trigger released its best show to date in SSSS.Gridman, a reimagining of a classic tokusatsu property with a healthy pinch of Evangelion moodiness for flavor. Last year, this spinoff just about eclipsed it. SSSS.Dynazenon marks the return of everything that made its predecessor great: atmospheric daily-life segments, exuberantly toyetic fight scenes, phenomenal aesthetic design, and more than enough nods to series canon to placate the die-hardest of fans. And in a couple key ways, like its more well-rounded cast and its deadpan sense of humor, Dynazenon even improves upon the formula. Even though I ultimately found the main plot of this one a little less emotionally gratifying than Gridman’s, there’s still a world of stuff to appreciate here—including the fact that, in a year full of crunch horror stories and missed deadlines, this was a remarkably healthy production that its team completely finished before broadcast. With a Gridman x Dynazenon sequel movie in the works, I’m more confident than ever that Trigger’s got a special series on their hands.

11. Godzilla: Singular Point

Unlike the kaiju that overrun its fictional Tokyo’s streets, Godzilla: Singular Point belongs to a dying breed in anime. Full of hard-sci-fi jargon, hyperfixated on futuristic technology and monster worldbuilding, keeping one foot grounded in reality as it goes on pseudoscientific tangents; yes, S.P. is a true-blue work of speculative fiction, written by actual sci-fi novelist Toh EnJoe. His scripts lend the show an air of veracity—the technobabble is rooted in actual scientific principles and moves at a fast clip, expressed through dialogue so rapid-fire it’d make Aaron Sorkin blush. But far from drowning in its own dialogue (even if I did have to look up comments to understand the finale), the whole project is just plain fun, supported by a great baseline aesthetic for its 2D characters, weighty monster CGI courtesy of Studio Orange, and a smart main narrative that scope-creeps in all the right ways. The show didn’t garner a huge following when it came out, and this was never going to be everyone’s favorite Godzilla anyways, especially if you’re looking for immediate monster battles or self-contained episodic plots. But if there’s one under-watched, under-appreciated show from 2021 that I’d urge people to binge over a weekend, it’d be Singular Point. It’s one of the smartest pieces of anime we’ve had in a good long while.

10. 86

Anime is lousy with light novel adaptations, and to be blunt, most of them aren't worth writing home about. That makes it all the more impressive that 86 is not only a good show, but an extremely smart war story. Partly told from the perspective of Lena, an optimistic commander of a remote military drone unit, the story dives headlong into discussions about systemic racism and dehumanization when those “drones” are revealed to be piloted by child soldiers of oppressed races. It’s a grim story, and the script handles the proceedings with significant grace, never shying away from the death its characters face or allowing its protagonist to feel comfortable with half-baked fixes for systematic problems. The show’s also bolstered at every turn by motivated directorial choices, as it repeats conversations from multiple perspectives to reveal new information and executes brilliant match cuts that contrast the hell its soldiers inhabit with Lena's ill-begotten luxury. 86 is the type of harrowing, brutal show that many larger franchises aspire to, and it got there on its first try. 

9. Laid-Back Camp Season 2

Burned out on edgy war shows and need to cool down? Well, have I got a chaser for you. Laid-Back Camp Season 2 marks the return of everything that made the first season prime comfort food: relaxing camping vignettes, warm comedy, fun characters, and the most gorgeous background art to grace any modern show. If that sounds like more of the first season, that’s because, well, it is, and there’d have been few complaints if that was all. But under the hood, this second season makes a slew of subtle refinements that help the show become a purer version of itself: more confident comedy, a reduced focus on its how-to segments, an uptick in character introspection, and even the occasional dramatic beat (handled with a light touch, of course). They’re small things, but combined, they turn this season into all killer, no filler—or whatever the moe equivalent might be. Laid-Back Camp was already enjoyable; at this point, it’s one of the finest slice-of-life shows ever.

8. Super Cub

On the surface, there’s a lot connecting Super Cub and my previous entry: languid pacing, scenic vistas, quiet characters on motorbikes, even a focus on scraping together money for new gear. The difference in Super Cub lies in the deep sadness that permeates the beginning of its story. Main character Koguma is an orphan living grocery trip to grocery trip on her lonesome, struggling as much to bike the hilly rural roads to her school as she does to talk with classmates. Those first few episodes, especially the premier, are a stark contrast to almost any other show to air this year: they contain almost no dialogue or inner monologues, instead lingering unflinchingly in the lonely, depressive headspace of their lead. It’s a captivating and accurate-feeling portrayal of poverty and social anxiety—and that makes it all the more satisfying when Koguma buys a titular Super Cub bike on a whim, changing the course of her life.

Getting into bikes seems like a small thing, but the small victories are what Super Cub is about. Koguma’s initial struggles to fill her gas tank or change her oil make her eventual successes thrilling, and when she later catches the eye of a similar bike enthusiast and begins to come out of her shell, it’s more rewarding than five shows’ worth of big fight scenes. It’s also beyond satisfying to see what the artists behind this show were able to pull off in an apparently tight production, with outstanding backgrounds and delicate character animation lending credence to its atmospheric day-to-day focus. There may have been more perfect shows that aired this year, but few struck me with quite the precision as Super Cub.

7. Kageki Shoujo!!

The Takarazuka Revue—a Japanese, all-female musical theater troupe that’s been around for over a century—has had a profound impact on anime, most obviously in 90s classic Revolutionary Girl Utena and recent hit Revue Starlight. So leave it to Kageki Shoujo!!, another show that focuses on the Revue, to leave a huge impression. Kageki follows a cast of young women attending a prestigious music academy, where they must compete for roles and stardom on the stage. But unlike the surrealist paths that Utena and Starlight take, Kageki adopts a much more grounded approach to its story, focusing on the daily struggles of its leads and the challenges of honing your skills for professional performance. 

Kageki’s biggest asset is its script. Full of heart and humor, it’s effective at getting us into the perspectives of no less than seven central characters, effortlessly juggling their dreams, backstories, and relationships with a sharp ear for dialogue. There’s a wonderful sense of the characters being lived-in; in the same way that good mise en scéne can convey the history of an on-screen location, the writing here immediately conveys what drives these characters and how their backgrounds inform who they are in the present. That’s a crucial skill during early episodes, which unflinchingly tackle subjects like child abuse and eating disorders. And yet, that empathy is also what makes the show genuinely funny and insightful, with jokes that arise naturally from the characters’ personalities, wisdom about artistic expression within commercial entertainment, and critiques of the suffocating pressure of gender norms. At the time of writing, Kageki Shoujo!! hasn’t been renewed for a second season, which is a crying shame. Even in an amazingly packed year, this show’s performance was unforgettable.

6. Nomad: Megalo Box 2

2018’s Megalo Box was a fun but forgettable show, remarkable mostly for its sturdy rags-to-riches story and crunchy, old-school aesthetic. The same can’t be said for its sequel, Nomad. Set years after the events of the original, Nomad finds its protagonist Joe completely alone, addicted to alcohol and painkillers, throwing matches in underground boxing rings as he floats from town to town. When he encounters a community of illegal immigrants being forced off their land, Joe decides to help them win it back, and maybe just see if he can salvage the things he left behind.  

Nomad’s premise has a lot more in common with an HBO drama or Oscar-winning movie than with most anime, which is striking on its own, but the show goes far beyond its surface-level hook. Nomad is one of the few anime I’ve seen tackle issues of immigration and racism head-on—its early sympathetic portrayal of a migrant community, and its later condemnation of profit-seeking technology companies, make it one of the sharpest, most progressive shows in recent memory. That all ties in beautifully with Joe’s path to redemption, which itself is treated with gravitas: Joe’s addiction and selfish mistakes are problems too big for easy answers, and both Joe and the returning side cast are humanized in sensible, subtle ways that deepen them beyond the first season's simple archetypes. The show’s entire approach is encapsulated in its finale, which makes one of the boldest, most unusual choices I’ve seen from a sports show, all in an effort to underline its terrific thematic core. In so many ways, Nomad is the inverse of its first season, yet still in constant conversation it. It’s a mature, intelligent achievement, and a sequel that deserves to be talked about for many years to come.

5. Ranking of Kings

It’s hard to know where to start with Ranking of Kings, because the show truly is the whole package, but let’s begin with the art. Styled like a children’s storybook, with round, flexible character designs and bold colors, the show has an infectiously loose style that allows for stellar character acting, momentous fights, psychedelic freakouts, and one of the best portrayals of sign language I’ve seen in TV anime. It’s the perfect fit for its magical realist material—the story of the deaf Prince Bojji plays out like the best fable you never heard, with a strong moralist leaning and an underlying darkness poking at the edges of its kid-friendly presentation.

But for its aesthetic strengths, the core of what makes Ranking of Kings work so well is its empathy. It’s a story about how true strength is measured in a patriarchal society that values violence, and the way that the less fortunate and disadvantaged navigate that. That's explored through the tale of Bojji (the most adorable, likable onscreen protagonist this year), but also through the entirety of its side cast. In backstory on top of complex backstory, initially evil-seeming characters are revealed to have complicated and rational motivations, while seemingly good people do horrible things for understandable reasons. That constant changing of sympathies is key to Ranking of Kings’s success—characters often do things you don’t like, but more often than not, they’re trying and failing to do right. And more than simply putting its cast through the motions, the show is just effective at the whole thing—that pure empathy-building had me fully invested by the first episode, then sobbing on my lunch break by the second.

Given that I'm publishing this article in July 2022, I've gotta be honest: Ranking of Kings wound up as a major disappointment in its second half (which aired in winter 2022), pivoting hard into an unsatisfying shounen plotline while its production floundered. Yet what we saw from its first half was so, so good that I still want to highlight what it accomplished in 2021. It was the rare visual stunner with the writing to match, and a masterclass in engendering audience sympathy. If only for that first half, it deserves the highest of praise.

4. Odd Taxi

There’s a very good reason that Odd Taxi ranked highly on basically every anime critic’s year-end list, even garnering an honorable mention from the New Yorker: the show has the best script of last year, and it’s not close. Written by mangaka and TV scriptwriter Kazuya Konomoto, Odd Taxi is full of shockingly naturalistic dialogue that moves at the pace of actual conversation, with an incisive wit and dry sense of humor. There’s such a worldly specificity and subtlety to its dense conversations that it’s impossible not to get sucked in—despite starring a cast of cartoon animals, it’s more akin to a slow-paced Stephen Soderbergh film, or a Quentin Tarantino flick on downers.

Although Odd Taxi is most easily labeled a mystery, the better part of its first half is relaxed, planting narrative bait as it drifts through conversations that explore the intertwining of modern technology, social media, and our real lives. Those early episodes feature a lot of table-setting, but they’re so powerfully good and rewarding on their own that they feel like anything but—which means that when it finally blossoms into a full-on crime caper, it’s already got its hooks in you. Predictably, it also offers one of the most holistically satisfying final episodes of any show in recent memory, anime or not. Odd Taxi is the antithesis of modern anime in all the best ways—smart, original, dialogue-driven, and neatly wrapped up in thirteen episodes—and I’m overjoyed that it exists.

3. Wonder Egg Priority

There are a lot of reasons to hate Wonder Egg Priority.

The show loses focus in its last few episodes, pivoting from enigmatic earlier material into a disappointingly literal sci-fi story, and introducing an unsatisfying final villain as an answer to its mysteries. The long-delayed finale aired months after the main series and arrived with a wet thud, becoming universally disliked for how it failed to wrap up the glut of still-dangling narrative and emotional threads. The show intimately and unsettlingly lingers on the effects of child abuse and mental illness, but then, in little more than an attempt to buck expectations, betrays its own themes and trust in its child characters by coming to waffly, wrongheaded conclusions and potentially exonerating its shadiest adults. And, most importantly, its overly ambitious production and a lack of concessions by its leadership created a horrifying burden on the staff. In a year of great anime tarnished by awful working conditions, Wonder Egg Priority led the doomed charge, literally putting an animation producer in the hospital due to overwork.

Any of those issues is reason enough to drop the show or to never watch it in the first place. Its placement here is not to excuse those things. But I do think it’s important to highlight the other side of the coin, and to praise the work of everyone who made this show. Because for Wonder Egg’s first ten episodes, it’s one of the absolute best anime I've seen in a decade.

When Wonder Egg works, there’s almost too much to praise. The aesthetic is absolutely striking, a cinematic synthesis of Kyoto Animation’s (specifically Naoko Yamada’s) moe style with the avant-garde horror trappings of David Lynch and claustrophobic editing of Darren Aronofsky. The team of artists pulls off incredible feats even during its late-game struggles, with stupefyingly layered storyboards, beautiful post-processing effects, and animation that meets and surpasses many modern anime movies for fluidity and subtlety. It contains some of the best, most profound, most tactfully written individual episodes of the year, with reflections on abuse, gaslighting, gender roles, and self-harm that will stay with me long after the show falls out of public discourse. It’s confidently fragmented, dreamlike by design, and by offering few easy answers to the questions it poses, it often does what the best of art does: encouraging reflection and discovery by allowing us to piece together its various parts for ourselves. Wonder Egg Priority is a profoundly broken show by the end, yet even in looking over its cracked pieces, you can still see the outline of something truly special. For everything wrong with it, it is one of the best, most affecting shows of 2021.

*1. The Heike Story (TIE)

It was a strangely bittersweet day when it was announced that Naoko Yamada would be making a new anime at studio Science Saru. Bitter, because she was formally leaving behind KyoAni, the studio where she’d honed her craft and directed some of anime’s most influential works. Sweet, because after one of the industry’s greatest tragedies, we finally knew that anime’s greatest modern director was still making art. This would be her return to television anime: an adaptation of a six-hundred-year-old epic poem. 

To call The Heike Story an adaptation might undersell the amount of original thinking that went into this production. Yamada’s telling is radically adapted, condensing the many threads and cycles of the source's long political struggles, and adding Biwa, an original character (named after the string instrument) who can see the future by covering one eye. That may appear to be a strange choice for an historical drama, but it's a brilliant move—the perfect perspective character for a story Japanese audiences already know, and a metatextual stand-in for the biwa-playing bards who passed down the original through oral tradition. Beyond the script itself, Science Saru is a perfect fit for the experimental side of Yamada we saw in movies like Liz and the Blue Bird; here we get hard match cuts, obtuse flower language, dense shot layouts, and chronology that flips between the in-story present and Biwa’s future narration through song. All of those shifting modes and abstractions can make for an intimidating watch—and indeed, it can be hard to keep track of the rapid events and similar-looking characters—but it’s all in service of the series’ main goal: to bring life to the historical and weight to its tragedy.

In that, The Heike Story succeeds tremendously. Despite its history-textbook-sized cast of characters, they’re all humanized in ways big and small, finding feminist threads in its characters’ struggle with ancient gender roles and sorrow in the child cast’s slow realization of leadership's demands. And as the tale continues, it is increasingly informed by the weight of incalculable loss, the idea of being an observer to a tragedy you can't prevent. That thread stands on its own as a powerful interpretation of a centuries-old story, yet it is also impossible to read it as separate from the 2019 fire that killed so many of Yamada’s colleagues, as an expression of the grief and impotent sadness that comes with being a survivor.

There’s no point in beating around the bush: The Heike Story is one of anime’s great masterpieces, and possibly Yamada’s finest work. If I were making a misguided attempt to rank these shows objectively, this would inarguably be in first place, no tie, because it is just that ambitious and that well executed. It feels like a watershed moment for what animation can achieve—a rare confluence of directorial vision, staff excellence, and sweeping source material that feels unbeholden to commercial viability, allowed to exist outside of mainstream anime’s most common tropes and audience expectations. Its ruminations on tragedy, survivor’s guilt, and the purpose of storytelling get to the center of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a pointless and painful world where everything will eventually be taken from everyone, and the meaning that those left behind can make from that. It is an endlessly dark show; yet through the hope it finds in that darkness, it is also one of the most human.

*1. Sonny Boy (TIE)

There is no 2021 show I thought about more than Sonny Boy.

Throughout its run, as it follows a group of time-and-space-adrift middle schoolers through a multiverse of fantastical worlds, Sonny Boy is jarring. It flips between dimensions and styles on a dime. It's only occasionally soundtracked, and it's edited with harsh jump cuts that seem designed to confuse. The script, by series director Shingo Natsume (of One Punch Man and Space Dandy fame), often comes across as a vehicle for philosophical musings. It regularly delivers plot twists near the end of an episode, only to shift its focus away from characters' immediate reactions in the next. Developments are teased and then never delivered. Character arcs are completed offscreen. It seems like it's building to an emotional crescendo throughout the series, only to land on a final episode that languishes in dreary anticlimax.

The end effect is unlike any other show I've seen. Sure, its influences, including Kino's Journey, Evangelion, and the works of Masaaki Yuasa, are right there on its sleeve, yet each of its worlds and vignettes feels revelatory and alien, authentically abstract. It's mercurial, dry and distant in one moment only to level emotional gut punches in the next. And, in its pursuit of meaning, it often bends and discards traditional narrative structure in ways that feel entirely purposeful, even as they can be strange and unsatisfying.

The show had me hanging on its every word, yet I still found that last part challenging, especially in the wake of its anticlimactic finale. The show proper begs for close analysis, taunting the audience with mystery boxes and visual symbolism and character arcs that seem like they might be neatly resolved, only to end with key promises unfulfilled and important concepts unexplained. It was startling when I realized that the ultimate message of Sonny Boy, this fantastical story, might be that stories don't mean much. Maybe an entire series' worth of adventure, experienced by characters or viewers alike, can't truly change a person. Or perhaps a story's effect is ever so slight: convincing a young man to care for something small beyond himself; giving him the perspective to smile at what seems like a loss. A story, after all, can only be a beginning. The real work of growth has to come from within.

All of this might be total bullshit that Natsume himself would disagree with—in fact, it probably is—but that in itself might be the point. The end effect of Sonny Boy's arthouse posturing and reluctant answers is to make us think about the proceedings, to interpret. It doesn't matter if what we find doesn't line up with the creator's exact intent or some sort of lore bible, because in the act of interpreting, we create our own meaning, and we often carry that with us far longer. I think Sonny Boy knows that. It's incredibly weird, sometimes offputting, and masterful in its own way.

And that, ultimately, is why I'm including it here, tied with Naoko Yamada's latest masterpiece: for all their differences, both The Heike Story and Sonny Boy are stories that connect to the core of what art means. Heike does so explicitly, through its ruminations on the purpose of storytelling and oral tradition; Sonny Boy does so implicitly, through its subversion of expected form and disregard for textual meaning. In those ways, they both engage with how we make sense of the nonsensical, grant meaning to the existential, and try to get by in a world that's out of our control. For us to get even one show a year operating on this level is a pipe dream. That we got two so close together was one of 2021's greatest gifts.