Welcome back to our little pandemic introduction to anime, but first: I've got some questions about how, or if, you'd all like to see this mini-series continue. Skip to the end for that part, and pipe up in comments if you have some thoughts.
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
After that brief bit of housekeeping, onward we go.
We've been targeting these guides towards complete newcomers to Japanese animated shows and movies, introducing famous shows that die-hard fans often cite as the shows that first hooked them, an assortment of new, internationally-produced shows intended from the outset for American markets, and some mega-hits that may or may not be your own cup of tea.
Having used up a good chunk of the best shows you can watch without turning on subtitles, we're now going to abandon that restriction and just go for the best of the best. That's not to say that many of these next choices don't have English voice-overs (called dubs) available. Some do, some don't. No promises.
You can pick and choose, but from here on know that even if shows have been translated into English (or any other language), you might still enjoy the Japanese language versions more. In those versions, the acting is precisely what the director intended the acting to be; the intonations have been done and redone until the results are either satisfactory or (cough) everybody runs out of time. The same care is not always taken with the English language versions, but it's entirely dependent on the show.
But there will be an adjustment period involved. After a few shows these problems fade; after a bunch of shows you will be picking up on the most common Japanese idioms as if it were nothing. The next step after that will be hearing those common phrases and now being genuinely miffed at the subtitles when the translators stretch their meaning to make the conversation flow better in English. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I have led you down a dark path, and I feel absolutely no remorse at all.
So let's get to it. Here are a few good "next" anime hits for newcomers who have landed at the "I've seen the famous ones, I want more!" stage of fandom. These won't steer you wrong. Even if you decide you don't like them, you won't feel like they've wasted your time.
March Comes In Like A Lion
For those that like: Drama, comedy, slice-of-life stories
We'll start with a pair of feel-good and/or tearjerker stories that are slow paced, low on action, and just generally pleasant places to spend some time. In the catch-all slice of life genre, the world does not need saving, there are few if any giant robots, and nobody is going to transform from schoolgirl to magical evil-zapping princess ... usually. Usually.
March Comes In Like a Lion follows the life of occasional high school student Rei Kiriyama, a professional shōgi player who lost his family in an accident and is now living on his own. He is adopted, not in the legal sense but in the bringing-home-a-stray-cat sense, by the eldest of a trio of sisters who also lost their own parents. Hollow and depressed, Kirayama plays shōgi to pay the bills. But he slowly becomes more and more a part of his new family, and reliant on it.
You don't need to know anything about shōgi, a game very similar to chess; you will be taught the rules via, and please do not hate me for this, a series of peppy music videos starring anthropomorphic cats. The show is part sports show, focusing on Rei's attempts to win and advance, but also about bullying, depression, loneliness, young romance, and take-your pick. Despite that gloomy description, it's also funny and relentlessly optimistic.
If you like the hook of young professional sports player attempting to find a foothold for themselves, you can also try the older and supernatural-focused Hikaru no Go. No young romance in that one, only a thousand year old ghost haunting his new prodigy-to-be into mastery of a game Hikaru had no interest in or evident skill at.
Your Lie in April
For those that like: Classical music, drama, romance.
The second of our month-named choices, Your Lie in April follows a young piano prodigy who is no longer a prodigy. After his mother's death, Kōsei Arima can no longer hear the notes he plays. After new friend-of-a-friend Kaori ropes him into playing accompaniment in her own violin competition, he reluctantly returns to the piano.
That's all you'll get by way of explanation. The rest unfolds as it does. If you're a classical music fan you'll like the setting, a series of competitive musical tournaments; the main theme, though, is overcoming trauma and finding reasons to carry on.
If the piano theme or the devotion to classical music resonates, follow up with Forest of Piano, on Netflix, the story of a different prodigy on a different path. Kai is a dirt-poor child who teaches himself to play the piano by ear—something that happens solely because he stumbles on an old, supposedly "haunted" piano in the woods near his apartment. Not much would-be romance in this one: It's instead a more single-minded story of the one-sided rivalry that pits Kai's once best friend, trained from birth to be a piano great, against Kai's seemingly effortless musical talents. In the middle is Kai's new mentor, a famous piano master whose career ended after injury.
If those are too slow-paced or have too many emotional calories to stomach during a Worldwide Death Pandemic, however, let's switch things up. As in, a lot.
Mob Psycho 100
For those that like: One-Punch Man, Supernatural, superheroes, action, camp.
This one is different from, well, pretty much everything else. Is our hero still technically in school, and dealing with the troubles of adolescence? Yes. Is there a love interest? Also yes. And good luck finding any other parallels.
Our superhero Shigeo, known by nickname Mob, is about the most mild-mannered and quiet boy you could imagine. Unfailingly polite, kind, and near-emotionless, he is barely a person at all. But he's also an astonishingly powerful psychic, which in this version of Japan means two things: telekinetic powers (while other psychics may bend spoons, Shigeo can effortlessly bend entire buildings) and exorcising evil spirits.
But Mob is not emotionless, he's just been carefully suppressing his emotions after injuring his own brother in a prior psychic rage. Uncomfortable with his powers, he seeks the advice of professional psychic Reigen, a con artist with no powers whatsoever; Reigen knows a gold mine when he sees one, and soon puts Mob to work as an underpaid and overused not-fake assistant.
The title comes from what happens when Mob can no longer contain his emotions and lets loose. It's not pretty. Or, actually, it's very pretty—there just tends to be quite a bit of property damage.
The show was showered with critical praise for its distinctive art style and action scenes, deceptively crude-looking lines that twist and flow when it's evil-battling time. It is aggressively silly and slapstick. Our hero is cringingly awkward. His new con artist mentor is cringingly pathetic. Even his new evil spirit sidekick (I said what I said) can't help feel sympathy for the kid. It's got heart, wrapped in a goofball comedy, wrapped in an unconventionally drawn smash-em-up action show with a battle-of-the-week plot.
Haikyu!!
For those that like: Sports
As you'd expect, there are many, many anime series focused around sports. Not all of them are good. Some of them are horrible. Haikyu!! is one of the best, and is good enough that even people who generally don't like sports-oriented shows might find themselves hooked.
Haikyu!! is primarily the story of would-be boys volleyball ace Hinata, who is obsessed with the game despite being one of the shortest players in the league, and glowering Kageyama, whose own obsession with winning has rendered him friendless and distrusted. Plopped onto the same high school team, they and the other players look to revive the once-championship school team from their current mediocrity.
What the show does well, very well, is show the individual genius of every player but the excruciating difference between single-player genius and team success. Rival teams and schools are not turned into cheap villains, as they are on so many other sports-themed shows, but are treated with respect: they're rivals, not enemies. Similarly, while there may be astonishingly talented teammates and rivals both, the show generally avoids giving anyone superhuman powers—again, a too-common trap of sports-themed shows. Players that seem to have superhuman talent have their weaknesses probed and revealed by rivals; everyone here is smart, and nobody here is invincible.
The pacing can be slow, with individual games often stretching into multiple episodes with player-backstory-of-the-week acting as filler between consequential moments, but the solid writing is devoted to showing the details and nuances of its sport. It works.
If you're a fan of sports shows, you'll have quite a selection. A good second choice might be Yowamushi Pedal; as you can guess, it’s about cycling. That one does tend to lean a bit harder into "my rivals are not fully human" tropes and makes liberal use of backstory-of-the-week filler, but redeems itself with its unlikely lead. Onoda is an anime-obsessed kid who considers himself to have no athletic skills, but one who has spent years compulsively biking to and from the city of Akihabara on a one-gear "mommy bike" so as to visit the city's anime, manga, and hobby stores. That rather insane weekend regimen has turned him into a hill climbing monster.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!
For those that like: Satire, action, comedy
Continuing our scattershot approach that includes a little bit of everything, here's something else that's aggressively different. The anime landscape has been littered with isekai shows this last decade, shows in which an unfortunate protagonist is transported to an alternate world and must learn to survive and/or become the absurdly overpowered hero of a generally magic-infused and demon-stuffed new land. Some are good; others are transparently meant to piggyback off the others. Very, very few turn the trope on its head, so here's one that does.
In The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, the Demon Lord Satan is on the verge of being beaten by his world's heroes and flees across to dimensions to ... this world's Tokyo, of course, where his magic (mostly) does not work and where he and his most trusted general, Alciel, must now find a way to survive as Normal Boring Humans. As in, feed themselves. Satan, now calling himself Sadao Maō, therefore gets a part-time job at not-McDonald's, enough to make rent on a modest apartment, and settles in.
Satan, as it turns out, has a hell of a work ethic. He may not have magical powers, but he takes his job seriously and has plans to conquer our world in the means that seem most apparent and plausible: rising up the management ranks of his chosen fast-food chain. Alas, he may be foiled by the not-KFC franchise across the street and by his arch-nemesis and former world's heroine, who has travelled across the same dimensional rift to murder him murderingly, and things get complicated. Caught between them is Chiho, a fellow not-McDonalds part-timer who soon develops a crush on, um, Satan.
This one may be a hit-or-miss with you, depending strictly on your sense of humor. The charm of the show is our would-be heroine's exasperation at "new" Satan, who genuinely seems to have settled into a satisfying life as fast-food wage slave and who does not appear to be on the verge of murdering anyone. It's the reversal of the standard hero and villain roles that make the whole thing not just watchable, but a pleasant change of pace.
Natsume's Book of Friends
For those that like: Supernatural, family fare.
For our last one in this eclectic list we'll go with a family-friendly choice. Natsume's Book of Friends is a long-running series about an orphan who grew up with the ability to see yokai, commonplace but invisible spirits that range from indifferent to humans to maneaters. (It's currently available on Crunchyroll, though it will take some searching as every season is awkwardly split from the others.)
When we first meet Takashi Natsume, he's landed in a quiet rural town after being passed from relative to relative, each family taking him only begrudgingly and rejecting him soon afterwards for his strange behavior. He has resolved to hide his ability to see spirits, so as to not cause trouble, but he also has no particular hope of staying in this town more than any of the others, and distances himself from classmates accordingly.
There’s a catch, of course. He soon learns that his grandmother, a powerful exorcist named Reiko, grew up in this same town. Specifically, he learns this because the aggressive local yokai, who are bad at telling humans apart by face but quick to discern their spiritual "smell", begin to chase Natsume furiously in the impression that his powerful grandmother has returned. They don't just want to kill him, but want to retrieve Reiko's most prized possession—the scrapbook in which Reiko inscribed each of their names, bonding them into her service, after beating them each in spiritual battle.
Natsume is saved by an unlikely ally. After breaking the barrier sealing the most powerful yokai in the area, a massive cat-creature named Madara, Madara agrees to protect him if Natsume agrees to give him Reiko’s "Book of Friends" upon Natsume's death. Madara, who now spends most of his time trapped in the "lucky cat" form that mimics the statue he was long imprisoned in, becomes Natsume's weird, fat housecat, and lives a new satisfying life of eating sweets, sneaking out to drinking parties, and smacking any yokai who looks to steal Natsume’s book out from under him.
The series is sweetness-filled and unassuming. Yokai cause trouble, either for Natsume, his family, or his new friends; Natsume does his best to solve the trouble while still concealing that he can see spirits in the first place. This all takes place in an idyllic rural town, and for a series that technically revolves around whether or not its main character will be torn to bloody pieces by invisible monsters, the weekly action tends to be surprisingly low-key—in a good, family-friendly way. It emphasizes friendship, understanding, family bonds and enjoying life even if the supernatural monsters on your doorstep keep telling you how delicious you look.
Which, as it turns out, translates alarmingly well to the position we find ourselves in this year. Hmm.
Now for the housekeeping!
This last one, again, was an eclectic mix of shows, and intentionally so: It's meant to guide newcomers towards new genres, not to be a "best anime of all time" list or anything like it. If you like any of these, we can guide you towards a dozen more that will scratch the same itch.
But stay in the house, please. We've got at least six more months of pandemic ahead of us, which is why I'm conspicuously promoting a new hobby that you can do from in front of your television. Take up ballroom dance some other year.
Now for the housekeeping part. This was originally intended to be a four or five part series for the holiday break, something light and fluffy to bring us over 2020's final rocks. But anime fans will know that we've only scratched the surface of the surface of even the "best" shows, and our installments have gotten, to be honest, much more feedback than anticipated. So here's where we can go from here:
1) We can let this drop. This is a political site, and these misadventures are just for fun. Having engaged in a bit of stay-at-home boosterism, we can call our job done and move on.
2) We can continue, and continue the hodgepodge, capsule-review-heavy theme of random-assortment-of-good.
3) We can continue but, now that we've given the introductions, target future installments towards the best of certain genres or around certain themes, things like "fantasy worlds" or "horror" or "slice of life feel-goods" or the surprisingly well-stocked "shows in which our main character is hit by a truck in episode one and dies."
4) We can highlight individual shows with longer reviews. We also have to decide whether we include reviews of shows that have serious problems—as we did in the capsule review of the good but flawed Sword Art Online—or if we want to ignore those and focus only on those we can most highly recommend.
There are probably other possibilities as well. Just as we've noted in other pop culture reviews in the past, art and politics can go hand in hand. We're allowed to have fun if we want to.
Some fun. As in, once every week or two tops. Don't give me a new part-time career here, I've been barely hanging on through this chaos as it is.
So it's time to weigh in in the comments. This small series has gotten rather more positive feedback than expected, and now it's your turn to decide whether we’re good to stop here or this becomes a new weekly or monthly or quarterly site diversion. No poll, because maybe someone else’s idea will end up being better than any of these. And keep those recommendations coming!