Modern Anime and Why I like to go back to find new anime
I will say ReZero was my favorite anime in the 2020s. Thematically is was meaningful, wasn't cliche, and despite some silly moments was serious despite its appearance. People here will cite COTE and Oshinoko as great anime which sure if you turn your brain off I will give Oshinoko that. COTE is an insult because it makes Ayanakoji intellegent by the rest of the characters being dumb. Andor was a lot better at showing you what truly being intellegent in the most practical and brutal sense means.
Vinland Saga and AOT are fantastic. Especially Vinland Saga, its truly a great piece of work. I feel as if Demon Slayer and Spy X family are just limp. Genuinely overplaying "Sad" moments, and intent moments. ReZero does a much better job organically bringing up this tension.
I miss Older Anime because you get so much meaningful TV that is sparse in todays environment. I mentioned AOT and Vinland Saga.
Cowboy Bepbop, Fist of the North Star, Samurai Champloo, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Steins Gate, Death Note, Bleach, Kimi No Todoke, and many more can capture emotion without manufacturing it with less emotion too. I love hitting the steins gate rewatch because I find new things every rewatch that makes it better.
Modern Anime fails to promote stuff that actually has characters, world, and a plot. I would say March Comes like a Lion, Your lie in April, White Album 1 or 2 forgot, Erased, and Dr Stone are fantastic but they get so overshadowed the the generic shonen and romance slop that fails to appreciate characters. I think many will find DIVE refreshing before Haikyuu overplaying flashbacks.
What I am saying is that Steins gate made me realize how much the quiet moments and the silent characterization. The showing of affection not the grand display is what makes any show or movie great. I want to feel something about a show even if its crushing like the 1997 berserk show and ongoing manga. The fact HunterXHunter a show with kids is more deep than shows with actual adults is damning to the fact that cool and edgy characters alone are such a lazy and lame way to paint a beautiful story anime is capable of.
Can we not make our characters more real. Can we produce real conflict. There is so much potential.
Vinland Saga and AOT are fantastic. Especially Vinland Saga, its truly a great piece of work. I feel as if Demon Slayer and Spy X family are just limp. Genuinely overplaying "Sad" moments, and intent moments. ReZero does a much better job organically bringing up this tension.
I miss Older Anime because you get so much meaningful TV that is sparse in todays environment. I mentioned AOT and Vinland Saga.
Cowboy Bepbop, Fist of the North Star, Samurai Champloo, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Steins Gate, Death Note, Bleach, Kimi No Todoke, and many more can capture emotion without manufacturing it with less emotion too. I love hitting the steins gate rewatch because I find new things every rewatch that makes it better.
Modern Anime fails to promote stuff that actually has characters, world, and a plot. I would say March Comes like a Lion, Your lie in April, White Album 1 or 2 forgot, Erased, and Dr Stone are fantastic but they get so overshadowed the the generic shonen and romance slop that fails to appreciate characters. I think many will find DIVE refreshing before Haikyuu overplaying flashbacks.
What I am saying is that Steins gate made me realize how much the quiet moments and the silent characterization. The showing of affection not the grand display is what makes any show or movie great. I want to feel something about a show even if its crushing like the 1997 berserk show and ongoing manga. The fact HunterXHunter a show with kids is more deep than shows with actual adults is damning to the fact that cool and edgy characters alone are such a lazy and lame way to paint a beautiful story anime is capable of.
Can we not make our characters more real. Can we produce real conflict. There is so much potential.
Commentaires
And even back then there was still "limp" anime along with the classics you listed. also dont forget that anime for the most part is just an ad for a LN/manga
In 20 years 2025 (or some other year in the 2020s) will be compared to 1998, or 2006, or 2011, etc.
My point being anime is just animation made in Japan, it’s as broad as American cartoons.
If you want to find something chances are it’s there, but you can’t be mad that someone else went looking for something else.
It’s like someone who watches the Simpsons can also like Ben 10 . Both animations but with wildly different plot lines and depth to the characters. It’s not which is better it’s what you’re in the mood for.
It’s pretending. I’ve mentioned Kimi No Todoke, I could add Bunny Girl Senpai for romance. Some shows have bad writing. Appreciate you pointing this out.
2013 was also the time period where I first started watching seasonal anime. So maybe I have a bias for that period of time.
I think the most substantial difference between the two decades is the quality of what's popular. When I scroll through the most popular shows in the 2000s, a lot of my favorites are on, or even near the top of that list. Sure, some of my top 10 is missing, but a lot is there.
When I scroll through the most popular shows of the 2010s, not many of them I consider favorites. Most of my top 10 is missing from the list. And many shows there are things I dropped. For some reason, this is a decade where there was often a separation between what is popular and what is good. Which probably sours people looking back at the era.
Suffering from my experience isn’t what I’d give to Isekai. This one had it. It had joy, love, and friendship. Felt like it ended there. Feel free to cite anything I didn’t mention in the post.
Maybe by SHEER VOLUME we're getting more iffy anime nowadays because we're getting literally more anime per season, quite significantly, but I'd say percentage-wise we might even be getting MORE good anime nowadays if you poke outside of the usual realm of what's big and popular.
Apocalypse Hotel is a fantastic example of characters changing their beliefs and learning to appreciate the beauty of the world and loving what they have now rather than simply waiting for what they want to come later, Umamusume is one of the best sports dramas we've gotten in ages and it's using HORSE GIRLS for it, don't think anyone's gonna argue with Frieren. Gonna shout out the entirety of the SSSS.Gridman series, which capped off with a BRILLIANT film a year or two ago, and that has some of the most beautifully realistic portrayals of... PEOPLE I've seen in anime, and it's a friggin' tokusatsu show by Trigger lol.
I could go on for far too long with details and examples, but do try to not tunnel vision on the classics TOO much. There's absolutely some amazing anime that have, clearly, stood the test of time, but for each Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion, you could easily find 5 to 10 utter flops from around the same time that people just don't talk about because they were bad lol.
So yeah, I do suggest just... looking hard at ALL years of anime, because while the classics are remembered fondly for a reason, the way people consume anime nowadays tends towards things getting swept under the rug really quickly, which means there's quite a lot of awesome stuff floating around that simply got drowned out by whatever currently had the most marketing oomph. We'll never get "classics" again as we currently know them, but that doesn't mean that shows aren't being made that by all means are up to that standard of quality, know what I mean?
There is good modern anime, like Apothecary Diaries, there are countless of old mid stuff.
The equation is simple: the good ones simply pass the test of time and are talked years or decades later and the rest falls into oblivion. As it has always been.
Based for the Re:Zero opinion, such a valid take for COTE and yet such a bizarrely awful one about OnK.
Anyway this is largely just a result of the bad shit being selectively forgotten over time. The proportion of good anime nowadays is about the same as it has for the last 10-15 years, I can tell you from experience, but now the sheer volume of mid and bad rising in proportion to the total, plus old bad anime fading from memory and many shows good and bad fading somewhat from memory by not being re-licensed for streaming makes it seem like almost everything nowadays is just a slurry.
I can completely agree with you that we get a good deal more slop released now than we used to. While that's true, the overall amount of anime being produced has skyrocketed. Pound for pound, more great anime is being produced than at any point in history. It's just buried in between the trendy shows and the slop.
The other point I'd like to make is that all of your examples seem to be popular shows. What's popular is not always what's good. When I first was getting into anime, Sword Art Onlone was the since sliced bred. Now, it's hardly even discussed. The flashy but vapid anime fade away in time. Solo Leveling will share the same fate. Many other popular anime today will share that fate. But many great anime will still stand strong.
What you might need more than anything is somebody to tell you what's worth watching. Whether it's a person, a discord group, or a website, you need someone to filter through the trash to pick out what's worth your time. Given how all of your examples were mega-hits, I suspect you're missing out on a ton of anime that I consider classics that aren't all that popular.
For starters, I'd recommend you check out Orb: OnThe Movements of the Earth. That should renew your faith in modern anime. I can give you more recs of you want.
TLDR: Watch better modern anime. Watch Orb
I said modern anime could really be promoting better names. I also mentioned potential. It’s more of my dissapointment in that aspect.