My personal anime golden age is 2004-2015

The years 2004-2014 are peak to me. A vast majority of my favorite anime fall in this 10 year time period

Monster, howls moving castle, Beck Mongolian chop squad, bleach, mushishi, Katekyo human reborn, code geass, Gurren lagann, toradora, fairy tail, Redline, steins gate, hunter x hunter, jojos bizzare Adventures, attack on titan (yes season 1 is my favorite), kill la kill, psycho pass, akame ga kill, and your lie in april. Im probably forgetting a few but a vast majority of my 8/10 and 9/10 and 10/10 anime comes from this period. Now there a some outliers obviously i like some stuff before 2004 like dragon ball, evangelion, and cowboy bepop and some stuff after 2014 like your name, jujutsu Kaisen and frieren. Im not saying that 2004-2014 anime are the only ones that matter im just saying that on average I find more enjoyment in shows from that time period for some reason.

I can enjoy a random 7/10 anime from that time period way more than whatever gets churned out by the modern seasonal slop machine.

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Commentaires

Alarmed-Version-23862026-01-14 10:13

Idaten jum 💓

Plenty-Cricket97152026-01-14 10:14

Hitman reborn

SniperInfinite2026-01-14 10:17

The anime golden age is right now

liketosmokeweed4202026-01-14 10:19

This is the slop age man, there used to be so many good anime only as in no manga base. Now we got Isekai, Isekai, Isekai, FIRE ANIME FROM BASED MANGA, isekai, girls doing cute things, FIRE ANIME FROM BASED MANGA. There was way better anime back in the day.

kingocd2026-01-14 10:41

Anime we have right now is better. We get more slop, because we get more anime, period.

For example in 2012, the strongest season was likely fall. Gintama, Psycho Pass, Bakuman, Shinsekai Yori, Initial D, Sakurasou, Magi; all pretty good.

This season we have: JJK, Frieren, Oshi no Ko, Sentenced to be a Hero, Fate, Hells Paradise, Golden Kamuy, Fire Force, all also pretty good. Both seasons have some widely accepted masterpieces, but we now have more, a lot more.

VoidEmbracedWitch2026-01-14 11:01

Gods, I wish we still got cute girls doing cute things. Feels like they're a twice a year occurrence now, but at least the moeblobs we do get tend to be some of the better looking shows of the year like Sorairo Utility.

Also, that lineup of what we get is missing a lot of mediocre at best romances that wish they looked as good as MariMite. [Explaining the insult since I don't trust people to have watched MariMite] >!it's rather minimal on the production front, but has decent boards as well as a cohesive aesthetic, which is exponentially more than I can say about weaker modern productions.!<

qef152026-01-15 19:43

Well, we actually got a shit ton of CGDCT this year.

Slime 300 S2, Mono, Hibimeshi, Ruri Rocks, Egatae, NinKoro, Bad Girl, Zatsu Tabi and Food Court all aired this very year.

And all of them IMO are minimally of good quality. There were certainly worse CGDCT in the past IMO despite having more in quantity.

Especially standouts this year like Food Court and Hibimeshi and on the other hand Mono was very well animated, while Ruri Rocks combines it all into a general masterpiece that they somehow manage to equal Onimai in animation quality, while providing a very good anime outside production values.

All of this makes me happy for the current CGDCT schedule. Let's not go back to the late 2010's when CGDCT was slowly becoming a real footnote (not so much the hits, as much as it were the weaker ones being really weak), instead of a minor, but consistently strong genre. The genre simply reinvented itself.

qef152026-01-15 19:41

> girls doing cute things

Forgot the early 2010's? It was full of cute girls doing cute things. And they were slightly worse IMO than what is on display today in average quality.

This year especially had them be actually very good across all anime released in the CGDCT genre.

Mysterious-Roll-33262026-01-14 10:38

This is gold anime right here; ***Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon***

liketosmokeweed4202026-01-14 10:18

Haruhi, Azumanga, Welcome to the NHK just to name a few of the best anime of all time.

Few_Highlight11142026-01-14 10:22

Going to take a guess and say OP is probably 30 lmao.

kn1g472026-01-14 10:24

Dear diary

gobananagopudding2026-01-14 10:24

I mean, all of this mostly depends on your age and when you actually had the time to watch countless series.

TMNAW2026-01-14 10:31

Late 70's to mid-to-late 80's were up there.

2004 to 2015 was very good too though. Around the time where digital animation improved drastically from the early 2000's, lots of auteurs producing some of their best work or coming to the forefront (Hosoda, Yamada, late-career Kon, Yuasa, etc.). I would probably put an endpoint earlier than 2015, since I don't think the early 2010's were nearly as strong as the mid 2000's though.

Gooxgox2026-01-14 10:34

1950-1970: The great generation

1970-1980: The Renaissance

1980-1990: The Enlightenment

1990-2006: The Golden age

2006-2020: The Great Leap forward

2020-now: The Dark(slop) ages

Kadmos12026-01-14 12:01

Which era was The Great Answer?

Less_Party2026-01-14 11:10

It's not a very cohesive 'era' if you ask me, 2004 is still firmly in the horrifically ugly early digital era while stuff from 2014 is just modern.

doctordoom852026-01-14 11:47

Honestly about the same for me.

2006/2007 were particularly insane.

Baccano, Black Lagoon, Claymore, Code Geass, Darker than Black, Death Note, Eureka Seven, Genshiken, Gintama, Gundam 00, Gurren Lagann, Haruhi Suzumiya, Higurashi, Kanon, Lucky Star, Moribito, Mushishi, Nana, Noein, Ouran High School, School Rumble, Toward the Terra, Welcome to the NHK, xxxHolic.

It‘s been said to death, but I do think anime will just hit harder for a lot of people (but not everyone) in the first few years they discover it (assuming they don’t live in a country/region where they’re exposed to it as early as childhood). Like I grew up with movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, but aside from DBZ, Pokémon, and Digimon during my high school years (which I recognized were different to cartoons in a way, but didn’t assume much beyond that or look into it further beyond that), I had no exposure to anime, and it was only in 2005 during my college years when I first began hearing about anime and decided to look into further than that. Obviously I didn’t just check out recent shows, there was some older anime before ‘05 I watched and became some of my favorites (Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, FLCL), but the following few years and checking out the new anime series of those years with my new best friend who I met around the same time were like discovering a wealth of treasure I never knew about until then. It was a sense of excitement and wonder that ultimately can’t last (not to say anime won’t still be very enjoyable, but it‘s no longer this new sensation) and just can’t be replicated.

So I would never say the period (or any period) was the best period of anime, but it was for me the period of anime that wowed me the most, and while there have been certain series since that have somewhat given me that sense briefly, it is just impossible, regardless of the quality, for a show now to capture that feeling I had back then again.

dfiekslafjks2026-01-14 11:56

It's easy to point to all the trash anime being released and say this era is worse, but also there is 10x more anime being produced today so it still averages out to be the same.

Everyones_Dead_Dave2026-01-14 12:33

Exactly this, there's a saturation of the market, hopefully its like the Game crash of '83 and we can have a hard reset of old school anime with the quality of modern animation.

Quiddity1312026-01-14 18:24

I wouldn't desire this as if there is a market crash the odds are that what gets produced is going to be the opposite of what hardcore anime fans want. You'd see more reliance on things that are sure to sell (isekai slop). You'd see over reliance on established IPs instead of new, unique things. And you'd absolutely see a bigger push for AI in the anime's production.

Needleworker_Pitiful2026-01-14 20:19

I just think the top anime of this era are good too me aside from a handful. Like I didn't like solo leveling, spy x family, Kaiju no 8, my dress up darling, ranking of kings, Tokyo revenges, kaguya sama love is war, fire force, komi cant commicate, rising of the shield hero, Classroom of the elite, blue lock, tomo chan is a girl, oshi no ko, mashle, dandadan, the promise never land and darling In the franxx.

All the anime I just mentioned i view as 7/10 or lower

FetchFrosh2026-01-14 22:14

Compared to 2006 the amount of anime today isn't really that different. I'd actually place decent odds that there were more total anime episodes produced in 2006 than in 2025 given just how many were 2+ cour at the time.

Kuramhan2026-01-14 14:29

1995 to 2010 is the golden age imho. The release of Evangelion to the fall of studio Madhouse.

It's not that there was more great anime in that period. In fact, I'm sure more great anime is coming out annually now then back then. But I feel like that was a period of the greatest creative freedom and passion projects. The industry was simply more willing to go out on a limb and green light projects that weren't a sure thing. And we got some of the best anime ever out of it.

Yooper_Eh2026-01-14 16:34

Chrono Crusade was the first anime dvd I ever purchased. It’s kinda funny seeing older anime’s screen ratios on newer tvs. Soooo much room on the sides.

HowToVenusaur2026-01-14 16:35

Maybe this is already a fairly accepted opinion, but I don't think there really is a "golden age" in the way most people think of it (i.e., the overall amount of "I really like this show" or above quality entertainment being produced being very high). You can probably try to quantify the amount of money that goes towards productions, the amount of time they are given to realize their creative ventures, the types of people at the helm of big projects and their overall track record from that time on, etc., but those things individually only paint part of the picture, and I don't think it's what people are talking about when they are referring to a Golden Age anyway. They just mean the era with the most stuff coming out that they enjoyed.

When taken from that perspective is gets super fuzzy. Not just because everyone is gonna like different stuff, but I wager that often, most people's Golden Eras also happen to coincide with the time they first *really* got into the hobby, or immersed into the hobby as a fully functional adult. If I had to choose, that would also be true of me. My favorite era, quantitatively, is probably the early 2010s, but that's also the time period I started seriously watching anime seasonally.

People also have short memories and nostalgia goggles on with eras gone by, I find. Everyone forgets the slop that gets churned seasonally within a year or so, let alone slop from a bygone era. Hell, people rarely talk about *good* shows from more than 15 years ago. There's also a lot of series' from those decades that were well received at the time that I think frankly don't hold up to scrutiny now. Beck? Last Exile? Both super well regarded when they released. Me personally? I wouldn't rewatch them if you paid me, probably. Let alone call them better than something airing just this season like Ikoku Nikki.

If I had to guess, the number of truly stand out shows that come out every year is probably similar (with some variation, obviously), but they're also lost in a sea of an increasingly large number of "yeah that's pretty good" tier shows, and "wow that's fucking awful" shows. The ratios are likely similar but the sheer amount of anime being produced is tricking people into thinking it's different now because there's more to search through to get to the treasure.

jamessurname2026-01-15 02:23

Bu-but what abt the 90's 🥺

qef152026-01-15 19:45

I have two, but that's because I'm super biased towards a single genre.

Namely 2006-mid 2010's and 2022-now. CGDCT either being numerous or pretty much every CGDCT being actually good minimum (back in the day you did have quite some duds that fell flat).