I had been aware of Princess Tutu for many years, thanks to trailers on ADV Films discs in the mid-2000’s as well as praise for it among Twitter users I follow, but I didn’t actually watch it until this year through a Skype groupwatch over a number of weeks.
I’m participating this year in the anime blogging community’s annual “12 Days” posting spree after taking part in 2014 and skipping it in 2015. The current effort is being organized by appropriant and bloggers involved in the project are invited to use #12DaysOfAnime as a hashtag on Twitter.
Anime series with episodes less than 10 minutes long have become my primary type of anime I watch lately. I sampled many short anime in 2016 and I still need to complete some of them including Please Tell Me! Galko-chan, Space Patrol Luluco, Sekko Boys, and Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro. Here are five short-episode anime series I enjoyed watching this year that happen to all have episodes shorter than 5 minutes.
My rate of keeping up with newly-debuted anime series has fallen in the past few years. I had decided to not participate in this year’s Anime Secret Santa project since I figured I might not be able to completely watch and subsequently write a review of a recommended anime within the given timeframe. I also passed on joining other bloggers in the 12 Days project that started on December 14th because I didn’t feel like I had completed enough anime since January to adequately compose 12 posts.
I ended up beginning more series from 2015 than I’ve finished and there are others I would still like to try out, though I likely won’t get through those until the first couple months of next year. (My curiosity in wanting to sample new shows has gradually led to a long list of half-watched anime, especially since the growth of simulcasts has allowed me to easily try out a first episode on a whim.) I’ll attempt to wrap up watching as many 2015 series as I can before year’s end and write about the ones I complete.
The bulk of my current anime watching involves series with episodes lasting less than 15 minutes. Those shorter runtimes mean smaller weekly time commitments for me as a viewer and also mean the shows featuring those shorter episodes sometimes have more focused writing and pacing compared to their full-length counterparts. Over the past few months, I completed watching five such anime from this summer.
Technically, this scene was from 2013.
There are a lot of anime series that debut each anime season and many of them I don’t get around to sampling, either because I was watching other shows and/or I felt indifferent toward plot descriptions I read before they started. As weeks pass and people continue to talk about certain shows (mostly in a positive light), I think about maybe trying the ones I passed over after they finish their runs.
This post contains lists of anime series that premiered in 2014 I haven’t tried yet but still want to in the new year, broken down by debut season. I used general buzz from people I follow on Twitter as well as user ratings on Anime-Planet in compiling the titles. I also listed the shows I completed, started and dropped so that readers know what I did try during the year and, in some cases, need to finish.
Feel free to respond in the comments with recommendations of which series to definitely go for and which I shouldn’t bother with.
(By the way, some of the titles I listed below were profiled in Flawfinder’s countdown of disappointingly bad shows – I might be a little more cautious about those.)
D-Frag! was a series I sampled when it debuted in January and then forgot about until I returned to it in July after it finished airing.
#dfrag I think I like the chibi & reaction faces in this show more than the intended jokes. pic.twitter.com/Kv3QebnWdK
— Tom L. in springtime ❤⚖⚽⚾ (@calaggie) January 28, 2014
At first, I thought the show was okay but as I went along with the series, I opened up to most of the characters and their straightforwardness so I enjoyed it a lot more by the end.
After finishing the anime series, I’ve been getting the manga as Seven Seas publishes English-translated volumes in North America and it has the same humor as its anime adaptation.
I was glad to hear during the summer that FUNimation plans to release the show on home video in 2015 – I’ll certainly try to support it and attempt to listen to a likely dub.
At the beginning of the year, I got the idea to attempt to review one anime for each letter of the English alphabet during 2014. The thought was that I’d have about two weeks to watch a show or movie and write a post about it and that seems pretty easy, right?
Well, I fell behind the pace and I stopped after letter “C” when I realized I didn’t feel like making up the ground I’d lost.
The anime I did end up writing about were:
A – AIR
B – Book Girl (Bungaku Shoujo) movie
C – Chibi Maruko-chan movie
I liked all three of them (unfortunately, I lost the review posts when I had to restart the blog in October) and I enjoyed trying out a new project to start off the year, even though it fizzled out by March. At least I got chii from Oishii Anime to join me in blogging different anime for a couple months.
