Anime 20XX: An Introduction

A few years ago the digital magazine Paste ran an article about the top 100 anime movies of all time. It’s a solid list, if a little predictable, but it did get some traction for being co-curated by Jason DeMarco, the man who co-created Toonami on Cartoon Network and the guy in charge of selecting all the anime that airs on Toonami and Adult Swim (or at least all the anime he suggests that network thinks will do well). You can find the list here if you're interested in reading it yourself. A few months after that ran, Anime News Network writer and all around great guy Mike Toole wrote a series of articles in response to that past article. Essentially, he noted how lists like “Best anime movies” tend to be easy to predict since almost half of it will inevitably be some combination of films by Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, Mamoru Hosoda, and Makoto Shinkai. After thinking about it and getting an indirect challenge about it on Twitter, Toole decided to see if he could write an alternative top 100 list that didn’t repeat anything from the Paste article, which he did. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 and I recommend you do, because they’re good lists, like anything Mike Toole writes.

Reading these got me thinking about anime films, specifically that of the 200 movies and OVAs listed in those articles, I hadn’t actually seen all that many of them. Sure, I’d seen a bunch of the obvious ones, but that was still a small minority of both lists and even some of the obvious ones that “everyone” has seen had still managed to slip by me. So I decided to put a little project together that I’m calling “Anime 20XX” where I’ll combine the Paste list and Mike Toole’s list together, arrange them in chronological order, and watch and write about as many as I can until I finish or get too busy to continue doing this. And then it took about 3 years for everything to get off the ground cause I need to see what was in print in the United States and how easy it would be to get some of these movies and suddenly it’s 2020 already. But hey, at least I’m finally starting it. So come back here later today (probably) for the first entry in Anime 20XX, which according to my notes will be about...none of the movies mentioned in either list, but a short overview of some notable early anime shorts that predate the first feature length anime film.

…Yeah, that sounds like something I’d do. See you later today!