Let's Go! Anime in 2024

2024: a year that saw the release of acclaimed anime films such as Look Back, The Colors Within and Ghost Cat Anzu. It was also a deceptively good year for original television series, with Brave Bang Bravern, Train to the End of the World and Negative Positive Angler standing out from the crowd. Girls Band Cry and Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night fought a heated battle for audience attention in the spring; meanwhile, Kyoto Animation’s third season of Sound! Euphonium brought its high school band saga to a thrilling and unexpected confusion. Then there was Dandadan in the fall, carried to victory by the power of Creepy Nuts.

Just as I did last year, I put together a round-up of my stand-out moments from anime in 2024. There’s even more I didn’t touch on, such as Dandadan’s legendary seventh episode as well as the art film stylings of Days With my Stepsister. Feel free to explore on your own!

Look Back

Look Back’s comic source material begins in a classroom. The film by comparison starts with the night sky, then steadily rotates and zooms in towards a single open window in a neighborhood lit by city lights. Cut to a held shot of a young girl crouched over her desk, a nearby mirror revealing her face. It’s an outrageous flex for what will be a small-scale story of two kids trying their very best to make it as artists. Yet it fits the material perfectly. Just as making art can feel as banal and momentous as taking a shit, the opening minute of Look Back finds cosmic immensity in the simple act of drawing.

Delicious in Dungeon

The third episode of Delicious in Dungeon adapts one of the best early stories in the manga. Our heroes Laios, Marcille and company stumble on a nest of living armor in the dungeon. Their desperate struggle to survive against these powerful foes would be entertaining enough. But then Laios stumbles across the truth of the armor: that they are not enchanted beings but instead colonies of armor-inhabiting mollusks. It’s the sort of weird little detail that sets Delicious in Dungeon apart from its contemporaries, as well as an intuitive leap that only a monster enthusiast like Laios could make.

This episode also sees storyboarder and animator Ichigo Kanno, and his friends at Studio Trigger, truly cut loose. I saw some fear ahead of time that Trigger’s bombastic sensibilities might swallow the comic’s quirky charm. The third episode, though, maintains the appeal of the characters even as it punches up the action. It even finds a place for the studio’s resident genius Kai Ikarashi to animate a wonky flashback to Laios’s past. While I knew going into Delicious in Dungeon just how much its team loved and respected the manga, this episode convinced me they had what it took to pull it off.

Ghost Cat Anzu

For some reason I expected that Ghost Cat Anzu would be a slow-paced, heartwarming story about a young girl that finds companionship with a big talking cat. Then I thought I saw that young girl roll her eyes. Wait a minute, I thought. Did that really happen? The character acting in Anzu (thanks to the use of rotoscoping) is just underplayed enough that you can miss small moments like this. But sure enough, as the film plays out, our heroine Karin is revealed to be a bratty little shit. In a good way, mind. Karin isn’t always easy to root for, but Ghost Cat Anzu does the work so that her best and worst moments are all rooted in character.

Train to the End of the World

A flashback sequence within Train to the End of the World reveals the origin of Akira and Reimi’s beef with each other. One day as kids, Reimi asked Akira for study advice. “Tear out the parts you want to memorize from a textbook or dictionary,” Akira says, “put them between two Togo rice crackers, and eat it.” Reimi does just that, and has a terrible bowel movement for the rest of the day.

Years later, due to a bizarre chain of events, Reimi saves Akira’s life by pulling a sentient mushroom out of her butt. Unfortunately, since the mushroom had already taken root, removing it regresses Akira from her bookish, sarcastic self to a childlike state. “This isn’t the Akira I know!” Reimi yells. “You need to be crabby and stubborn, and read complicated books like this!” So she force feeds Akira her favorite novel, which magically restores her to her true self. A truly strange (and yet heartwarming?) sequence that could only ever work in a bonkers show like this one.

Brave Bang Bravern

Cygames is on a roll of producing deeply weird original anime productions. Zombie Land Saga was a silly tale about zombie idols set in Saga Prefecture. Akiba Maid Wars was a surprisingly straightforward crime drama about maids in Akibahara. Then 2023 brought us Brave Bang Bravern, a gritty military science fiction story that just so happens to star a giant talking robot with his own theme song.

Just like Zombie Land Saga and Akiba Maid Wars kept their premises a secret until airing, Bravern waits until the end of the first episode to spring its titular robot on the audience. But the show isn’t done. Every couple of episodes the series pulls a new rabbit out of its hat. Mysterious naked women, James Cameron references, time travel…the ride never stops. In retrospect the show could have benefited from more episodes to let the characters breathe. Still, I respect just how many times Bravern caught me by surprise. It’s the kind of trick that only original anime can pull off.

Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose His Master

Yatagarasu isn’t a particularly flashy series on the surface. Its animation is often just functional, and the series takes its time to flesh out its large cast of characters and the unusual fantasy realm they inhabit. Sure, it might be adapted from a beloved series of Japanese fantasy novels. But who outside of the country has read those? A flashy Shonen Jump+ adaptation like Dandadan makes for an easier 2024 recommendation.

Here’s what I’ll say for Yatagarasu, though: every person to whom I have recommended the series has adored it. A friend of mine in my local anime club was so taken with the series that she watched ten episodes ahead of the rest of us. She sought out the manga adaptations and even tracked down the novels. It’s tough for me to say how the anime compares to the novels because I haven’t read them. Here’s what I’ll say, though: Yatagarasu’s character and mystery writing puts most other fantasy anime made these days to shame. And the creature animation is pretty good! It’s no surprise the series became a cult classic this year among those in the know.

Mononoke: Phantom in the Rain

The titular “Phantom in the Rain” is a karakasa, a hopping umbrella with one eye, big teeth and a tongue. Before watching the film, I couldn’t help but wonder, “how is Kenji Nakamura and company going to make this thing scary?” I shouldn’t have worried. Mononoke’s karakasa is a typically bizarre, reality-bending anomaly that spreads like an oil slick and yet (in its final form) does resemble a big angry umbrella. It’s a reminder that while Mononoke has been praised for its visuals and its social messages, it is also reliably excellent at promising a monster and then delivering. Even when (especially when) that monster is also a metaphor.

Negative Positive Angler

Tsunehiro, the protagonist of Negative Positive Angler, is flawed in many ways that anime protagonists are typically flawed: he’s depressed, self-destructive and antisocial. So it’s no surprise that he’s intimidated by Ice, his super cool cosplay model fishing buddy. What surprised me though is that Tsunehiro also doesn’t know what to make of Ice because she is a Thai woman. She can speak languages other than Japanese, expresses herself in a forward way and uses different euphemisms than he’s familiar with. It isn’t until the two of them end up seasick on a boat together that Tsunehiro realizes that he and Ice have more in common than he thought. It’s rare that you find anime that addresses racism and xenophobia in Japan outside of fantasy metaphors; I think it’s great that Negative Positive Angler not only went there, but did a pretty earnest job of it.

One Piece Fan Letter

Once upon a time, One Piece was a story about a handful of kids joining forces to take on the world. Now it’s an epic narrative in which armies super-powered pirates clash in battles so huge that they reshape the landscape. What worth is the life of one person in the midst of that conflict? For One Piece Fan Letter, director Megumi Ishitani and character designer Keisuke Mori/soty dig past the intimidating edifice in search of the comic's beating heart. It’s good to be reminded after all this time just what the series means: that Luffy punches supervillains into government buildings not just for his own satisfaction but to make ordinary people laugh.

Girls Band Cry

By all rights I should pick the famous scene from episode 8 that launched a thousand arguments on the internet. But the scene from Girls Band Cry I keep returning to is from the big concert in episode 11. “To all the people who rejected all of me,” Nina yells, “I’ll scream to them that I wasn’t wrong!” Let’s carry that energy into 2025.

Other Year-End Roundups

• Anime News Network's Best Anime of 2024
• Sakugabooru Animation Awards 2024
• 2024 in retrospect: crakthesky's top 50 AMVs
• Crunchyroll News's Year in Review
• iblessall's What Was Up With Anime in 2024
• Kambole Campbell's Picks for Vulture

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Here's "The Amazon" by PieandBeerAMV.