Welcome back to the most special post of the year! As is tradition, we’ve gathered writers from different communities but a shared trait: a love of animation and all it encompasses. The goal, to praise at length the greatest productions and most resonant direction in all of 2018 anime, according to a series of categories. These are our yearly anime awards – the sakugabowl!
Hugtto! Precure #16 was a historical high not just for the franchise, but for magical girl anime and Toei Animation altogether. Though we’ve already covered the main culprit behind it, a look at the episode itself and the whole team who made it possible was well-deserved. Anime doesn’t get much better than this!
We’re back to highlight another rising anime star, perhaps one of the most exciting ones we’ve tackled. Someone whose talent, ambition, and unwillingness to back down has allowed him to shine as animator, supervisor, and even immediately make a splash in directorial duties after giving them a try. There’s no ceiling for Koudai Watanabe’s potential!
Anime has a long tradition of cultivating plenty of its most brilliant talent, those individuals that fans point at to illustrate the possibilities of Japanese animation, in TV shows for kids. Let’s explore the factors that cause this and a bit of a curious exception through the fantastic latest episode of Precure.
We return to our series about up-and-coming anime creators with perhaps the character animator who is generating the most excitement within the industry itself: the mysterious soty, whose work you might have started to enjoy on Toei anime under the name Keisuke Mori, but also on all-star congregations of talent using his pen names on other productions. Let’s observe not only his extraordinary skill, but also the unique animation culture he inherited.