2024年最佳与最糟的动漫盘点

2024 has been a crazy year, thankfully, in mostly good ways when it comes to anime and life for Yazzi and I.

The relocation to Tokyo this spring has made it a dream come true, but keeping up with anime has been a bit of a scramble.

This video split into two parts: the top 10 best and top 10 trashiest anime now, with the worst of the year coming after Christmas.

We've decided to go with 'Trashiest' this time for a bit more positivity during this transitional moment in history.

Rosetta is sponsoring this segment, assisting those eager to learn Japanese!

2024 has been a crazy year, thankfully, in mostly good ways when it comes to anime and life in general for Yazzi and I, which has been more or less a dream come true since we moved to Tokyo this spring.

But the funny thing about relocating halfway around the planet is it can make it hard to actually keep up with anime, even when that anime is very good. So it's taken a bit more of a scramble than usual to pull together my rankings of the most exceptional anime in one way or another of the year.

Hence why I've decided to split the list into two videos, this time with my top 10 best and top 10 trashiest anime hitting well now, and the top 10 worst of the year coming right after Christmas.

Why not put the trash out with that video, you ask? Because we love trash in this basement. Pay attention.

And on that note, I chose to go with Trashiest instead of last year's Most Cursed ranking, even though it rhymed so good, because I feel like we could all use a bit more shameless positivity in this transitional moment in history.

And also because most of the anime curses this year were just like TurboJK production delays, production delays with a side of TurboJank, or being on Disney, which no one wants to sit through a whole list just to hear about.

And the one anime that I could have pitched as super cursed if I were a liar isn't really cursed at all, just ridiculously horny and tragically misunderstood, much like its heroine. But you'll hear all about her in a minute or 50.

Cause right now it's time for Mother's Basement's best anime of 2024, sponsored by Rosetta.

Every anime enjoyer considers being keen on a bit of Nihongo at some point in their lives, but that's a lot easier said than done. And trust me, saying that last sentence with a straight face was quite difficult.

But thanks to Rosetta Stone's voice recognition feature, which provides instant feedback on your pronunciation by comparing it to native speakers, at least I didn't have to worry about butchering the Japanese bits.

Rosetta Stone is an industry-leading mobile and PC app that teaches you Japanese and over 20 other languages in a uniquely intuitive and immersive way. It mimics how we learn as kids, bypassing your English vocabulary altogether by directly linking the new sounds you're learning with the images and concepts they represent.

With lessons geared toward practical words and phrases compressed into conveniently bite-sized chunks, so you can learn on your own busy schedule, whether you're looking to travel, enjoy anime on a deeper level at home, or play some cool import video games.

Rosetta Stone is a fantastic foundation to build toward that goal, as well as a fantastic Christmas present for any Weebs you might know who share it. And right now at the link in the Doobly Doo, they're offering Mother's Basement viewers over 60% off an unlimited plan, including not just Japanese but all of their language lessons for life.

So click that link to give the gift of learning to someone you care about or keep it all for your grinchy self.

Today my 10th place pick is a very personal one, a remake of an anime that defined my childhood and continues to shape my sense of humor and taste in anime fights to this day. Rumiko Takahashi's gender-bending, genre-defining magic martial arts rom-com Ranma 1/2 is the story of Ranma, a boy who turns into a girl, and Akane, a girl who hates boys who are forced to marry each other by a panda who turns into the worst dad ever.

An arrangement they might actually find they enjoy quite a bit in spite of it all if they could ever get over their mutual tsundere-ness. But that's easier said than done when you're being assaulted on all sides, emotionally and physically, by a menagerie of the craziest martial artists ever created by one of Japan's greatest character writers, including but not limited to Kendo, Johnny Bravo, Betaorra, Zoro, the original Yandere, the best Yandere, and the dirtiest oldest dirty old man.

Every one of whom is a unique delight. Except that old man. He should have stayed in his hole. At first, I was a little put off by the remake's many small differences from the anime I grew up on, but the more I've watched, the more this new take has grown on me with its cutesier pop art infused mixed media aesthetic and generally improved fidelity to the original manga's story and tone.

The trash goblin in me does still resent the removal of Ranma's female presenting nipples, but I suppose cufying the character designs is an acceptable compromise to preserve the actual characters behind them. Like Ranma with her total lack of female modesty, which probably wouldn't fly with international broadcasters.

Because those great characters are what make this story still worth retelling today, and this new anime arguably presents them more consistently than the old one did, with all its flanderizing filler and padded-out romantic progression that kind of made it seem like Akane and Ranma didn't like each other nearly as much as they actually did.

On that note, though, perhaps the greatest strength of New Ranma over its predecessor is its much snappier pacing and sense of comedic timing, blazing through story arcs and fights in almost half the time the original took, without ever feeling like it's rushing or missing a beat.

Meaning the jokes come faster and for the most part hit harder, as do the fights, even if the original did have some more impressive Sakuga. This does come with trade-offs, though; the slower pacing of the original gave it a nice cozy vibe and let it linger longer on important emotional beats, which are further enhanced by a moodier soundtrack.

Not that Kaoruwada's new music is anything to sneeze at, it's great for comedy, action, and drama. It just doesn't quite capture the melancholic beauty of a summer sunset in Tokyo the same way. But all that really means is that both versions will have their own distinct value for fans, irrespective of whether or not you want to see a tit right now.

And as someone who loves the old anime, that's everything I could have asked for from this new one. A great new version of the story that can draw in a new generation of fans without outright replacing that classic I love.

As love stories go, A Sign of Affection is a whole lot less complicated than Ranma and less violent, but no less rich in character. I've always had a Fua Fua spot for Doki Doki Shoujo romance, and this one scored a critical hit on it with a flawless and relatively fast-paced execution of the classic.

Handsome Extrovert brings Cute Introvert out of her shell arc with the novel twist. That said, Introvert Yuuki is so introverted in the first place because she was born deaf, cut off from the world of the hearing, which plays nicely into the handsome man's Itsuomi's whole thing of being a world traveler and polyglot obsessed with understanding foreign points of view.

Keeping with those values, the show's portrayal of deafness and the struggles that come with it, as well as sign language and other non-verbal modes of communication, is well researched and beautifully presented, especially in terms of sound design and storyboarding.

And speaking of beautiful, if you're a fan of the whole Makoto Shinkai aesthetic, you'll find a lot to love in the show's portrayal of Tokyo and other locales. While the core concept is pretty fresh, if you've seen your share of shoujo things, a lot of the tropes at play here will feel familiar.

The overprotective childhood friend, the obsessive other girl, and so on. But thankfully it doesn't draw any of them out too much and even uses a few as springboards into other equally heartwarming romantic side stories that manage some solid payoffs in a relatively short period of time.

And you know, just seeing those tropes play out in the context of an adult relationship with college-age characters is enough to set this apart from the rest of the genre by itself.

Also, one of those side relationships I mentioned is gloriously uncomplicated, making a nice change of pace from some of the drama you'll find elsewhere.

We've been truly spoiled for choice this year when it comes to romantic anime, especially in hybrids with other genres, but as far as the more straightforward examples go, A Sign of Affection slightly edged out Blue Box for me as the absolute best of the bunch.

Girls Band Cry is a multimedia music and anime project from Toei Animation, spearheaded by the core creative team that made Love Live Sunshine over at Sunrise, which aims to break away from the idol-centric stories that tend to dominate the music genre.

The story follows a rock band followed by a cutesy country bumpkin who dropped out of high school due to bullying and a former indie star who left her now huge idol band over creative differences as they figure out what they want to say through their sound and fight to keep that sound authentic in an industry that only knows how to sell what it's already selling.

Now, does it feel a touch disingenuous watching members of a TOEI Animation owned Nord keyboards, Pearl drums, Gibson guitars, GNL Psychoerhythm, and Martall amp sponsored Gorillas style industry plant band making passionate speeches about keeping it real and not selling out to the man over delicious, low-priced Yoshinoa beef bowls before blowing off steam with some karaoke at Big Echo Sound?

No, actually. And that's a massive testament to what an incredible writer Juuki Hanta is. From Princess Jellyfish to Nichijo to Sound Euphonium to Grand Belm to all the best seasons of Love Live to A Place Further than the Universe, he is simply the best in the business at writing young women who feel at once appealing, distinctive, and real, with complex inner worlds, compelling motivations that make you want to root for them, and traits that harmonize in both fun and emotionally resonant ways with all of their castmates.

And while Yorimoi is still his best script to date, Girls Band Cry comes damn close, deftly balancing a ton of laugh-out-loud humor with poignant and personal drama, and wisely taking its time introducing us to those girls, letting us get to know the core trio, developing their rapport and inside jokes alongside their musical style so we can fully appreciate how their sound and energy changes after meeting their bassist and pianist almost halfway through the series.

To be fair, a lot of that realness also comes from the brilliant acting that brings the script to life. And I'm not just talking about the voices here. As you might have noticed, this is an almost entirely 3D animated show, and if you've been paying attention, then you've already seen what a breakthrough it is for the medium, layering bold, expressive 2D anime poses on top of more subtly nuanced body language that's only really possible in 3D, without ever falling into that uncanny valley occupied by most things that look like this, and without resorting to the frames skipping effect that most other shows and movies use to close the gap between 2D and 3D.

It also helps that the music absolutely rocks more than hard enough to feel like the authentic product of creative passion and personal pain, and credit where it's due, they still could have sold out a lot harder if they'd say, gotten all the instruments from Yamaha instead of hitting up brands around the world that rockers this pretentious would actually use.

But none of that would matter if the characters weren't so lovable and believable to begin with.

After he wrote the gripping conclusion to Chainsaw Man's first season, Tatsuki Fujimoto took a step back from the weekly shonen grind to pen a trio of one-shot manga that are each masterworks in their own right.

Just Listen to the Song is a thought-provoking piece about the way that works of art can take on a life of their own beyond the author's original intent once they break containment, which really stupid people unfortunately tend to read.

As Fujimoto saying, the curtains are just blue, bro. But that's ironically a perfect example of what the manga is about. Goodbye Airy, meanwhile, is a beautiful tribute to his love of film in general and cool guys walking away from explosions in particular, but the best of them, I think, was the first of them Look Back.

A love letter to manga as an art form, a chronicle of the lifelong obsession it takes to make a master illustrator, and a poignant rumination on one of Japan's most senseless recent tragedies, as well as more broadly how people process grief, all packed into 148 carefully crafted pages.

To put it bluntly, there was no way that Kiyotaka Oshamama and Studio Durians' film adaptation could ever match the originals brilliance. Its structure, message, and imagery are just too intrinsically tied up in the original medium.

It is a near-perfect manga, but thankfully they didn't try to. Instead, they aim to capture the emotional essence of the story and preserve its themes in the new form of a love letter to animation, which if you've seen Flip Flappers you know is precisely what Oshyama does best.

Each of the amateur four coma comics that served as a linchpin of the original narrative has been transformed here into a uniquely stylized animated short within the film, allowing the star-studded animation staff to flex their own creative muscles and put a distinctive stamp on the film's emotional highs and lows, while the story in between of two young budding artists whose mutual admiration and jealousy for each other's talents pulls them together, pushes them apart, and drives them both to reach new heights is carried by beautifully expressive character animation and diligently detailed background art, every moment further elevated by every heartstring tugging note of Haruka Nakamura's excellent score.

If you make art, if you love art, if you're human and you have an hour to spare, reading Look Back is one of the best ways you can possibly spend it, and watching Look Back comes impressively close to that.

It's not just artists who build on each other's work and inspire each other to new heights, though that's just as much a thing in STEM, and it's one of the many intertwining themes at the heart of Orb on the Movements of the Earth, a fictionalized, extra dramatized account of the real generational struggle to overturn geocentric dogma and bring mankind closer to understanding its true place in the universe.

The story spans across decades, following seasoned astronomers, curious students, perceptive peasants, and learned nobles alike as each in turn is pulled in and compelled by the universal gravitation of heliocentric theory, the elegant, consistent pure math that washes away all the contradictions piled up by centuries of scholars trying to cram our round solar system into the Church's square hole, though of course, the Church doesn't like that all too much, and the threat of inquisition looms over all who dare to pursue this heresy.

Yet despite the danger, despite seeing several people die horribly on screen, despite overwhelming opposition from most experts in their field, Cause keeps finding new champions. For some, it's a chance at glory, riches, a place in history. For others, the prospect of overturning such a core tenet about our world opens the door to challenging other entrenched beliefs, like the notion women can't be scholars, or that earthly suffering is inevitable and our only salvation lies in heaven.

But beyond all of that, the same simple and powerful force calls to all of them: the inherent, undeniable, electrifying beauty of self-evident truth. The joy of learning new things that suddenly cast the same old sky you've seen a thousand times before in a whole new light.

Though of course, that goes hand in hand with the terror of tossing away all you thought you knew. And while some do have the courage to face that head-on, many others respond to it quite violently.

In this way, Orb isn't just the story of one important idea at one key moment in time, but of everything that has always made our world and our species beautiful. Of the thrill of curiosity, the transformative power of imagination, and the miracle of written language connecting minds across countries and continents, decades, centuries, and millennia.

On paper, it sounds like just a show about some old guys reading even older books and thinking a lot. And it kind of is that, I'm not gonna lie. But I promise you, it'll get you thinking even harder. And it moved me to tears more than once.

While we're on the subject of ahistorical historical dramas, though, it is difficult to overstate how grateful I am that The Apothecary Diaries carried on from last year into this one because I somehow missed it on my list for 2023, and that crime absolutely needed to be rectified.

Not only is it a deeply compelling example of the court intrigue genre set in and around the palace grounds of a cleverly constructed alternate history imperial China, but it is without question the best damn mystery anime I've seen in years, packing devilish little logic puzzles into each individual arc while hiding much grander mysteries in plain sight within its overarching narrative.

If you're not familiar, the series follows Mao Mao, a brilliant young peasant apothecary with a passion for poisons who spends her days helping her aging father and the kindly courtesans of the imperial city's red light district. Until one very unfortunate day, she gets a little distracted looking at herbs, and then kidnapped and sold into servitude as part of the imperial harem of the palace's inner court.

At first, she tries her best to keep her head down so as to likewise keep the stipend paid to her kidnappers down, which would be much higher if people knew that she could like, read and sh*t, but she ends up rising through the ranks anyway when her stupid smart ass can't resist solving the mystery of why the Emperor's babies all seem to be getting sick and dying.

It's the lead in their mommy's makeup, which leads to her becoming a lady-in-waiting and personal poison tester for the royal consort whose baby she saved, as well as the unofficial personal mystery-solving assistant of the court eunuch Jinchi, a handsome and enigmatic young nobleman with a mind almost as brilliant as her own.

The Inner Court is a place where few things are as they seem, and everyone has some private agenda, so she ends up with plenty to do in both of those roles, giving us plenty to enjoy in terms of politics, world-building, and rich multi-layered character interactions.

But The Apothecary Diaries' greatest strength is without a doubt Mao herself. One of the sharpest witted, most complicatedly charismatic protagonists in all of anime. A great detective every bit the equal in skill and glaring personality faults of Sherlock Holmes himself.

And with Jinchi as her sassy Watson, this anime's banter game is almost unrivaled in recent memory, with romantic tension absolutely off the charts, unconstrained by the societal taboos that keep John Locke locked in the realm of fanfiction.

Though if that's the sort of thing you're looking for, for most of its first episode, which follows a pair of rival ace pilots showboating and joint US Japanese training exercises on Hawaii, Bang Brave Bang Braver seems like it's gearing up to be Top Gun with giant robots, and that's already the coolest sentence that you've heard all year.

But then the impossibly deadly aliens show up, and you realize it's actually gonna be Top Gun meets Independence Day with giant robots, and you thank the universe that you could be alive in such a glorious moment in history.

But then the giant robot with its name in the title shows up, shouting out special attack names and playing his own theme song, and you realize that the English language does not contain enough cool movie references to describe how awesome this thing is really gonna be.

And that's before the giant robot starts ranting to the assembled surviving military leaders of the free world about how good it feels to have the Japanese man he loves inside him while said Japanese man is being waterboarded by the CIA.

This is an anime without limits, an anime unrestrained by silly notions like common sense.