Seitokai no Ichizon in, Ninja Scroll Out:

Ninja Scroll was certainly a groundbreaking work for its time, a very well animated movie made in 1993.  But the movie is really showing its age at this point in time.  You have an aloof guy who gets press-ganged into fighting a bunch of evil ninjas by being given deadly poison and having to work for an antidote.  I hate reluctant heroes, because stories are about decisions, and characters are characterized by their decisions, but Jubei doesn't make any decisions because he was forced into everything that happened throughout the movie.  Then you have a 'party' of heroes that constantly threatens to kill each other and constantly insults each other.  It is an iron rule of good storytelling that your heroes must get along, because nothing is more painful to watch than domestic discord.  Nor is there anything uglier about a person than someone who constantly gets into petty fights and nettles those around him, even when they don't deserve it.  In short, you can't be a hero unless you get along with other people, because that is the very definition of a good person.

To make matters worse, the villains don't get along with each other either.  They're supposed to be this 8 man organization of evil ninjas, but they're constantly working alone and backstabbing each other, to the point that the heroes are routinely saved by their own enemies rather than their own skill in fighting or teamwork.  The only way to make the heroes in the story to be heroes, given how awful all three characters were to each other, was apparently to make the villains even worse to each other, to the point of endless fratricidal murders.  This is also the mark of terrible storytelling.

Is there anything good about Ninja Scroll?  The imaginative fighting techniques used by all the characters, the fast-paced action sequences, the high quality art and animation for its era, and the interesting setting of all this happening in ~1700's Japan.  But this simply can't compare to a newer, longer series like Seitokai no Ichizon.

In Seitokai no Ichizon, despite all pretenses to the opposite, all 5 main characters are best friends.  You can feel the love flowing through them every episode, no matter how subtly it is shown and no matter how many embarrassed camouflage screens are put in front of it.  There are no villains, because they are living ordinary lives where people are naturally good to each other and nothing extraordinary goes wrong.  Rather than action sequences, the world is just bursting full of fellowship, cheer, and oodles of irony.  If I had to explain Seitokai no Ichizon, it would be like all those Christmas carols coming to life, jingle bells, deck the halls, joy to the world, away in the manger and all the rest.  It's a festive, upbeat story that leaves you full of smiles at the end.  For humor to work, it must poke fun at human foibles.  IE, it must show how people are slightly evil, but overall good, and how hilarious it is to watch people struggle with this inside themselves, and with the people around them.  You can also make fun of people who are slightly incompetent, but overall competent, and how they make up for their deficiencies in one field by doing better in another.  Or any similar formula -- you can make fun of people who are wrong in a specific matter, but right in their overall principle, or the reverse.  You can make fun of anything so long as it follows the formula of two opposites colliding into a strange, all-too-human synthesis  The human condition, neither angel nor beast, really is hilarious by nature.  Because we are not suited to ourselves, we are not efficient or well designed, but more like greek chimeras, pure hodgepodges of differing natures all squeezed into a single form, there's just endless complexity to every moment.  And what but laughter can answer to all the contradictions our chimera-like lives cause?

Seitokai no Ichizon is extremely funny.  At least the second season is extremely funny, and that's enough.  It has earned the right to join the other funny series in my rankings; Squid Girl, Lucky Star, Nichijou, Yuru Yuri, Azumanga Daioh, and Working.  Meanwhile, Ninja Scroll is too mean-spirited and contrived to belong next to anything good.

120.  Seitokai no Ichizon.

By the way, this brings the number of ranked series that aired in 2012 up to 39 series, nearly 1/3 of all good anime.  What a ridiculously awesome year, and what a ridiculously great fall 2012 season we are being graced with to finish it off.  And to top it all off, 2013 is looking to be just as good as this one.