I've been stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to my top anime rankings. A while ago I realized that it was unfair to pit movie-length series in direct competition with 1,000 episode series because there's no meaningful grounds for comparison. Of course one blows the other out of the water, despite minute-for-minute the movie maybe being superior.
I wanted to honor movie-length anime somehow, but I didn't want to pretend that movie-length anime was better than serious longer format franchises. It would be too pitiful for a two hour movie to be better than, say, Yu Yu Hakusho, which is over 100 episodes long. What would that say about the quality of Yu Yu Hakusho's episodes? All of them combined aren't worth one movie? That's like saying the series is worth less than spit, the exact opposite of what I'm trying to get across by ranking such franchises.
The two types of anime needed to be segregated. Short-length anime shouldn't compete with long-form anime at all. It's insulting to the long anime to lose to the short, and it's unfair to the short anime to always lose to the long no matter how high quality the short anime was. They just needed their own separate awards categories. As it stood it was like comparing apples to oranges.
Of course this problem falls along a gradient. Shorter series will always be at a disadvantage compared to longer series, but when does a short series have enough length to reasonably sit at the big boy table with the longer ones and reasonably be able to beat them? I decided to let the lived experience of Japan be the standard setter. Since the shortest allowed tv season to air in Japan is 12 20 minute-or-so-long episodes, or 4 hours in length, the dividing line between 'short' and 'long' series is 4 hours. You can tell a 'serious' story in over four hours that can compete with any other story ever told. But if you're shorter than that, no matter how good you are, you can't tell a story like that, so you can join the 'special needs' children over that way and get your own 'special' trophies instead.
From here on all anime in my top anime rankings are currently 4+ hours in length or slated to become such before the end of their runs. Any anime I used to rank that was shorter than that has instead been moved over to the 'good movies' hall of fame. Anime so short as to fall below 4 hours in length either are literally movies or may as well be. There they can reign as kings of the mountain instead of runts of the litter.
Usagi Drop barely clears this hurdle due to having 4 5-minute specials in addition to its regular 11 episodes, which does add up to 4 hours of content. Thanks to this Usagi Drop counts as having '12' episodes in all, making my job a lot easier.
However, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Binbou Shimai Monogatari, Kiki's Delivery Service, Summer Wars, Mononoke Hime, Spirited Away and 'Omoi, Omoware, Furi, Furare' had no such luck. They had to go. Like droids, they were no longer wanted here.
The problem of course is that I do not currently have decent replacements for the seven ranked series that fall under that 4 hour bar. Series I used to rank but dropped long ago are self-evidently not better than the movies I'm currently removing -- they lost head-to-head with those movies. Series I never ranked despite being much longer than the removed movies also lost head-to-head with those movies so can't possibly serve as replacements. None of them will do.
The only series that can replace the current 7 ranked-but-too-short series are series that have yet to come out, but when or if they did they would easily surpass these short story competitors. You could call them the phantom 7.
Of these three series are easy calls: Ken Tensei, Shikkaku Mon and The Eminence in Shadow have already been announced as incoming, will be at least 12 episodes in length, and will be better than the movies they're replacing. It's a bit early to include them in my rankings but they were going to join my rankings the moment they started airing anyway so it's no big deal.
The next four are not easy calls. I had to weigh both their quality and the likelihood that they would receive an anime adaption announcement some time down the road and then multiply the two factors to decide who should fill out the ranks. I came up with Mao, Summer Pockets, 100 Kanojou and Isekai Kenkokuki. All 4 have reasonable prospects of getting an anime and would be great anime if they ever happened.
Mao is by Rumiko Takahashi and so far all of her works have eventually received anime adaptions. It's pretty much unimaginable that the Mao anime is not already in development. It's extremely similar to Inuyasha so would be very popular (which is why it will be green-lit sooner or later) and very good (which is why it would make my top anime rankings once it does start airing.)
Summer Pockets has multiple times gotten anime green-lit announcements only for key to retract the claim with vague statements afterwards. I'm practically certain Summer Pockets will get animated eventually, they're clearly just waiting for the right time, the right studio, or when the right forces align etc. I believe the anime is in development right now and they just aren't saying it. The Summer Pockets visual novel is one of the greatest masterpieces to ever grace this green Earth and the moment it gets an anime it will take the world by storm, so beating the movies it's replacing is not an issue.
100 Kanojou is my favorite manga that hasn't received an anime. It's also the favorite manga of a great many other people and is wildly popular. It's pretty much unthinkable that this show won't get adapted sooner or later, it's like not picking up a $100 bill from the ground. There's no reason censors would stop it from getting adapted because it sticks to PG hijinks that no one could get in a tizzy over, despite the polygamous premise. Basically if Kanojo mo Kanojo can get an anime 100 Kanojou will too. Being the better work and down the same avenue of thought how can it possibly be passed over? I expect a 100 Kanojou announcement any day now. Once it airs it will be so funny as to easily surpass the movies I'm kicking out.
Isekai Kenkokuki is the most dubious placeholder. It's the best Isekai story that hasn't been adapted yet, and dozens of worse Isekai anime have been announced or adapted as anime, so it stands to reason that Kenkokuki must eventually receive the same favorable treatment. But that's only true if Japan has any taste at all. Isekai Kenkokuki is not a huge popular phenom beloved by all, it's appreciated only by a cultivated few. If it does get an announcement, (and why shouldn't it when so many other crappier isekai do?), it will do fine as a long series much better than anything a short movie can manage.
Because Kenkokuki's prospects are so vague, it ranks last in my new top anime rankings at #200. If a better series comes along of the proper length and is not Kenkokuki, I can always kick Kenkokuki out and add in this definite prospect instead. It's just a placeholder to keep my rankings at an aesthetically pleasing 200 for now. Of course, if Kenkokuki were kicked out, and then later announced to be green-lit, the series would quickly re-enter my rankings. That's how provisional these final slots are.
I didn't want to rank series before they aired (in the case of Ken Tensei, Shikkaku Mon, or The Eminence in Shadow) or even before they're announced (in the case of Mao, Summer Pockets, 100 Kanojou and Isekai Kenkokuki), but I also didn't want to keep two incompatible categories of anime, long series and short movies, joined at the hip like Siamese twins. They don't belong together and the longer they're kept together the more harm they'll do to each other. Surgery was necessary, so much so that the lesser evil of ranking series that haven't technically happened yet had to be done.
I've been weighing these two unsatisfactory options for a long time now and I couldn't hold off any longer, I had to pull the trigger. The time to violate one of my two principles had come.
With that said, the removed series are still in a hall of fame, just the 'good movies' hall of fame instead. They join 12 other movie-length anime in that top 200 competitive field that I've been itching to honor but could no longer include in my top anime rankings for the same reason I can no longer include these 7. (As you can see I've been pruning away at short ranked anime for a long time now despite how good they all are.)
To do this I had to remove 19 currently ranked movies that these new anime movies displace. This isn't difficult because anime is so much better than western content, the only question was who to execute, not whether. I removed the 4 Star Wars films from the Disney era (they're filler anyway), 4 mediocre Bond films, 6 mediocre Disney Animation films, Man of Steel and 4 musicals.
No comments:
Post a Comment