Anime and Manga That are Awesome

• Here is Greenwood: This has a special place in my heart as one of the earliest anime I ever saw. But having rewatched it several times since then, there is a distinct reason why the denizens of Greenwood Dorm were able to hook me on anime. This "oldie" (it was released in Japan in 1991) still represents "slice-of-life" fun at its highest quality. The characters are entertaining and well-established; the stories are light but not dumbed-down; the emotional moments genuinely make themselves felt. It's a great "introductory anime" to get someone into the medium.



• Revolutionary Girl Utena: This anime is, in short, simply the best work of any kind that I have ever seen on femininity, adolescence, trauma, human relationships, and the responsibilities of personhood--in my entire life, ever. It convinced me that anime truly is an art form that, at its noblest, can compete successfully with any other medium. All this, AND you get cracktastic symbolism, sword fights, a rockin' soundtrack, cross-dressing, pathos, fairy tales fractured to the point of inversion, compassion, and truly unique (if occasionally disturbing) humor to boot. There are very few pieces of art in this world that I can say with 100% certainty have enriched my life. This is one of them. It's certainly the only anime that's ever made me want to write a letter of thanks to the director. I highly recommend that everyone watch Revolutionary Girl Utena at some point in his or her life, anime fan or not. (But a word of advice: watch the TV series, and THEN the movie--not the other way around!)

• Yugo the Negotiator: After working in anime for a while, it's hard to escape the conclusion that 90% of it looks more or less the same as something you've already seen a dozen times before. Happily, just as I hit that point, I discovered Yugo. This 13-episode series demonstrates that even in this day and age, anime CAN be made for adults--and I don't just mean "adults" in the sense of "people who can legally watch sex and violence." It CAN have realism. It CAN have detailed background research. It CAN have complex but entirely believable political plots--and it's not even boring in the process. This anime follows a few incidents in the exciting, action-filled (though sometimes literally tortuous) life of Yugo Beppu, hostage negotiator. But far from being all exploding helicopters and high-stakes chases, it's quite cerebral, and most of the action is at least as psychological as physical. And whatever your personal reactions may be to the characters or their portrayals, the compassion of the creators for all players and the respect for the complexity of all human motives shines through. If anything, watching each story arc of Yugo the Negotiator feels like watching a feature film divided into episodes.



• Princess Tutu: Yes, I will just say it and get it out of the way: this anime has ballerinas in it. But if you decide not to watch it on those grounds, you will be depriving yourself of one of the most impressive anime I've encountered. In one sense, a very good description of Tutu would be to say that it's like Revolutionary Girl Utena except that people of all ages could comfortably watch and enjoy it. However, in another sense, that would be a very bad description. What makes Tutu fantastic is that it's a very complex, very easy to watch, intensely compelling fairy tale. Like all good fairy tales, it says some very insightful things about life and the human condition--in both ways that a small child could understand and ways that will take an adult's breath away. It is always responsible, always mature, always funny, always smart, and always just a little different than you were expecting. Which is another way of saying: always just a little better than you dared to hope it would be.

• High School Romance - His and Her Circumstances: Simply put, to me, this is the definitive high school romance manga. I can't work up the desire to read another one, because I can't imagine it significantly surpassing this one.



• BL - The Ice-Cold Demon's Tale: I feel this is worth listing because however anyone might personally feel about the genre, The Ice-Cold Demon's Tale remains impressive. This is because it is so utterly different than what most people (including me) associate with BL. I did not seek it out, and came very close to never even knowing it existed. A close friend of mine literally FORCED me to read the first volume, and I wound up buying it and every subsequent volume for myself. How can I put it? It has a plot. In fact, it has such a far-reaching plot that about 1/4 of the way through the series, as far as I can tell the author forgot it was BL and let those elements slide to the wayside in favor of the plot. It has characters that I can easily identify with people I know in my everyday life, and they are both entertaining and endearing. In a genre where very little in the way of craftsmanship is expected, this is a series where craftsmanship is not only present, but seems to grow with each passing issue.



• Manga for Linguists Who Love Badasses - Yugo: Sadly, this is not a widely-recognized genre--but if it were, Yugo would win hands-down. This manga series is what the Yugo the Negotiator anime was based off of. It clocks out at over a score of volumes and several additional stories so far, and so at this point it is very structurally repetitive. Every story arc, Yugo goes to a different country for a different negotiation, there's a different beautiful woman, and he's tortured in a new and different way. But just like the anime, all the locales are well-researched and carefully depicted, all the physical action is psychological action in equal measure, and Yugo Beppu's badass factor is through the roof. He'll allow himself to be arrested in the U.S. on false charges, fake his own death, walk into a high-level government meeting and casually threaten to blow up the entire Mekong Delta with a bomb he got FROM the Vietnamese military using nothing but his persuasive oratory--you name it. He is, in many significant ways, the Japanese James Bond. And gosh darn it, Yugo speaks a million languages, and as a linguistics major that makes my little heart go pitter-patter.

• Here is Greenwood (by Yukie Nasu): Yes, the manga upon which the anime was based. It is awesome for many of the same reasons as the anime. It excels at the cleverly simple, low-key insanity of everyday life in high school. Well, okay, maybe alien invaders made of chocolate aren't exactly everyday life--but on some metaphorical level, when you read it you relate. I consider this to be Yukie Nasu's best work of manga.



• Absolute Boyfriend (by Yuu Watase): I will be the first to say that I cannot fairly judge Yuu Watase's work. I have disliked, often hated, almost everything of hers that I've ever read. She only has a few male character designs, so everything feels recycled. She so often starts out with serious plots that, in my opinion, devolve to the point where they cannot be taken seriously (or even respected) when she writes herself into a corner and has to take the absurd path out. The one exception to my Yuu Watase hatred is Absolute Boyfriend. On the contrary, I found it an absolute joy. It BEGINS with the utterly absurd plot premise "A girl accidentally orders an android boyfriend over the internet." In a situation like this, the absurd way out is the only way out. And I found myself enjoying both the characters the gently insane ride.



• Family Complex (by Mikiyo Tsuda): It's hard to explain the cracktastic glory of this manga. It's a one-shot about a plain boy trapped in a beautiful family. Or possibly it's a one-shot about a beautiful family of people who all long to be the plain boy. Hard to say...