Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

Every now and then I just get a hankering to just knock out an anime that’s been lingering on my PTW list for a while. It isn’t me being on the hunt for a specific genre or anything; I just want to watch something I’ve been meaning to. The thing is, some of those anime turn out to be absolutely phenomenal and I lament my inability to have watched them sooner and so I trap myself in a vicious cycle of trying to explore my PTW only to find out that it was an isolated incident and not an indicator that I’m holding off on the pinnacle of anime or something. To get to the point, here are some of the best anime I held off on watching that I wished I had picked up sooner.

GRAND BLUE DREAMING

This is the very reason I’m writing this blog post as this was an anime that I knew in my heart of weeaboo hearts that I’d like but I put it off time and time again because other things just superseded it in importance. I thought Grand Blue Dreaming would be about adventures in diving with mild romance elements but GBD is rather about adventures in getting wasted with mild diving elements. It captures the experiences of a certain type of person experiencing college and is unrelentingly humorous with the kind of pacing from joke to joke that could be obnoxious to some but it unparalleled in comedy to me. The animation can be an absolute wash but I absolutely binged this show in a day when I started it and I’m chomping at the bit for more of season two to drop so I can blast through it too.

PARASYTE: THE MAXIM

I had been planning on watching Parasyte since the season it was airing but after seeing a few select scenes I proclaimed “lol 2edgy4me” and ignored it completely from there out. Last year, a friend of mine who I wanted to kind of understand more declared this was one of his favorite shows so I watched it then and it was also an absolute binge session as well. Parasyte surprised me with how compelling and just much of an unrelenting thrill ride it was and, while I found our MC bland, I enjoyed the blooming relationship between him and his parasite who became his weapon as other parasitic aliens sought to destroy him. It has predictable beats for sure but the visceral visuals of it all and aforementioned thrills has me wishing I had given it a chance sooner instead of writing it off based upon a moronic preconceived notion. It’s still edgy though.

HIS AND HER CIRCUMSTANCES

You indulge yourself in anime communities for long enough and you’ll become privy to certain notions like what anime have been deemed utter wastes and irredeemable adaptations. His and Her Circumstances fell into those trappings when I started back into anime seriously in 2018 and so I slapped it on my PTW list for a critical eye hate watch that would make me seem as equal as my peers and forgot about it. I didn’t know what it was about but all my online friends said “KareKano machine goes BRRRRR-CRASHBOOMABSOLUTEDESTRUCTION” so when my podcast did “Anno August”, a dissection of all of Hideaki Anno’s major words that weren’t Eva, I finally got to watch His and Her Circumstances and I was so pleasantly surprised that I wondered what kind of carcinogenic substances those anime fans were on because, in spite of the obvious production issues, His and Her Circumstances was a delightful romcom that oozed that 90’s shojo anime charm. It was filled with self indulgent romance stricken teens and classic anime comedy antics and I was thrilled to watch it even as the budget collapsed into itself and the main couple became background characters. I want to someday read the manga which I’ve heard is vastly different from the anime (so much so that the original mangaka took offense) but KareKano already has massive issues already so maybe not.

RUROUNI KENSHIN: TRUST AND BETRAYAL

It’s such a shame that the mangaka of Rurouni Kenshin is such an absolute garbage human being and that other mangaka of Weekly Shonen Jump fame leap to defend him. I have to say that at the top because I had the DVDs of Rurouni Kenshin’s (or Samurai X if you will) Trust and Betrayal OVA for the longest time but never watched them just out of sheer principle of “screw that kind of person in the worst way”. I didn’t want to watch it in spite of how eager I was at procuring the DVDs for a few dollars at a flea market when I was a younger weeb. I would see anime at the time and just buy it up regardless. Someone told me that Trust and Betrayal was best reserved for the midpoint of watching Rurouni Kenshin and I hadn’t seen it so I held off and held off. Eventually, the mangaka of Kenshin was outed for collecting questionable video materials and it was destined to be PTW forever. Fortunately for me though, I was bored one day in 2022 and just the first DVD in to see if it even worked. This led me into watching it and eventually believing that Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal is probably one of the best pieces of samurai media out there and that it’s such a shame that I have to constantly attach an asterisk when I speak of it. It’s a beautifully animated classic OVA with a very stand alone story (anyone who tells you that you have to watch the original is a liar and you should not trust them) that stands as a testament to just the glories of what OVAs were accomplishing before they fell into obscurity. It’s a heartfelt experience that boils the rage and tenders the heart and I hate how late I was to this party in particular.

Epilogue: my second DVD didn’t work so I ended up just finding it off an internet truck which actually looked way better than what I ended up seeing on the DVDs so…

SPIRITED AWAY

YEAH. I didn’t watch Spirted Away until I was deep in the anime mines of 12 episode siscon fetish anime and it’s such a shame that I was like this. I liked Kiki’s Delivery Service and that was it. “I wasn’t going to explore any Ghibli movies now! That was for normies who only watched MARKETABLE anime!” decreed 2021 Mattie who was an insufferable ass who thought a single year of anime podcasting meant that he had any leverage as to what anime should or shouldn’t be watched. What a fool. I knew Spirited Away as a movie that was on Toonami once and I wanted to watch it but I couldn’t (by the time it had a rerun my dad had sworn off cable) so it was one of my very first PTW anime on my newly minted MyAnimeList. I got to watch it as part of Otaku Melancholy’s MAY-AZAKI MONTH and was thoroughly enamored. I mean, I bought the blu-ray and art book I was so entranced. It made me feel foolish that I had ever pushed it off to watch another day as it wrapped me with the warm hug of seeing a truly pivotal experience. I knew, as a man in his late twenties when I watched it for the first time, that I had been deprived of something that would’ve been transformative for the better had I seen it sooner. Not watching Spirited Away in 2011 when I first dove deep into anime and instead forcing myself to try Persona Trinity Soul is a sin that I think I must carry alone. Even if you do watch the film and find yourself unimpressed, I think it’s an experience enough just to witness what a master of the craft can do when he’s firing at all cylinders with unflinchingly dynamic creativity and effort. It’s the anime for sure that I wish I hadn’t waited on.

These are just a few of the more extreme examples and I’m sure there are more for sure. A guy I know regularly says that “your plan to watch should be the longest list of all so you’re always finding more anime to watch” and I love that. I think your To Do list should always be full in any hobby so you’re always reaching for the next work or piece that keeps you excited and engaged. With all that said, what are some of the anime that you had planned on watching for the longest time and fell in love when you got around to them? I’m really curious and would love to hear from you! Comment, shoot me an e-mail, or whatever so we can talk! As always please go check out my podcast, the Anime Brothers Podcast, wherever you get your shows! We just did an episode on Gundam GQuuuuuux and it was a fun time for sure. I’ll see you all soon!

Also I saw Weird Al just yesterday as part of his Bigger and Weirder Tour and it was an absolute treat. The man is still one of the best entertainers and puts on an amazing show at 65. Check him out if he comes to your city!