Anime and manga I remember. And some I had to look up on Crunchyroll. There are likely a few I'm not thinking of that I watched on Crunchyroll originally, but Crunchyroll seems to drop anime from my history when it loses the licence. They damage my history. They should keep it even if the shows aren't available any more.
A fascinating and insightful story of a time when one society changes into another within a generation. A complete change of ethos and world-view. I was hooked by a visually stunning nighttime wilderness lake crossing in something like episode five. Or six. or seven?
It starts out as an ordinary copycat magical girl story. But then it changes into something else. The viewer repeatedly discovers that everything he thought he knew about the story was wrong, and has to realign his understanding. Finally, near the end, the level of wrongness rises to mythological proportions. Then you discover that you have to view the whole thing again to really understand what's going on. And maybe you even want to see it a third time. A masterpiece.
Here's a 3-minute video review of this show.
A boy meets a girl who informs him not to talk to her because she does not exist. The story evolves to become a kick-ass story of ghost-hunting gone wrong. There's a wonderfully creepy scene in a doll store in one of the first few episodes.
My all-time favorite movie. I've seen it sixty times, and after all that, it still doesn't bore me. It's about a father and two daughters who move into the country while the mother is in hospital. The girls are 4 and 10 years old. What's spectacular about this show is that the girls actually act like four- and ten-year olds. Miyazaki has absolutely nailed these characters. The girls have a few magical adventures during the movie, often involving Totoro, who seems to be some kind of wilderness spirit.
I used to be that shy, so it resonated intensely with me. The manga won a well-deserved award for best shoujo manga. This romance is unique among romances in that the story doesn't end when the main characters finally do get together. But you can't follow the whole story in the anime. It goes much, much further in the manga. The mangaka took time off for pregnancy, leaving fans wondering if the series had ended, but she returned to continue it.
The girl is a runaway, and sleeps with random men just to get a roof over her head.
At the start, this seems to be a piece of sex-exploitative pornography, but it turns out to be anything but.
Everything changes for her when the hero of the piece takes her in and treats her decently. Gradually we learn her past and why she became a runaway as she feels ready to divulge it.
An almost surreal six-episode piece about a society where robots are heavily discriminated against, even though they seem to be as intelligent, as wise, and possibly even as emotional as people. A society where robots have to wear a marker so that no one can mistake them for real people.
The Time Of Eve is a cafe where robots are allowed to drop their markers and interact with others as if they were people.
An extremely slow-moving railway journey about a boy who wants to visit a girl he holds dear before one of them moves so far that he fears they will never see each other again. The mood of a late-night railway journey is exquisitely rendered. That's the first third of the movie. There are two other parts, which follow along chronologically, and I'm not going to spoil it by telling.
A manga. Each delightful episode (maybe a few exceptions) consists of people interacting when they are waiting for a train to pass at a railway crossing. Some of these scenes are related to each other, but rarely do related episodes follow straight on one another. A kind of short story anthology.
Seki sits beside a boy who does amazingly complex things at his desk in school out of boredom. Somehow seki always gets in trouble for what the boy initiates.
A continuaton of Bladerunner, years later. Excellent animation and story-telling.
A man, when his grandfather dies, adopts his aunt, who is a young child. The show presents a year in their lives together.
A romance where music takes the place of kisses.
I'm talking about the anime series, not the anime movie (which I haven't seen much of nor the live-action movie, which I haven't seen at all. It's a classic story about a world in which people coexist with robots of various kinds. It's at times whimsical, heartbreaking, violent, peaceful. And there's a plot. Details early in the series -- seemingly just local colour -- become major plot points toward the end. Not like Madoka, where everything changes repeatedly whenever you get more information, but more like a mystery, where you gradually pick up more clues and put them together.
A plague has struck and almost all of the men in the world are dead. The few remaining men, who had been in some kind of suspended animation during the plague, have to work at repopulating the world.
Now this is an obvious set-up for a pornfest, and there are a lot of sexy scenes, but the interesting parts of the story are:
By episode 10 I'm no longer sure who the "good guys" are.
The story is about a young girl whose parents had died and was consoled by a passing prince. So impressed was she that she decided that when she grew up she would become a prince.
With this attitude she enters a high school where everything is even stranger than her resolve.
A cartoony explanation of the human body at the cellular level. Gwen, my wife, used to explain the biology they represent, especially when it's not all that clear from the story.
A definitive version of the anime, put together with the active participation of the mangaka. Unlike the original version that was cobbled together while the magaka was still writing and when the animators caught up then started to improvise...
The North American release of the original Sailor Moon was bowdlerized. I've been told there were scenes where they were fighting some evil cult that happened to use some kind of cross as a symbol. (I never got to see these). All of that got cut out, with great damage to the continuity of the story.
Furthermore, two of the characters were lesbian. The American translation pretended they were just sisters, but when that became no longer credible the Americans just cancelled the entire show.
The new version, a remake made with the collaboration of the original mangaka, is based closely on the original manga, is not bowdlerized, and the lesbians are lesbians.
This appears to be a movie that's split into two episodes on Crunchyroll. The sailor scouts are all somewhat older, and are starting to establish themselves in career paths. They're not adults yet, but they're substantially more mature than they were in Sailor Moon Crystal.
I don't remember what happens here. I think I was exhausted when I saw it ages ago.
Set in an alternate history Japan in the 30's. The shogunate is still in charge (in our history, it fell in the previous century, ushering in the Meiji (I think) age).
An extremely dark story, filled with intrigue and skullduggery. You never seem to really know what's going on -- my wife says the same thing about John leCarre's works, so it's in good company.
The series feels incompete as I write this. I've only seen the first season, and don't know if there's another. It's possible it will change in future episodes, but so far it hasn't.
A martial arts sitcom where the titular character Ranma is cursed with frequent sex changes. My favourite story arc is the one that reveals Akane's past.
A man who is down on his luck finds a persocom discarded in the garbage. Persocoms serve a role like today's cell phones, but they have bodies like real human beings. Some of them are merely small cartoon figures, but the persocom the man finds has the body of a full-sized startlingly beautiful woman. But her memory has been wiped.
The central mystery of the story is where she came from, what she was built for (she's not an assembly-line model), and what the outcome is going to be. And what do the mysterious secret agencies have to do with her?
Along the way there's a lot of embarrassed sexual humour, such as when the man goes to buy her underwear.
This one is a manga. (I forget if it was an anime.)
This one is a TV show whose main function is to get people to buy and play nintendo's pokemon games. The first few seasons are quite good, but after that it gets repetitive.
Another game-advertising show, but an inferior one.
YuGiOh is a card game, and this show exists to advertise it. This one isn't nearly as good as Pokemon, and neither is the game. Whenever a new powerful card shows up in the show, the same card starts to show up in the card stores. So the winner in the game is usually whoever has managed to buy the most-recently issued powerful card. The pandering to quick bucks is gross. it's painful to see children fall for it. So whenever a child went to our local card store to buy YuGiOh anything, the owner of the store would warn them away from it, because it was a terrible game, and recommend Magic the Gathering instead.
I was surprised to discover that this was anime. I've seen only a few episodes when I happened to catch them while travelling. I much enjoyed the bits I did manage to see.
Sebastian is on a quest, possibly to find his father or something like that. He travels across France with his dog, Belle, encountering adventures. 20th-century stuff.
I do wish I knew where to find this one so I can watch it all.
Likewise, I was surprised to discover this one was anime.
Les Mysterieuses Citée's d'Or is a supernatural story about a boy and girl exploring the ancient Aztec world. I believe Citée's may have been made into a game long ago. I vaguely remember seeing it in an Amiga store.
One of the classic series, originating as a manga, but now I can only find it as an anime. I've only seen a few of these 110 episodes, but every now and then I choose to see another.
A boy, whose mother has been killed, meets Maetel, a woman who looks identical to his mother, but is a different person entirely. She offers him an all-inclusive pass on the galactic railroad. He wants to go to the planet where they give out mechanical bodies for free. I strongly suspect there's a catch, but haven't gone far enough to know for sure, or what it is.
It appears to be a kind of road (well, railroad) movie, where every episode or two the train stops at a planet and they get out and look around. The train they're on is (looks like?) a steam train, and it takes off from one planet, travels through space, and gets back on the tracks when it arrives at the next.
There has been an unsuccessful attempt to revive the series (in manga, at least) by having Maetel meet Tetsuro again ... but it feels forced, not natural, and I wish they had decided to reprint the original series yet again. But they (whoever they are) said it had already been reprinted so many times .... evidently they didn't feel it worthwhile to to do it again for new readers.
There's a related series, The Galaxy Railways: A Letter from the Abandoned Planet. I'll watch that after I've finished all hundred-odd episodes of the Galaxy Express.
and another related series: Captain Harlock
The anime stops before the story ends. The manga goes on to a proper ending. It's about a guy who happens by a place where the mistress in charge grants wishes. For a price. The price he agrees to is for him to work for her. We get insight into the workings of a Japanese wish-granting organization.
Children operate defence machinery. This show is also a romance. And if I recall correctly, there is significant societal change during the story.
She dies, and is reincarnated in a world where she has no access to books. She decides she is going to have to write some books herself. She has to start by figuring out how to make paper.
She is somewhat sickly, but nonetheless steadily advances in society, and toward her dreams.
All very strange and slow, with long philosophical discussions about the meanings of words, quite abstract scenery, and occasional almost subliminal walls of text that you have to watch frame-by-frame to see properly. Unfortunately the streaming services don't stop that precisely, so it's hard to read those frames.
and there are probably more by now.
A series of movies about the supernatural. I'm not sure, but they seem to move into the past, from one to the next, as you gradually get some understanding of what's going on. A detail I enjoyed: Notice the main female character's attitude to ice cream in the first movie.
An interplanetary mecha war story that starts out with a false-flag attack, making everything confusing for the characters. Quite a few unexpected but plausible plot twists.
Mecha. There are a vast number of gundam stories to the extent that I don't even remember which ones I've watched,
(Thierry says:Missing something here. The description below does not match the anime above.)
(If so, I don't know what the proper title is for the movie I describe below. It doesn't match the information on "The girl who leaps through time" I find online.)
A live-action movie about a girl who has learned an ancient martial art that can be used only by women against men. It involves exposing her breasts to dazzle attacking men, so they can be vanquished.
I wish I knew what the name of this movie actually is.
One I'm started to view because my daughter recommended it. It's entirely a character-driven story, and a good one.
Several related anime:
Very much violence and politics in a city that seems to have been established for the study and development of magic.
A young girl is bought at an auction in modern-day (I believe) London. The sale price astonished everyone there. It's an ancient magus that has bought her. The show is about her growing up, ther relationship between them, and assorted magical characters.
These seem to have originated in a video game.
Fate/Stay Night
Fate/Zero
(not yet) Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia
The sacred beasts have been created to win a war. Now the war is over, they are no longer needed, and are in fact dangerous to keep around.
Some girls decide to become mangaka.
A girl-on-girl romance, very well depicted.
Short comedic episodes about various medical situations
A mystical master teaches how the world works. (and it's not our physics) A very peaceful show.
RECOMMENDATIONS END HERE
I forget what this one is, but I remember recommending it.
and its sequels
I mix this one up with Love. Chunibyo & Other Delusions
About a would-be actress.
Also you and Me 2
Mecha.
I mix this one up with Chihayafuru
and WHite Album 2
A tale of how media idols are separated from all they hold dear.
I think the girl is maybe autistic? strange? but the people sharing her dormitory take care of her.
Short take-offs on Chthulhu mythos entities, all made cute.
Beautifully surreal short episodes of conversations between fairies.
It is said that only wolves will enter heaaven at the end of the world.
Society is monitored by technology that identifies when people are ready to commit serious violence, so that police can intervene. But intervening sometimes requires serious violence. The series analyses the paradox of policing.
A very quiet, restful series about some girld to go on a series of ordinary camping trips.
There's something wrong about a small time. Each year, dusing a festival, someone dies.
If you get to a particular website at midnight, Hell Girl will appear. Tell her who to do it to, and she will send that person straight to hell. The catch? When you finally die, you too will go straight to hell.
Women are recruited to fight monsters.
Also called 'Working'. Working in a very strange ast-food restaurant.
Women who fight monsters.