[B]Air[/B]
I honestly can't say enough good things about Air, in fact everything about this show is phenomenal which is why it's my personal number one. The first thing I noticed about Air was the artwork, things like the sky and the ocean are vibrant and alive with colour, subtle things like the waves breaking on the beach look so real that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the animators actually took real video footage and just painted over it to get the effect. Air's greatest acheivemant however is its cast, right off the bat it has to be said that the female characters are cute beyond words and the lead male character (and his gravity-defying fringe) is one of the few male Anime characters that I could actually relate to as a male Anime fan. More importantly however is that you can't help but fall in love with these characters, you [i]genuinely care[/i] about them and want more than anything to see them overcome their troubles and live happily ever after.
[B]Azumanga Daioh[/B]
It's charming, it's endearing and it's funny beyond belief - it's Azumanga Daioh! I stumbed across this show a year or two ago completely by accident, I watched the first episode and within five minutes I was completely hooked on it. What interested me about AD is that it steers well clear of the 'teenage highschool girl story' cliches that most shows seem to revolve around and focuses almost totally on the comedy. Despite the fact that there's six primary characters (and several secondary characters of varying levels of importance) everybody gets a fair amount of screentime, sometimes it does veer on the edge of becoming the Chiyo show but luckily it never actually does. Like Air, AD manages to capture the viewers hearts with its characters, you're always rooting for Sakaki in her quest to find a cat that won't maim her, in Chiyo's attempts to find her place as a child in a young adults world and in Osaka, Tomo and Kagura's attempts to... well... finish school at all.
[B]The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya[/B]
This show seems to have taken the slapstick comedy stylings of Azumaga Daioh, the cuteness and character development of Air and the mystery of Serial Experiments Lain and moulded them into one massive gargantuan hybrid show. From a personality perspective Haruhi Suzumiya may very well be the most complex character ever to grace the world of Anime - she's eccentric, boisterous, manipulative, sometimes violent and fiercly intelligent, but on the flipside she's graceful, charming, cute as a button, multi talented and the most important (yet saddest) girl on Earth. What attracted me to this show was its depth, the characters all seem to have hidden agendas which somehow relate to the 'insignificant' Haruhi and I have a tremendous amount of respect for any company with the testicular fortitude to purposely show their work in the wrong order and make the viewer do their own reseach to watch the episodes in the correct order.
[B]Serial Experiments Lain[/B]
It's difficult to go against the norm and do something different, many shows have tried, but very few ever manage to pull it off - some, however, go above and beyond the call of duty which is exactly where Lain can be found. Lain's power lies in it's ability to decieve the viewer (in many ways this shows reminds me of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' or one of his many groundbreaking movies) with false clues, lines of thought which end abruptly and a story so complex (yet intriguing) that you'll want to keep watching just to see how far they're willing to push the envelope. The complexity of this show really seperates the men from the boys, I loved it for the many ways it caould be interpreted, for the further discussion it demands and for its uncompromising nature.
[B]Ghost In The Shell: The Stand Alone Complex[/B]
Like many people, the original Ghost In The Shell movie was my first feature length Anime experience so I was thrilled to bits when I discoved the series upon its UK DVD release. Whichever way you choose to look at it GITS:TSAC is a masterpiece and the new benchmark for futuristic, Sci-Fi Anime. I'm a massive appreciator of art so I was reduced to a dribbling wreck when I saw the New Port City cityscape for the first time, I mean, the attention to detail in this series is just mindblowing, it just goes to show that you can spend a fortune on a project and have it look good, take note Hollywood.
