With 2024 in the rear-view mirror, it is time for my fourth annual New Leaf Journal anime year-in review. In 2021, 2022, and 2023, I listed my top five (2021) and six (2022 and 2023) anime series of the year along with honorable mentions/notables and category-specific awards. This year, I decided to split my year-end review into two parts. In this article, I will rank my top six anime shows of 2024 in reverse order (from six to one) and then discuss some additional series outside my top-six. You will find my category-specific awards such as best script, best aesthetics, best episode, and many more in a companion article.
Pre-Ranking Introduction
This is a generally spoiler-free survey of the best anime to air in 2024 with one caveat. When I am discussing subsequent season anime, I will sometimes implicitly reference things that happened in earlier seasons. I think that everything in this article is still safe to read – but I invite readers to exercise their own judgment about shows they have not watched but are likely to watch in the future.
I watched many shows in 2024. However, I am not an anime reviewer. I watched the anime that I had some interest in continuing for one reason or another and skipped others entirely. While I do try things outside my main interests, I am less inclined to grind through shows I consider to be slogs than I was in early in the previous decade. My ranking comes with the disclaimer that it is entirely possible that I missed a show that I would have ranked in my top six. However, I will note that I have not had to re-visit my 2021, 2022, or 2023 rankings since publishing them.
Finally, I watched every anime in this article with Japanese audio and English subtitles. While some of the shows do have official English dubs, I am not familiar with them.
Eligibility Rules For Our Ranking
Our last order of business before I begin my best-of 2024 list with the sixth best anime of the year is defining which shows are eligible for my ranking.
- This is a ranking of TV anime with at least 10 standard-length episodes (21-23 minutes). I do fully consider shows with one- or twotheatrical-length episodes.
- Seasons which aired entirely in 2024 or began in 2023 and concluded in 2024 are considered. Seasons which begin in 2024 and conclude in 2025 are not considered.
- If a show had its second or third season in 2024, I will consider the 2024 season in isolation. However, in light of the fact that these shows may accrue some advantages from prior developments, I may favor first-or-only one season shows where everything is otherwise equal. There may be cases where a show has had so many prior seasons that I will no longer consider new seasons for anime of the year purposes, but no show was excluded from my top-six for that reason.
With our ground rules established, let us proceed to the anime of the year ranking.
2024 Anime of the Year Ranking
2024 was, in my estimation, the best overall year of anime of the current decade (2021-30 is how I count it, see some of my 2011-2020 recommendations). While it lacked what I would describe as a once in a decade show of the caliber of my 2021 anime of the year, SSSS.Dynazenon, it had no fewer than four shows which would have been anime of the year had they aired in some other years. For that reason, our top-six was very competitive, with no room for the sort of protest pick that I tacked on to the end of my 2022 list. Only excellent shows need apply, and you will find six excellent shows below.
6. Girls Band Cry
Girls Band Cry was produced by Toei Animation and directed by Kazuo Sakai. It aired for 13 episodes from April 6 to June 29, 2024. I will note additionally that the lead writer was Jukki Hanada, which may turn out to be something of a theme in this article. (See Girls Band Cry details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
Girls Band Cry is a fully CG anime, making use of 3D models for characters and the environment. I ranked another CG girl’s band show in last year’s top six – BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! – and noted that I am not too familiar with the aesthetic genre. That remains true, but I suppose I am becoming more familiar having now made it two years in a row with a CG girl’s band show placing in the year-end ranking.
The principal main character in Girls Band Cry is Nina Iseri. She is 17 and has dropped out of high school after having had some disagreement with a situation at her school and how her parents handled it. Her parents allowed her to live alone with an allowance provided that she attended cram school to study for college entrance exams. Nina has one mishap after another on the day she is supposed to move into her new apartment, and while wandering she happens upon a familiar face – a young musician named Momoka Kawaragi who had been the lead singer-songwriter of her favorite band, Diamond Dust. Nina awkwardly approaches Momoka, who had been performing in front of a train station, and manages to convey how much Momoka’s music meant to her. Momoka takes Nina in for the night (Nina having no other place to stay due to her mishaps) and reveals that she is quitting music and leaving town the next day. The next day Nina, not content to watch her hero give up, makes a dramatic effort to convince Momoka to stay – culminating in Nina singing her favorite song of Mokoka’s with Momoka handling the guitar in front of the train station where they had met.
Momoka decides to stay in town. Nina was happy – but they have a misunderstanding. It turns out that Momoka is impressed with Nina’s singing, notwithstanding the fact that Nina is an amateur – mostly with Nina’s ability to convey her feelings and frustration through vocals. Momoka fancies the idea of switching from vocals to lead guitar and building a band around Nina – and she recruits a high school acting student, Subara Awa, to handle drums. Nina is initially reluctant, but unsurprisingly gives in to her hero’s intense effort to win her over.
Nina – who is the heart of the show – turns out to come with some strong positive and negative traits. I would classify her as intelligent, but she is painfully shy due in part to her recent experiences in school and she is remarkably stubborn. She has a strong sense of justice and a good heart, but her nosiness can grate on others – including both Momoka and Subaru. Nina is prone to making snap decisions – sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Her quick temper is at the cause of more than a little bit of discord. But something about her singing – amateurish as it is at the start – speaks to Momoka and eventually attracts two additional members to join the bad on keyboard and bass. Over the course of the show – we see the band shift from being led by Momoka, –who had past experience working on a successful project, albeit a project which became more commercially successful after she left – to Nina, whose iron will and force of personality exerts a gravitational effect on those around her (whether that is for better or for worse is a matter of viewer discretion).
Girls Band Cry is designed in no small part to introduce and market its central virtual five-girl band. Fortunately, the show is far more than a marketing gimmick. It is a well thought-out piece about five lost girls who come together to form a band, all the while trying to work out what it is they want to accomplish individually and as a group. One’s mileage with the show will depend in large part on one’s mileage with Nina. My top-six ranking is a testament to the fact that I think Nina is one of the best anime leads in the decade thus far – a girl with a kind heart and good intentions but a difficult personality that can be attributed to some social drama she endured in high school. Momoka and Subaru are excellent characters in their own right. Monoka was wandering aimlessly after having, for reasons that are explored in the show, walked away from a chance to make money off her music, and Subaru, was being pressed into pursuing acting due to family circumstances. The final two members, Tomo and Rupa, are interesting in their own rights but comparatively under-developed.
The music in Girls Band Cry is as good as one should hope from a show that exists in part to pitch singles of its in-world band’s music – and I grant this while not having any special interest in the genre. The members of the band are all played by amateur voice actresses who also handle their instruments – and the end result is quite impressive. One thing I appreciate is that viewers can pick up in nuance in the band’s different performances, how individual members change and grow, and why one song may be more successful than another. The visual aesthetics are somewhat mixed. The character designs for the five main girls are top-notch and I think they move more fluidly than did the characters in MyGO!!!!! last year. However, the character acting is not quite on the elite level of MyGO!!!!! The backgrounds are usually good – but there are some odd quirks here and there such as an eerily smooth cat (its fur lacks any texture).
Girls Band Cry is simultaneously a pleasant surprise and an under-achiever. In its best moments its characters and overall writing quality are good enough to put it in the periphery of the anime of the year mix. While it was consistently good, it made a few odd decisions in the second half of its run. Firstly, it left the last two-to-join members of the main band under-developed. One aspect of a band rivalry which crystallizes late in the show’s run feels contrived – which is an issue since that point is significant in the last few episodes. The show hits what feels like a season-ending climax in episode 11, which was one of the best individual episodes of 2024 (Girls Band Cry 8 was also a top-notch episode), but then begins an entirely new two-episode story arc in its final two episodes. While I like the idea that Girls Band Cry goes for in episodes 12-13, which raiseinteresting questions about what it means to pursue art as an indie project and what it means in practical purposes for a band of creatives to look to Nina Iseri for leadership, two episodes are not enough time to explore these ideas, Indeed, the final arc ends up feeling half-baked as a result. Had Girls Band Cry managed its last few episodes better than it did – it could have gained a couple of places on my final ranking. As it stands, however, it is a terrific show and a strong start to our year-end top-six.
5. A Sign of Affection
A Sign of Affection was produced by Ajia-do Animation Works and directed by Yuuta Murano. It aired for 12 episodes from January 6 through March 23, 2024. The anime is based on an ongoing manga by Suu Morishita (a pen-name for two authors). (See A Sign of Affection details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
I wrote seven articles about A Sign of Affection. Five of the articles were about hair color in the show. More pertinent to this short essay, one of my A Sign of Affection articles was a full review of the anime, which came with a summary (the seventh article is an addendum to my review). I encourage interested readers to consult my review for a detailed introduction to the show along with my full assessment.
A Sign of Affection follows the budding romance between Yuki Itose, a deaf first-year college student who had previously lived in a small-but-happy world, attending a school for the deaf with a small number of classmates, and Itsuomi Nagi, a handsome and charismatic polyglot who spent part of his childhood in Germany and loves to travel. While Yuki and Itsuomi are the main characters, the show also examines romances and unrequited love on their periphery – mostly involving characters with links to Itsuomi.
The first thing that jumped out to me about A Sign of Affection was not its plot – which I had some prior familiarity with from having read part of the manga – but its visual aesthetic. Its soft pastel pallete works for a show seen mostly from Yuki’s delicate perspective. The character designs are top-notch, granting they depict an unusually pretty collection of people. While this is far from a action show, it has some of the best character acting one will find in anime – especially any scene involving sign language (the team put special attention into those scenes). A Sign of Affection does conserve resources and it has a few weaker episodes on the visual front (episode 7 comes to mind), but as I noted in my review – this is the best-looking shoujo romance I have seen since Blue Spring Ride.
A Sign of Affection is not an ambitious piece. It is in many respects a formulaic shoujo/josei romance beyond the fact of Yuki’s being deaf. But it is well-executed. A Sign of Affection nails its emphasis on communication and what it means to communicate well. The main Yuki-Itusomi courtship is resolved surprisingly quickly. On the surface – these two characters had nothing in common. While Yuki is not defined by her disability, it does set her apart – and prior to attending college, she had spent her school years in a small group of students with hearing impairments (not all of them were as deaf as Yuki). Itsuomi is a handsome world-traveler who speaks three languages and spent part of his childhood in Germany. Yet despite their very different life experiences and the fact that Itsuomi begins the show with no sign language knowledge, the pair are able to communicate effectively and quickly resolve potential misunderstandings. There is a subtle irony in the fact that Yuki’s childhood friend, Oushi, who became proficient in sign language so he could talk to Yuki, struggles to do the same. Similarly, Itsuomi’s two high school friends, Shin and Ema, struggle to understand why Itsuomi does not seem interested in Ema, who has harbored strong feelings for him for years. A Sign of Affection effectively illustrates that surface level communication barriers can be overcome by making a genuine effort to understand the other person. Conversely, people who seem to have surface-level advantages in winning the affections of another can easily overlook the details.
While there is no denying the genre-fitting feminine wish-fulfillment aspect of A Sign of Affection – specifically in a charismatic, handsome young man taking a strong liking to a cute-but-shy girl whose disability makes people less inclined to approach her – the show makes more of an effort than most others in this space. Itsuomi eventually gives a credible account for why he likes Yuki. While Itsuomi does drive the plot forward, the story could not move forward without Yuki making her own effort in stepping outside her comfort zone and trying to understand Itsuomi. The show’s emphasis on trying to see another person for who they are is what makes it a worthwhile anime romance.
The main focus in A Sign of Affection is Yuki and Itsuomi, but the secondary characters are well-conceived in their own right, albeit under developed save for two: Yuki’s childhood friend Oushi Ashioki and Itsuomi’s best friend Shin Iryuu. Oushi is grating in most of his scenes because of his patronizing attitude toward Yuki, but he ultimately serves an important role in hammering home the show’s point that communication requires understanding. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Shin’s episode, which centers on his feelings for a fellow high school classmate who in turn has feelings for Itsuomi. Although Shin only featured in one episode, he made good use of it as he examined the dangers of relying on questionable assumptions instead of being forthright with people he cared about.
Having had the better part of a year to reflect on A Sign of Affection, my feelings are largely unchanged from my original review. Its production values and careful attention to detail recommend it as a well-above average show, but the writing for what is ultimately a character-focused romance is not quite interesting enough to put it in the anime of the year tier.
4. Oshi no Ko [season 2]
Oshi no Ko’s second season, like the first, was produced by Doga Kobo and directed by Daisuke Hiramaki. It aired for 13 episodes from July 3 through October 6 of 2024. It is based on a now-completed manga series by Aka Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari, although the second season ends part-way through the manga’s story. (See Oshi no Ko details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
The first season of Oshi no Ko was something of an anime phenomenon and would have most likely been my 2023 anime of the year had it not punted its final episode. However, that final episode set up the main plot line of the second season, and I ultimately preferred the second season to the first, notwithstanding its lower relative 2024 ranking.
As a threshold matter, I recommend reading my largely spoiler-free summary of the first season in my 2023 Anime Review article since the second season picks up where the first season left off.
Most of the second season of Oshi no Ko focuses on one of the two main character siblings, Aqua Hoshino. Hoshino is followed as she works with other actors and actresses, namely Kana Arima (my 2023 female character of the year) and Akane Kurokawa, both of whom played significant roles in the first season, in preparing for and ultimately performing in a 2.5D stage play adapting a fictional popular manga series. (see this article for information about what a 2.5D stage play is – I was not familiar with the medium prior to Oshi no Ko). The stage play arc is long but ultimately very well done. While the first season was inconsistent producing the defining moments in anime in 2023, especially at the ends of episodes, I generally found the second season to be more consistently interesting while still delivering some of the more memorable scenes of 2024.
The principal main character, Aqua Hoshino, comes off better in this go-around. Aqua is a difficult character. In a past life be was an OB-GYN entrusted with caring for Ai Hoshino, who was pregnant with twins. Past-life Aqua was murdered right before Ai gave birth and apparently reincarnated as her son. After AI was murdered at the end of the theatrical length first episode, Aqua decides– with the benefit of his memories from his apparent past life and his small inheritance from Ai – to make his way through the entertainment industry in order to hunt down whoever was responsible for Ai’s death. The second season does more than the first to grapple with Aqua’s character – we see for the first time Aqua considering what is his debt, if any, to Ai, what he wants from life and whether it is acceptable for him to want anything for all. Aqua questions what all his efforts are for and, to my pleasant surprise, begins to consider honestly confronting the obvious feelings that his two more talented colleagues, Kana and Akane, harbor for him.
Kana is one of my favorite anime characters (she was my 2023 pick for female character of the year) and it is fun to see her in her element – acting instead of moonlighting as an idol in a new idol group also featuring Aqua’s (also reincarnated) sister, Ruby Hoshino – and the show explored some of Kana’s inhibitions and insecurities as a still-talented actress who struggles the the weight of having previously been a successful child star. Akane, who is herself an extraordinarily talented actress with a different skill-set than Kana, mainly featured in the first season as an out-of-her-depth player on a reality dating show tormented by mean online commenters. In the second season, we see a more confident Akane preparing for and ultimately taking the stage, as well as her efforts to understand and grow closer to Aqua, with whom she shares an odd connection set up by some of the episodes in the first season. Another strength of Oshi no Ko season 2 is how well it handles its side-characters. The second season mostly casts Aqua’s sister Ruby and her idol group (save for Kana who takes on another role) into the background. But we meet, and learn about, a cast of other interesting characters – from the socially awkward and strident author of the source manga to the stage-play writer’s struggles to adapt her creative demands to a flashy model who had made a small appearance in season one flaunting his then-atrocious acting skills. The new characters are consistently good and justify their screen-time.
Only in the latter few episodes of Oshi no Ko do we step away from the play and gradually shift some of the focus back to Ruby and her idol group (while also developing the Kana and Akane plotlines). These episodes are in the aggregate weaker than most of the stage-play episodes, but the end of the season shifts its focus to the underlying mysteries that were set up in the first season that are mostly pushed into a background role for much of the second. Despite my having stated in my season one plots that I found Oshi no Ko’s overarching plot to be less interesting than some of its specific character dynamics, I found myself intrigued by the main plot developments in the last couple of episodes. Moreover, while the second season ends on something of a cliff-hanger for an inevitable third season, it ran through the tape so to speak and produced a strong final episode.
Oshi no Ko season two is a high-end production, but it struck me as generally less impressive visually than the first. Perhaps the best term is economical – it had some of the absolute most dynamic scenes in a dynamic year in some of the stage-play episodes in the middle of the season, and the second season ends with what may well be the finest in-anime episode music video (rivaled only by one in the first season), but it was often content to hold its fire and maintain a steady base-line. It continued to excel in the voice acting department – its all star cast produced the best overall performance of any show in 2024.
I often do not like the most popular shows, but Oshi no Ko is a case where my tastes incline toward a big commercial success. Had the second season aired in 2023, it would have been my choice for anime of the year. While I am still not entirely convinced regarding the main overarching mystery plot tied to Aqua’s and Ruby’s reincarnation, I very much look forward to seeing the third season and finding whether it will offer enough to secure a top placement for what has established itself as one of the best anime series of the first half of the current decade.
3. Sound! Euphonium 3
The third season of Sound! Euphonium, like the first two seasons and four movies, was produced by Kyoto Animation. The director of the third season was Tatsuya Ishihara (the first two seasons, which aired in 2015 and 2016, were directed by Naoko Yamada). I will note here for reasons that will become clear in relatively short order that the script of the third season was written by Jukki Hanada. Sound! Euphonium is the adaptation of a light novel series by Ayano Takeda. The novel series is complete and the third season adopts its ending. (See Sound! Euphonium 3 details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
Sound! Euphonium the anime has the most complicated history of any show in my top-six. The first two seasons aired in 2015 and 2016 respectively for a combined 26 episodes. There were four movies produced in the eight year gap between the second and third seasons. Two of the movies recapped the first two seasons, while two more recent movies, Liz and the Blue Bird (anime original) and Sound! Euphonium – Our Promise: A Brand New Day (“Brand New Day”), covered events between the second and third seasons (namely the second of three years in high school of the main protagonists). The third TV season technically follows Brand New Day, which is effectively required viewing, meaning it is really more of a fourth season. Liz and the Blue Bird is strongly recommended viewing prior to watching the 2024 third season – especially since it has very similar themes – but its focus on two second-tier characters makes it not required. There is also an original video animation called Sound! Euphonium: Ensemble Contest, which occurs between Brand New Day and the third season, but it is not officially available for streaming in English (all of the movies are available for free streaming, as I explained and recommended in an article).
Eight years passed between the airing of the second and third seasons of Sound! Euphonium and five years between Brand New Day and the final season. Much happened in the real world – namely the horrific arson attack on Kyoto Animation, which led to many deaths including a number of talented studio workers who were part of the production of the first two seasons and the movies.
The first two seasons of Sound! Euphonium rated as my third and second best shows of 2015 and 2016 respectively, although the first season was head and shoulders above the still-very good second season. The series covers a high school concert band through the eyes of Kumiko Oumae, a euphonium player who begins the first season as a first-year high school student (note that high school in Japan covers grades 10-12). Kumiko is a talented – albeit not otherworldly – euphonium player. Kumiko, who had been playing euphonium in school bands since elementary school, only reluctantly joins her high school concert band after being dragged along by her new friends (Kumiko’s lack of ambition and indecisiveness is a theme). She quickly finds a place in her band because she is an above average musician, but she finds a different place in the band due to her tendency to stick her nose in other people’s problems. In the first season, she repairs her strained friendship with her middle school classmate and band member, the supremely talented Reina Kousaka, and she supports Reina whose brash attitude and well-founded confidence leads to friction with the older members. In the second season and the movies covering Kumiko’s second year, we see her start to become a leader in the band due to her tendency to stick her nose in other people’s problems and take an interest in resolving them – all the while never fully shedding her own indecisiveness. After a long journey, the third season picks up with a development that should not come as much of a surprise to people who saw the second season – even without the benefit of seeing the intervening movies – Kumiko has been elevated to the position of president of the concert band for her third and final year of high school.
Unsurprisingly, things are not all smooth-sailing for Kumiko, who finds herself faced with some of the same problems that bedeviled her predecessors and some new problems somewhat unique to the dynamics of her year. Kumiko’s job is to work with her executive committee and the band’s instructor to guide the band to winning honors in the national competition. The band’s ambition, and the hard charging nature of Kumiko’s best friendReina, whom she gave a key leadership role, causes anxiety for many of the green first year members. While Kumiko is committed to the band being a meritocracy, which she advocated for in defense of Reina in the first season, she begins to question her beliefs when a fellow senior and talented euphonium player transfers into her school and joins the band at the start of the year. Finally, Kumiko has personal challenges beyond guiding the band – namely her own future. At the start of the season, our indecisive protagonist still has not decided what she will do as far as college goes and whether she wants to continue with music. Kumiko, always the procrastinator, uses her band responsibilities to put off making decisions – but those things can only be put off for so long.
Before praising the story, I will cover the aesthetics. The first two seasons of Sound! Euphonium were gorgeous, as should be expected from Kyoto Animation, but the third season is, bar none, the prettiest TV anime I have seen. Unlike the other shows on this list, Euphonium 3 does not take episodes off – it does go the extra two miles for big moments – but its base-line level would have been more than enough for the prettiest show of 2024. The designs of the main characters were tweaked slightly with an eye toward being more mature and realistic, and that accrued to the show’s benefit. The use of colors and lighting are superb, and Euphonium 3 may well have the best character acting I have seen in any anime, giving it a point for animation in addition to beauty. The third season does not have as many concert performance scenes as the first two, but it saves the two best of the entire series for the end.
In light of the fact that the third season followed two full seasons and at least one movie of development, it had a high bar to clear for my ranking purposes. While I ultimately placed it in third place – I can say that the third season was clearly and beyond doubt an anime of the year level production. Season 3 of Euphonium is the end of the series – and it wraps things up as well as one could hope. It is ultimately Kumiko’s story and journey, and she faces all the challenges I noted and reaches what I found as a viewer to be satisfactory conclusions on every point. One thing I most respect about Euphonium is its small world/big world perspective. The show takes place almost entirely within the confines of a high school concert band, and small problems in the grand scheme of things become all-encompassing problems for its members. The series, and especially the third season and Liz and the Blue Bird, are admirably aware of the fact that this band represents what will only be a small part of the lives of its members. We see former members make appearances in the third season, and some of these members offer Kumiko important advice. But most importantly, we see that the former members are moving on with their lives. They keep in touch with their friends and sometimes check in on how the band is doing, but they have moved on – and the viewer knows that so too will Kumiko and her same-year friends we followed for the whole series.
Euphonium came very close to securing my anime of the year nod, but its issues ultimately relegated it to the bronze medal against tough competition in 2024. The first four episodes jumped from one issue to the next in a way that I did not feel as cohesive as I would have liked. Things picked up beginning in episode 5, but there were some stretches in the middle episodes that dragged a little bit. There was something about the pacing – where here we put a full year’s events into one season instead of splitting the year in two (see the first two seasons) – that felt a inconsistent to me. There were also a couple of important characters – namely Shuuichi Tsukamoto (Kumiko’s childhood friend and class vice president) and Kanade Hisaishi (a euphonium player one year Kumiko’s junior who has a lovably warped personality) – who could have used more attention. The show was a borderline anime of the year candidate until its last few episodes – and it became a true contender with its penultimate episode 11, which was not only one of the most remarkable single episodes of TV anime I have seen (even granting it was a touch heavy-handed), but also, as I later learned, an example of the anime team making a dramatic executive decision to diverge from the source material.
There are numerous years in which Euphonium 3 would have been my anime of the year, and 2024 was nearly one of them. Euphonium was without a doubt the best series to air in 2024, but its third season, taken in and of itself, was not quite the best show. For Euphonium fans, of which I am one, I will submit that the series, and Kumiko’s journey, could not have ended much better.
2. Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master
Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master was produced by studio Peirrot and directed by Yoshiaki Kyōgoku. It aired for 20 episodes from April 6 through September 21, 2024. The anime is based on an ongoing novel series by Chisato Abe. (See Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
My 2024 runner-up is the only show in my top-six which has not at any point been mentioned in these pages (I had to save one surprise). No show in the upper-echelon of my ranking put as much work into world-building as Yataragarasu. The first 12 episodes make up a multi-faceted court drama with a large roster of characters.
To begin, as the name of the show suggests, the dramatic personae are yatagarasu, creates which most often have a human form but can also take the form of three-legged ravens (technically the raven form is their real form, insofar as I understand it). Thus, the characters look and behave like people, but are yatagarasu – a point which features prominently in the show’s world.
The first eight episode arc, which is the only part I will discuss in any detail here, has, in general terms, three separate-but-related plot lines. Most of the first season sits in the capital of the show’s world, with four different realms each sending a young woman as a candidate to marry the crown prince, Nazukihiko. However, many people in the court, including the Empress dowager, do not want Nazukihiko to become the new Kin’iu (or King, roughly speaking) on account of his poor reputation, favoring instead his elder brother, Natsuka. This causes Nazukihiko to not visit his potential brides and perform the function expected of his position, creating more uncertainty. Nazukihiko chooses as his assistant a teenage boy from the north named Yukiya, who, perhaps interestingly, seems to have been called to the capital after meeting Natsuka. Yukiya, who would have much preferred to stay home, immediately finds Nazukihiko odd and infuriating (not without reason), but they come to grow closer as they work together, with Yukiya, often under unpleasant orders, having to navigate the dangerous court drama. Meanwhile, the four women vying to marry the non-appearing Nazukihiko have their own situations and dramas – which come in the context of behind-the-scenes jockeying for power among the North, South, East, and West.
To be sure – my summary is not great, not the best. But this anime of the year format is not conducive to summarizing a very intricate, complicated show, and I note again that my summary and introduction did not touch at all on the second half, which has a distinctly different focus than the first.
I have a soft spot for court dramas – see for example my fourth place ranking for the interesting-but-flawed Raven of the Inner Palace in 2022 – and this is a great court drama. The first 12 episodes feature a parade of interesting, well-conceived characters, all with their own motivations. Yatagarasu does an excellent job of balancing not tipping its hand. It shows (as opposed to tells) more than enough about the dramatic personae so that when it tips its hand and reveals a character’s actions or motivations, the viewer can, with hindsight, go back and see how the reveal was foreshadowed. This is done to especially great effect in the latter-stages of the first 12-episode arc.
While there are many memorable characters – the two leads in both halves of the show are Yukiya and Nazukihiko. Yukiya, the recalcitrant teenager thrust into the role of being one of the presumptive Emperor’s must-trusted assistants, is a great character with a compelling backstory which gives rise to good reasons for his reluctance to become too involved. Nazukihiko, who is funny, condescending, arrogant, and confident-with-justification all at the same time, contributes greatly to Yukiya’s angst. The four women (or in one case, a girl) who are candidates for Nazukihiko’s hand in marriage go about their affairs mostly separate from Yukiya and Nazukihiko, but they are all very compelling characters in their own right – although there is little I can say about any of the quartet in a spoiler-free forum.
The overall audio-visual aesthetics are above average in general and certainly for the genre – I dare say it is close in quality in its better moments to the otherwise inferior The Apothecary Diaries. It struggles on two visual points – firstly character faces look too similar to one another, which is a minor issue in the very early-going given the show’s unusually large cast. Secondly, Yatagarasu struggles with some action scenes, albeit that issue shows up more often in the second half. Its use of CG animation is a mixed bag – some scenes look good but there are some elements in in-between shots which look out of place.
There were two issues – other than there being an outstanding anime of the year candidate that I will discuss next – which kept me from giving a yes to making Yatagarasu the anime of the year. Firstly, while its first 12 episodes were the most consistently compelling TV anime of the year, there were times when I felt like certain plot threads moved a little bit quickly. This was a case, given everything that was going on, where an additional 2-4 episodes of material focusing on the first arc might have benefited the show. Secondly, we have the latter eight episodes. Now to be clear – the second eight-episode arc is well above average and it certainly does not raise the same kinds of issues I noted regarding the ending of Girls Band Cry. But it did have issues. Firstly, some points from the first 12-episode arc were not – to my mind at least – fully dealt with or resolved before we are moved to the next arc, which occurs not long after in the show’s world. Secondly, the minor pacing issues I noted for the first 12 episodes became more serious in the final eight because there was clearly more material than there was time, and the end result jumps too fast from point to point. Thirdly, the pacing issues are exacerbated by the fact that the final arc strives to expand the show’s world to some extent – while no plot revelation/resolution is unjustified, they do not always feel fully earned. Finally, while the latter arc focuses on the show’s two best characters, it suffers from having to start over to some extent.
I came away with the feeling that there was probably a better way to do Yatagarasu. But the end result, while ultimately not perfect, is a terrific piece that is easy to recommend to just about anyone. Ranking above the third season of Sound! Euphonium is no small feat, and Yatagarasu would have been my selection for anime of the year in many years, but there was one show that on the whole, fulfilled more of its potential and did just enough to fly higher than our shape-shifting raven friends.
1. The Dangers in My Heart [season 2]
The Dangers in My Heart’s second season, like the first, was produced by Shin-Ei Animation and directed by Hirokai Akagi. The script was handled by Jukki Hanada, who also wrote the scripts for sixth-place Girls Band Cry and third-place Sound! Euphonium 3 (talk about a good year). The anime is based on an ongoing manga series by Norio Sakurai. For followers of my ranking, it is worth noting that my 2022 anime of the year, Teasing Master Takagi-san season 3, was also a Doga Kobo-produced romantic comedy directed by Hirokai Akagi. (Lesson: If you have a middle school romantic comedy you need adapted, I have an idea of where you should go.) (See The Dangers in My Heart details on ANN, AniDB, MAL, and Wikipedia.)
I have previously written full reviews of the first and second seasons of Dangers, so I will keep my general introduction short since I introduced the series in my first review and re-introduced it in my second season review. The view-point protagonist in Dangers is Kyotaro Ichikawa, a middle school student who begins the show in 8th grade (note that middle school runs through 9th grade in Japan). He has goth fashion sensibilities and begins the series as a loner, with no friends, playing a dangerously unstable character in his own mind. Through being in the right place at the right time and having latent desire to be helpful, Kyotaro ends up befriending Anna Yamada, a very tall classmate who works as a teen model with ambitions of becoming an actress. Unlike Kyotaro, Anna is bubbly and popular. Kyotaro begins to drop his internal dangerously unstable shtick in the first season as he makes his first friend in Anna, and it becomes increasingly obvious to the viewer that Anna begins to develop feelings for Kyotaro through their interactions. It also becomes clear that up to that point no one around Kyotaro, who has a perfectly nice family and acaring older sister, thought much of him at all one way or another – not because he was creepy or dangerously unstable, but because he had not made any effort to interact with his peers or otherwise be a part of the class.
I had a mixed overall view of the first season – which I discussed in my review and evinced in relegating it to the honorable mentions section of my 2023 year-end review, outside of my top-six shows. Kyotaro’s transformation from making an effort to be the creepy kid in the corner to gaining the confidence to put himself out there through his friendship with Anna is a central part of the story, but the first season leaned too far into creepy Kyotaro in its first third. It improved as it went along and the latter half of it was borderline top-six quality, but I was left with some qualms, specifically that I did not think it did enough to develop Anna.
While the second season does not negate my issues with the first season, it does soften them knowing what the show had done with its early character development. In the second season, we see Kyotaro, now more mature than when he started, coming to terms with his own feelings for Anna and his feelings about himself. That Kyotaro started with self-valuation issues should come as no surprise (the reasons for his lack of confidence are explored). That Anna, who Kyotaro admires, undeniably thinks highly of him, forces Kyotaro to reassess how he thinks of himself. Moreover, Kyotaro’s growth is not confined to his interactions with Anna. The second season builds off the first in that Kyotaro begins to become more a part of the class, and we see clearly and beyond doubt that his peers were more than capable of reciprocating his interest in talking to them. This is to say Dangers is not the story of being ostracized by others, but instead of othering oneself.
Dangers’ strength in the second half of its first season and in its second season is Kyotaro himself. He is intelligent – which is central to the midseason climax of the second season, but he is written credibly as an awkward middle school boy. Anime school romances have an unfortunate tendency to create drama through denseness. In Kyotaro’s case – he leaves no doubt in his monologues that he sees what the audience sees. His issue is less understanding the situation than accepting both and himself.
The second season does well to address most of the issues I had with Anna in the first season. Some of the issues derived from perspective – we always see things through Kyotaro’s eyes, and his perception of Anna is colored by his own complexes. The second season begins with Anna and Kyotaro having reached the friend stage – and with them now being able to consistently hold one-on-one conversations, we learn about Anna’s own inhibitions, which are ordinary and expected given her stand-out characteristics (appearance, being camera-friendly) and her limitations (she is good at reading Kyotaro but not especially book-smart).
While The Dangers in My Heart will always focus heavily on the main pair, the second season does more with its secondary characters than did the first – and this adds variety to the episodes. Anna’s friend Moeko Sekine is always great fun and a few characters who played minor roles in the first season benefit from bigger roles in the second. I will note there are two later-introduced side characters whose purpose seems to be little more than to push the plot along, but more screen-time for Kyotaro’s and Anna’s classmates accrues to the second season’s benefit.
While this sort of set-up where an attractive girl develops feelings for an at best ordinary-looking boy, there is an element of wish-fulfillment. But similarly to A Sign of Affection, the wish-fulfillment aspect is not about outward appearances, but instead about how a character in good social standing takes the time to get to know someone who others overlook. It is worth noting that despite the fact this is a school romance where the view-point character is a boy and he is winning the affections of a girl who is – by some objective standards – out of his league, the author of the source material, Norio Sakurai, is a woman and she explained that she “came up with the basics of Ichikawa’s character by imagining what I would do in his position.”
Dangers is not on the same aesthetic level as A Sign of Affection (save for its highly animated opening song), but the production values are well above average and very consistent – even granting that I do not love how the show draws faces. I will single the show out for some outstanding voice acting – rivaling Oshi no Ko and Euphonium. There is one episode in which Kyotaro’s (Shun Horie) voice subtly changes – and the subtle change was done well enough that I picked up on it before it was noted. Hina Youmiya does a great job of conveying Anna’s personality and moments of interpersonal insight, and Megumi Han stands out as Moeko.
Unlike the first season, season two was strong out of the gate – its first few episodes were good enough to convince me that we had a potentially special show on our hands. The second season can be neatly broken into two halves, with the first culminating in an episode 6 midseason climax and the second with the final episode – which ends very convincingly for an ongoing series. Without getting into unnecessary details, the first half deals with Kyotarou, with no small amount of help from Anna, coming into his own, and latter half shows what both he and Anna can do with their newfound confidence.
Dangers had its small blemishes. It introduced a new character and plot point in episode 5 that it only returned to indirectly later in the season. While I suspect that the point will be a bigger focus in a third season, it is a minor demerit since my anime of the year assessment is of this season. While Dangers handles most of its big moments exceptionally well, there was an excess of melodrama in episode 9, which I suspect was its third-or-fourth highest priority scene. One could make the case that its midseason climax could have dialed down the intensity a bit, but I think it worked well. There were a few incidents of overly convenient comedic set-ups, including in the generally excellent final arc, but they were largely forgivable. While Dangers was, insofar as I understand, the most popular of my top-three shows – both in the United States and also Japan – its subject matter, getting into the mind of two ultimately endearing and smart but insecure middle school kids, has more particularized appeal than the bigger themes ultimately tackled in the third season of Sound! Euphonium, much less Yatagarasu. However, I will shift away from demerits to credit Dangers for a similar reason that I credited Euphonium 3 – while Kyotarou’s and Anna’s fears and concerns are largely particular to a time and place, both of them, especially Kyotarou, show awareness of the fact that they are growing up and that their lives may be substantially different in a year or two, much less as time progresses.
In my review of the second season of The Dangers in My Heart, I described it as the first genuine anime of the year candidate – which was an evaluation made based on the fact that it was clearly and beyond doubt the best show from the first quarter of 2024 and that it compared well to other anime of the year winners. The final analysis ended up being very close, and I could make a strong case for both Yatagarasu and Euphonium as the anime of the year. Part of me wanted to give the nod to Yatagarasu or Euphonium because they are undeniably more ambitious than Dangers or specifically to Yatagarasu because it is a first-season piece and I suspect it has more appeal to people who are not interested in anime. However, after carefully weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the three shows, I concluded that The Dangers in My Heart was the most consistently excellent anime of the contending trio, maintaining the highest base-line while having a stronger conclusion than Yatagarasu. The final assessment leads to one conclusion: The second season of The Dangers in My Heart is my 2024 anime of the year.
Anime of the Year (Last 10)
- 2024: The Dangers in My Heart [season 2/2]
- 2023: Overtake!
- 2022: Teasing Master Takagi-san [season 3/3]
- 2021: SSSS.Dynazenon
- 2020: My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU! Climax [season 3/3]
- 2019: Fruits Basket [season 1/3]
- 2018: March Comes in like a Lion [season 2/2]
- 2017: Tsuki ga Kirei
- 2016: Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinju
- 2015: My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU! TOO [season 2/3]
Additional Anime of Note
2024 was a deep year in my assessment – which means that some good shows necessarily missed the top-six cut. I decided to limit myself to offering notes on 15 additional shows which did not make my top-six. Do note that this list is not exhaustive (I watched a good number more than the following 15 shows to completion) and I will list the 15 shows alphabetically in order to underscore the fact that this is not a ranking. Before continuing, I will cheat and refer readers to my full reviews of two non-top six shows:
- Review: Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki: Second Stage
- Review: Days With My Stepsister
- Hair Color Review: Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night (Note: The final arc was awful, so my lukewarm assessment in the hair color piece became more decidedly negative)
Having written full reviews of these shows, I figured it would be a waste to use one of my 15 honorable mention slots on re-inventing the wheels. I will also exclude the first season of The Apothecary Diaries, which I liked in the early going, as I noted in a 2023 article on hair color in the show, before gradually souring on it, as I explained in an article designating it as my choice for a popular anime I did not much care for.
365 Days To The Wedding was produced by Ashi Productions and aired for 12 episodes from October 3 to December 19, 2024. Two shy and socially awkward employees at a travel agency, Takuya Ohara and Rika Honjoji (Rika is much more socially-challenged), conspire on pretending to be engaged to avoid being transferred to a new office in Anchorage, Alaska. One can see where this will end up from a mile away, but I ended up liking both Takuya and Rika. The show had a surprising interest in examining different views on marriage through peeks into the stories of other characters. These attempts were hit and miss, and I would have liked to see a more thorough exploration of Takuya and Rika, but my final impression is favorable.
Astro Note was produced by Telecom Animation Film and aired for 12 episodes from April 5 to June 21, 2024. This show wears its 1980s anime inspiration on its sleeve with a glossy aesthetic and a familiar set-up. A recently laid off young chef falls in love in first sight with the landlady of a local boarding house, and he ends up staying there and making breakfast for the eccentric cast of boarders while looking for new work. The landlady is, of course, an alien. The first half of Astro Note is funny and enjoyable beyond its classic anime call-backs. The second half was a little bit too strange and ultimately rushed for my taste, but the end product is still solid and is worth a look for people who enjoy these styles of romantic comedies.
Brave Bang Bravern! aired for 12 episodes from January 11 to March 28, 2024. The U.S. and Japanese militaries are overrun by alien space robots. But a giant and very loud robot named Bravern is on their side and can only be piloted by Lt. Isami Ao, with whom he apparently shares a special bond. There are many robots, robot fights, loudly announced attacks, and explosions. What in the world did I just watch? 6.6354/10: Giant robots are awesome.
Dandadan was produced by Science Saru and aired for 12 episodes from October 4 to December 20, 2024. This was one of the blockbuster anime of 2024 and I am not sure whether it should count for 2024 or 2025 since (A) it ends in the middle of a scene and (B) its continuation is slated to begin in July 2025. But for ranking purposes, the issue is moot since Dandadan was not in play for my top six. It centers on a shy nerdy boy (Ken “Okarun” Takamura) who is obsessed with aliens and a trendy girl (Momo Ayase) who believes in supernatural entities. It turns out they are both right, and encounters with aliens and spirits lead to the boy being possessed by a spirit (at the cost of something important to him) and to the girl waking up to her psychic powers. Dandadan has top-line production values and some of the best animation of 2024. Despite strong attention to detail and some individually good episodes, Dandadan wore on me for a number of reasons – not least because Momo is the only tolerable character – and I came away nonplussed.
Demon Lord 2099 was produced by J.C. Staff and aired for 12 episodes from October 13 to December 29, 2024. 500 years before the start of the show, the “Hero” killed the “Demon Lord,” thus ending a war between mortals and immortals in favor of the mortals. Demon Lord Veltol re-awakens 500 years later to find things are very different. His fantasy-inspired world collided with our world, and now its inhabitants live side-by-side with humans in a sort of futuristic cyberpunk setting. The set-up is goofy, but Veltol and his follower, Machina, are appealing leads. While the show never takes itself too seriously (Veltol becomes an online streamer as part of his quest to regain power), I thought its setting and handling of technology in the first half were interesting. The second half, while fun, was less compelling – but Demon Lord 2099 turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was produced by Madhouse and ran for 28 episodes from September 29, 2023 to March 22, 2024. I noted in a separate article that Frieren has the highest aggregate rating for any TV anime on My Anime List. It is a high fantasy show featuring a near-immortal elven mage who is only now, after all the members of the party of heroes she had traveled with decades earlier to defeat the demon lord have passed away, beginning to think about what it means to appreciate the little things and the connections she makes. In order to reconcile her feelings – specifically for the now-late hero of said party – she sets off on a new journey with an apprentice mage and, subsequently, other party members. Frieren is the only show which rivals Euphonium in the visuals department (granted I am not a fan of the character faces), and it is capable of jaw-dropping animation when it goes all in – see especially episode 9. It has a distinctive sentimentality that works more often than not in the early going, even granting that it can be heavy-handed. While the writing for the slow-paced scenes is generally acceptable, the script creaks in its more action-oriented story-lines or when trying to explain certain aspects of the show’s world. It had its best stretch early in the second half, highlighted by a legitimate episode of the year contender in episode 15, which did more than any other to realize the potential of Frieren’s brand of sentimentality. I had it as a borderline top-six candidate, granting its flaws, until the aimlessly meandering mage examination arc which dragged on from episode 18 through the end of the show. It sidelined multiple interesting characters, introduced a conga line of less interesting characters, and brilliantly decided to render the entire 10 episode exercise entirely meaningless with a twist in the final episode.
Kaiju No. 8 was produced by Production I.G. and aired from April 13 to June 29, 2024 (second season slated for summer 2025). The show is set in modern Japan, but modern Japan is plagued by giant kaiju periodically emerging from the Earth. 32-year old Kafka Hibino dreamed of being on the Kaiju Defense Force, but he repeatedly failed to make the cut and was instead working on a dead kaiju disposal company. While in the hospital after a kaiju-related injury, a kaiju enters his brain and makes him part kaiji. Kafka, while having to keep this secret, makes one last attempt to join, and succeeds in joining, the Kaiju Defense Force. This show is not my typical fare, but it surprisingly found itself in my top-six mix in the early part of the year. It has a fun cast of characters (led by the good-hearted Kafka) and the kaiju fighting action is well done. The fights often felt more like foregone conclusions than they should and the final arc dragged a bit, but this was one of the better shows of 2024 and I look forward to season two.
Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines aired for 12 episodes from July 14 to September 29, 2024. The view-point protagonist is a nondescript first-year high school student – whose defining characteristics are loving romance light novels and having an interest in comparing tap water from different pipes – named Kazuhiko Nukumizu. He unexpectedly becomes the confidant of his popular classmate, Anna Yanami, when he inadvertently sees her being rejected by her childhood friend. That leads to him befriending two other losing heroines: Lemon Yakishio (also childhood friend rejection) and Chika Komari (club senior rejection). Makeine is a strange show in ranking terms in that it sweeps two major category awards (see my companion article) while not coming close to making my overall top-six. Its overall aesthetic and production values are outstanding and it delivers a few genuinely impressive scenes – almost all of which involve Anna – but its writing and inability to avoid dumb attempts at humor undercut its attempts to be serious. I could see a second season improving, but the first ultimately grades out as decent.
The second season of MF Ghost was produced by Felix Film and aired for 12 episodes from October 7 to December 23, 2024 (the first aired in 2023 and I discussed it in my year-end review). MF Ghost is the successor to the legendary 1990s street racing series, Intial D. Set in the same world two decades later with many returning characters, but a new cast of racerscompete in a more structured racing league this time around. The main character is Kanata Rivington, a supremely talented Japanese-English racer who trained under the protagonist of Initial D before taking his talents to Japan and driving an underpowered Toyota 86 against high-powered sports cars. I fully recognize the flaws of both MF Ghost and Initial D – for example their questionable writing and absolute inability to write women at all (save for very rare exceptions) – and I am still a fan of both. I want readers to understand how hard I tried to convince myself to put MF Ghost in the top six. The second season had more racing and less awful romance than the first – and since the racing and the racers are great, this worked to the show’s benefit. Yes, the racing was too often interrupted by the inane conversations of the scantly clad scoreboard girls, chief among them the incredibly dull main heroine and love interest, Ren Saionji. Yes, there was a non-racing stretch in the second half. Nevertheless, much of it was less irritating than similar stretches in the first season – at least until Ren has an immature meltdown and causes an incident. Speaking of said incident, which segues into the second race of the season – I dare say Kanata’s “no problem” line was the most genuinely affecting manly anime moment since Kamina did something in episode 7 of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in 2007. Unfortunately, much like the first season, the second season ends in the middle of the race. I want MF Ghost to work with me in season 3. Let us just do racing, focus on the racers. I will accept a romance plot – as awful as both MF Ghost and Inital D are at writing women – if we can just swap in Nozomi for Ren. Cut the in-race scoreboard girls scenes by 50% (at least) and please, please, end a season with the end of a race. I could go rogue and give the anime of the decade nod to a season that does this. (That may be extreme but a cleaned up MF Ghost season would at least land in a year-end top-six.)
Negative Positive Angler was produced by studio NUT and aired for 12 episodes from October 3 to December 19, 2024. NegiPosi is an anime original featuring Tsunehiro Sasaki, a college student who was diagnosed with an apparently terminal illness and decides to stop going to school, runs away from debt gamblers while blowing his loans on pachinko, and contemplates taking his own life, but then falls in with a group of nice people of different ages?? who love fishing and take an interest in him. I was skeptical going in, but NegiPosi checked in as above average. The aesthetics are solid and the characters were fun – even the initially unpleasant Tsunehiro comes around. Like many anime originals, it did not quite stick the ending – having an excess of melodrama, biting off more than it could chew, and rushing to a neat conclusion – but it could have been a fringe top-six show in a weaker year.
Nina the Starry Bride was produced by Signal.MD and ran for 12 episodes from October 12 to December 26, 2024. This show, which has an ancient near-east-inspired fantasy setting, stars an orphaned street girl who is sold to the royal family in her country and pressed into service as a stand-in for a deceased priestess-princess. Nina is energetic and willful, and she eventually wins the affections of the Prince who kidnapped her, but looming over them is the fact that she is to be married off to a neighboring kingdom. There is a good show in here, but it is harmed by its brutally fast pacing – something that was obvious to me despite not being familiar with the source material – which impaired its world building ambitions. Despite its pacing issues and lack of ambition in the animation department, Nina is a fun heroine and the show checks in as above average.
Pseudo Harem was produced by studio Nomad and aired for 12 episodes from July 5 to September 10, 2024. This is a new entry in the gimmick school romantic comedy space. Eiji Kitihama is a backstage member of his high school drama club, and Rin Nanakura, his junior, joins as an actress (she turns out to be talented). Eiji and Rin immediately hit it off with Rin using her acting skills to play different anime trope characters to flirt with Eiji. This show actually works because both Eiji and Rin are fun and they actually have good chemistry. Moreover, it is not defined by its gimmick – we cleverly see less of Rin playing characters as she and Eiji become more comfortable with one another. It tried to do too much in too little time i, leading to an odd final episode, but Pseudo Harem was the best pure comedy of 2024 and would have had a colorable top-six case in 2021 and 2022.
The first season of Shangri-La Frontier was produced by studio C2C and aired for 25 episodes from October 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024. Its second season began October 13 and is ongoing as of the publication of this article – but this assessment is only of the first season. We have a modern Japan setting save for the existence of very immersive VR games. The protagonist, Rakuro “Sunraku” Hizutome, is a top-flight VR game player who seeks out “trash games.” In the show, he decides to play Shangri-La Frontier, which is a god-tier game, using the skills he cultivated in the trash games. Shangri-La Frontier has remarkably good animation and choreography, some of which is almost certainly wasted on such a pedestrian set-up. But it is precisely because the show is content to be pedestrian that I find myself enjoying it. This really is about people just playing a VR game. There is no lurking evil or greater plot. Just people playing a game – and being well animated doing so. I rate this one as good fun.
SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary was produced by Lapin Track and aired for 10 episodes from July 7 to September 15, 2024. Shoshimin is an odd mystery show featuring two smart friends in high school who insist that they want to be ordinary and not get involved in mysteries, but find themselves involved in many mysteries. Of course, most of the mysteries are mundane, including one centered on a missing tart. Things take a more dramatic turn in the final arc. It is an interesting show with an artsy aesthetic that sometimes works (but not always) and a definite mood. I would have trouble saying the first season, which ends at an odd juncture, is good, but I will be watching the second in 2025.
The Demon Prince of Momochi House was produced by Studio Drive and aired from January 6 to March 23. We have an upbeat orphan girl who is presented with a letter purportedly from her late parents giving her the inheritance to the Momochi House. To her surprise, the house is occupied by three very handsome young men, one of whom is her age and embodies a local deity responsible for mediating between the human and spirit worlds and the other two are themselves ayakashi (spirits). A disgruntled daikon ayakashi appears in the first episode. I very much liked him and I pledged in a contemporaneous post on The Emu Café Social that I would keep watching the show as long as the daikon made at least one appearance in every episode. I watched all 12 episodes.
Yakuza Fiancé was produced by Studio Deen and aired for 12 episodes from October 7 to December 23, 2024. Here we have the high school senior granddaughter of a mob boss being sent to another family to be engaged to a young yakuza (also a high school senior) who is – to put it mildly – a bit unbalanced. Her sense of pride, which derives from her yakuza upbringing, eventually wins her unstable fiancee over, although she remains less than convinced. This show goes against the trend of yakuza anime trying to soften the yakuza – the characters here err on the hard core criminal side, except the heroine who was more born into an odd culture than being an active participant. It would have made more sense to make the leads older, but it turned out to be fairly entertaining, granting its late-season tendency to tell instead of show and its shoddy production values.
Conclusion
Using my preferred anime decade scheme of 2021-2030, 2024 was the best year overall thus far. It produced four plausible anime of the year contenders, out of which we ended up with a very close three-show race for the crown. My additional mentions after the top six highlight that 2024 was flush with quality shows (there were more good-to-decent shows that I did not mention).
I collected some other good year-end reviews for those who are interested in different perspectives and recommendations:
- Sakugablog: Sakugabooru Animation Awards 2024
The Sakugablog awards focus more on animation than I do, but Sound! Euphonium 3 and A Sign of Affection show up regularly in the reviewers’ picks. - Anime News Network: The Top 10 Anime of 2024
Four of my top-six make the Anime News Network top-10 but none finished higher than fifth. - Takafumi at Pls No Hate: ~SPOILER FREE~ SUMMARIZING THE YEAR! 2024
I am a big fan of Takafumi’s blog. He talks about a number of shows that I did not watch at all, so consider this a good way to expand your anime horizons. (His anime of the year will be familiar to people who read by anime writing, however.) - Guardian Enzo at Lost in Anime: 2024 Anime Year in Review: The Top 10 (and Anime of the Year Video)
Guardian Enzo has the same top-two in the same order as I do, but we go in different directions for the rest of the top-10 (I dropped his 3rd and 5th ranked shows).
I am satisfied with the year that was after having been disappointed with the lack of a top-tier show in 2023 and the general lack of quality shows below the top-tier in 2022. We are already a few weeks into 2025 – and I cross my fingers hoping for a second consecutive strong year in TV anime.
