Anime — 2013 in review

When something that used to have a regular slot in the day happens less often, there comes a tipping point where it almost never does. It was like that with TV before we gave that up; and it happened with anime last year.

The year opened with us picking up three series -- Chihayafuru 2, Vividred Operation (previously reviewed) and The Unlimited (good to see familiar faces, but the story was a bit meh) from the winter quarter in addition to carry-overs, including the previous summer's Uta Koi (generally harmless mix of humour and retellings of the lives of the poets), and going back to pick up the previous autumn's Girls and Panzer (a fun piece of sports fluff involving the lady-like art of sensha-dō).

But as spring arrived and none of the series appealed, it was time to eke out what we had (including barrelling through the entire run of Encouragement of Climb taken as one 40 minute session) -- and hence the crash.

Of summer's shows I tried the first episodes of about half a dozen series, but the few that didn't end with a feeling of "glad that's over" didn't leave me eager for the next episode, and the only one that went any further than that was Gatchaman Crowds, which is the other series we're carrying forward to this year along with Chihayafuru 2 (and House of Five Leaves, where the DVDs never got unpacked all year -- should have just charged through it when we started).

At some point I might get around to looking at some of the autumn titles (the ones that sound dire but got good word of mouth and the one that looked plausible and got no word of mouth) -- but I did watch a lot more anime in the closing weeks of last year than the whole rest of it, rewatching Akagi (having seen that was on the Crunchyroll repertoire), Saki (in readiness for the current season's continuation that I haven't started yet) and Sora no Woto.