Anime: Your personal year in review for 2025

Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0. It's a movie.

I'm an old timer (in my 40s, watched the original on TV when it came out). I found it too fast, diluting the drama.

They summarize a lot of stuff I consider essential. To be honest, I would rather they remove even more stuff if that meant giving the remaining material room to breathe. In my opinion, that would be better than the music video I watched.

Hopefully, the other movies are more successful at doing their own thing at a more reasonable pace.

Pretty good year overall!

I'll limit this to 2025 because holy cow, that's still an absolute ton of shows given how much is coming out these days.

Favourites of 2025

• Shōshimin: I love this even more than Hyouka. The oddball platonic dynamic between the two protagonists and their verbal and mental sparring is so satisfying to watch, and the commitment to telling a full story with an arc over the course of their school life together pays off wonderfully.

• CITY: Weekly dose of joy.

• Mono: Weekend animation: Just such a cheerful, fun and undemanding show backed by a likeable cast, great performances (Kiriyama is a standout) and nice fluid animation.

Disappointments of 2025

• Mobile Suit Gundam Gquuuuuux: Look, I like UC Gundam as much as the next guy, but if the intention was to focus so heavily on Char's story, they should have just made him the protagonist like in Origin. All three of the actual protagonists come off as undercooked and the ending just devolved into a slurry of fanservice. Credit to Tsurumaki for the great animation but Anno does not deliver on the writing.

• One Punch Man S3: Shounen Jump has paid so much care and attention to nurturing their other series (even Jump Plus stablemates like Spy Family and Chainsaw Man) that I'm so curious as to how they fumbled this. One Punch Man may not be their flagship title, but it's well known and beloved both within Japan and overseas and very easy material to adapt - this should have been a slam dunk! I would love to see the Shirobako-style insider story as to what went wrong here one day.

• Lazarus: I don't want to say this is a bad show, because it is fun to watch week to week and it has some great action. However, everyone went in with sky high expectations because this was meant to be Watanabe Shinichirou's return to the genre that made him a legend, and it just doesn't come together as a package in the same way as his earlier work. Would have worked better if they'd either cut some stuff like the assassin guy or extended it to a full 26 episode run.

• 3-nen Z-gumi Ginpachi-sensei: I just wanted more Gintama, but instead I got someone writing a totally different show using Gintama's characters. Awful.

Surprises of 2025

• Chainsaw Man: Reze arc: I was rather cynically expecting this to just be the next season packaged as a more profitable movie, but on top of delivering everything that you could want from Chainsaw Man (flashy action, off-beat writing and imaginative visuals), it's just a great movie in its own right and absolutely not the sort of story that should be told in episodes. The tender performance for Reze in particular is just outstanding and really invites you to go back and imagine what's going through her head in the earlier scenes once you've seen the entire story play out.

• Ruri no Houseki: It's an anime about rocks minerals, but it's actually pretty good? Despite the abundance of unnecessary fan service, it's genuinely educational and beautifully drawn and animated to boot.

• Apocalypse Hotel: It shouldn't work on paper but somehow it does. The sheer unpredictability and variety in the episodes, the weird sense of humour and the strangely heartwarming themes all come together in one tasty soup. As someone who rarely takes holidays, the forced holiday episode is one that will remain in my memory for a long time.

• Link Click: Great Nolan-esque time travel thriller that really shows off what Chinese studios are becoming capable of.

Haikyuu!! It's a volleyball sports anime. So much fun, really gripped me, even when I was laughing at the shounen tropes. I thought it was satirizing them but nope it's just shounen. Didn't think I'd be into a sports anime, but my partner started watching it and I got pulled in. They started it since it often popped up as the best sports anime, so now we don't know which way to go if we want another.

We also started Little Witch Academia, a cute witch girl anime from Studio Trigger. We haven't gotten far in, but I'm charmed. I'm braced for a classic Studio Trigger mid series shake up, don't y'all harm a hair on their heads.

Bleach Thousand Year Blood War looks great, but we were disappointed in the pacing for the most recent... Set of releases? Not as bad as some of the Hueco Mundo bits. We had more fun with the start of the arc.

I rewatched Death Note and Cowboy Bebop. My memory did not fail me, I still quite enjoyed them. Second arc of Death Note was still worse/frustrating to watch, probably because production was rushed. I liked Mello much more but that's more a statement on how I've changed. Not sure I have much to add about Cowboy Bebop, it's damned good.