The convention season is over, and I’m enjoying my final weeks in San Diego before heading back to Japan in August. I’ve been stocking up on the awesome Mexican food available in the U.S., and took a second road trip with my daughter, visiting beautiful places in Arizona and Death Valley. And naturally I’ve been trying to keep up with all the new anime series, including Dr. Stone, which I found to be a totally fresh anime concept, and lots of fun to watch.
Dr. Stone is the story of burly high school boy named Taiju who’s finally ready to confess his love to classmate Yuzuriha after five years of waiting. As Taiju’s science-loving friend Senkuu looks on, a strange green light appears, and all humanity on earth is turned to stone right where they’re standing…for 3700 years. Eventually, Taiju is able to escape from his petrification, and finds that Senkuu has escaped his own stone prison half a year earlier. Together they hatch a plan: Senkuu wants to free the other frozen humans and restore human society, and Taiju wants to free Yuzuriha so he can finish his declaration of love to her. Like the Sounan Desu Ka? anime, it’s full of random information, such as how to manufacture gunpowder, which might come in handy if you need to restart society from scratch someday.
I asked J-List’s Twitter followers to suggest other series that featured a really fresh anime concept at their cores, and here are some of the results we got…
- Attack on Titan, which was an incredibly bold and fresh idea when it first appeared, telling the story of humans doomed to live in a strange purgatory where they could be eaten by semi-intelligent giants at any time.
- Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka, which blends the familiar magical girl concept with gritty military war themes.
- Speaking of magical girls, Madoka Magica really broke the mold when it came to deconstructing a beloved genre and making it much darker.
- Gakkou Gurashi, aka School Live!, a genius show produced by Nitroplus about a bunch of cute girls who live in their school for some reason. It’s totally not about a zombie apocalypse and how the girls deal with the stress of so much death around them or anything.
- FLCL, which represented a bold new direction for Gainax to take in 2003. After the show appeared, Gainax fans were separated into musty old-school fans like me who will forever love the precise style and characters of Hideki Anno, and the “new” fans who prefer the flashier approach FLCL established. This “new” Gainax tradition lives on in Trigger.
- Serial Experiments Lain. The Internet touches every aspect of our lives today, but in 1998 it was still a new enough thing that a surreal story about technology and identity was fresh and awesome.
- Bakemonogatari/Monogatari Series. One of the most successful shows in recent memory, it’s basically porn for people who like voice actors talking.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. A surreal and beautiful show with lots of gender-bending action, it blew fans’ collective minds back in 1997.
- Since this is a post about fresh and original anime concepts and not about “good” shows, I’ll throw in Mayoiga: The Lost Village, a truly interesting concept about a group of people who agree to travel to a deserted village to start a new life completely separate from society. Sadly, the execution quality was a bit lacking.
- One problem with fresh anime concepts is that they quickly become the baseline that other shows are compared against. We all take the original Neon Genesis Evangelion for granted now, but when it first came out it was incredible, an ostensible robot anime loaded with ancient history about monsters whose coming was foretold in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with trailblazing characters and tons of Freudian psychology themes added for drama.
- Another show we take for granted today but which was extremely innovative in its day was Sailor Moon, because it blended the separate genres of magical girls and sentai hero teams, creating the first anime tailor-made to be enjoyed by both girls and boys.
What represents a really fresh anime concept? It’s hard to define, but I’d say we should not be able to immediately guess what tired old tropes or kinds of character archetypes are coming within the first five minutes of watching, and there should be surprises that we can’t anticipate. It should not obviously be based on, or take major cues from, another anime or a Hollywood movie.
What are your choices for series that feature a fresh anime concept at their cores? Are you going to give Dr. Stone a try? Tell us on Twitter!
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