1996: Pivot Point

Kadian1364 grew up with anime since middle school during the Pokemon and Toonami boom in the late 90's, and developed a voracious appetite for Chinese girl cartoons that hasn’t stopped since. Sometimes anime reviewer at the Nihon Review, sometimes content to make his opinion known on other blogs, he spews most of his on the Internet’s soapbox, Twitter (https://twitter.com/kenyaboi1364). He also relishes running weekend Skype calls with friends viewing the best and worst of anime’s history.

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The mid-90's was a time of affirming stylistic and philosophical changes in the anime industry. The recognizable stereotype of popular anime characters folks still associate with the medium–realistic body proportions with large, expressive eyes and youthful facial features–largely developed and matured in these years. It was a hybrid of the cartoonish Disney-like designs Tezuka popularized and the realistically shaped heroes of the gritty science fiction and OVA anime that populated the 80's. It wasn't until a decade later would we see the dawn of a new character design paradigm. At the same time, disruptive titles in recent history like Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon, and Neon Genesis Evangelion made artists and producers think differently about who could be their prospective audience and how to design new works to reach them. Cross-gender pleasing characters were of course a major part of this emerging design philosophy, but the novel combinations of diverse genres was an emerging effort to broaden the demographic appeal of traditionally niche, gender-exclusive brands.

But before we get to the meat of this article, there are the also-rans worth enumerating. Of course, the second half of Evanglion in early '96, with its psychological complexity, artistic abstraction, and culturally relevant topics, so precisely struck a nerve with an entire generation of viewers that clones and variations would be seen for years to come. Slayers Next, the second of a series of seemingly arbitrarily titled seasons, continued the distinctly 90's-flavored high-fantasy gag-comedy action-adventure franchise. Kosuke Fujishima's You're Under Arrest found a home on TV after its '95 OVA, but instead of fluid car-chase animation, it found pleasant success in low-budget traffic police sitcom fare, spawning three seasons in total through the 90's and 2000's.

Gundam continued to roll out sequels and spinoffs, with After War Gundam X, an alternate universe TV series in a post-apocalyptic scenario with maximum colony dropping absurdity, and the 08th MS Team, an OVA returning to the "One Year War" from the perspective of grunts embroiled in the jungles of Southeast Asia, which earned points with fans for its gritty Vietnam-like take in the favored continuity. And the big traditional shoujo series from the year, Kodomo no Omocha (a.k.a. Kodocha), was the most off-the-wall, dizzyingly hyperactive melodramatic romantic comedy about child actors you'll probably ever see. (And this is just the opening theme! - Ed.)


While numerous titles deserve their due, a few series are so distinguished for finding trend-setting, audience-broadening combinations of diverse genre elements and their enduring popularity that they justify greater elaboration of critical merit.