2002: Anime Rising to the Top - Believe it!

Savanna Smith, more commonly known around the net as "lostty", has been into anime for over five years. Although she is currently stuck in summer school along with a job that takes up too much of her time, she still considers her full time passion to be procrastinating. One of her many pastimes is analysing anime like Evangelion in way too much detail. She runs a blog known as Anime Princess where she tries to update when time permits, and you can follow her daily rantings on Twitter.

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When choosing 2002, I did so without much thought into what had actually aired. Back in these days I was pretty much a youngin' who hadn't yet discovered anime outside of the things that had made its way to North American television. 2002 was a year that anime really started to thrive in the West with Spirited Away even winning the Oscar for Best Animated Film, but as for Japan? I wasn't really sure how it was shaping out there, but what I ended up discovering was that it was a year filled with some of the most popular series out there that new and old anime fans still turn to watch today.