Hello folks, and welcome to the end of 2025. I’m sure you don’t need me to summarize this year on a global scale; in short, shit sucks, and it’s questionable when or if things are getting better. While the damage of Donald Trump’s first term as president was limited by his own laziness and ineptitude, the collective forces of evil made sure they hit the ground running this time, and thus the America of today is already a significantly more unstable, hateful, and corrupted empire than even the one of just twelve months ago. Alongside the cruelty raining down on us from our elected officials, Trump 2.0 has also unleashed a fresh wave of cruelty from his supporters, who have declared “woke is over” and revealed themselves to be wholly constructed of belligerence and resentment.
As a child, I thought the world could be sorted into good guys and bad guys. As an adolescent, I realized this view was an impossibly naive perspective on the variability of consciousness and personal experience. As an adult, I’ve realized nope, child Nick kinda had it, there are definitely lots of proudly ignorant and fundamentally hateful people out there. And that bums me out! I don’t want to think our arguments are based less in misunderstandings than in fundamental disagreements on whether humans should be treated with dignity and kindness, but the reactionary wave currently crashing over human society makes the truth impossible to ignore.
So what do we have in the face of all that? Well, with billionaire oligarchs slipping millions into the well-oiled hands of our public officials, I’d say not that much on the global level. What we do have is what the little guy has always had: each other, so long as our solidarity and common compassion hold out. I know it’s just a drop in the bucket in terms of our historical moment, but I’ve been doing my best to be a little kinder, a little friendlier in my daily interactions, if only to make me feel like I’m pushing against the tide. And thus I’d urge you all as well, whatever you can do for each other, please try to make your friends and neighbors’ days a little easier. An open door, an honest smile, an unexpected gift; I know it’s a sappy cliche, but it really is these small gestures that hang in memory, and make the weight a little easier to bear.
As for me personally, the defining story of 2025 has been following through on my New Year’s Resolution, and dedicating some time each week to my own creative writing projects. After writing fiction consistently from middle school through my mid-20s, I fell out of the habit as a critic, lacking either formal motivation or a story I really wanted to tell. But getting into Dungeons & Dragons over the past few years ended up serving as a natural segue back into my first passion, an excuse to sculpt characters and conflicts without the weight of anyone’s expectations beyond my table of players. And by the end of last year, with the encouragement of more friends, I was ready to jump back into what I’ve always wanted to do.
Since then, after starting off with a couple manageable shorts, I decided fuck it, I’m writing another fantasy novel. And thus that is what I’ve been doing, beginning with a few hours of dedicated time every Saturday, and ultimately rising to the point where I’ve been stacking my article buffer all the higher (currently over three months ahead!) to facilitate more uninterrupted writing. And with every page I write, I’m feeling more authentically myself, more stuffed with fresh ideas, more eager for new experiences, and more anxious to pour all my raging emotions into my poor, unsuspecting characters. I’ve spent a lot of time just surviving, and this year has been a warm reminder of what actually living feels like. I want to make more marks on more hearts, to pay back all the artists who’ve inspired me and folks who’ve supported me, to continue the grand project of making people feel a little less alone. I know it’s quite an arrogant wish, and it’ll be a long road ahead until I have anything presentable, but I’m looking forward to every step.
Anyway, that more or less covers my course through the year. But of course, this is technically a top anime of 2025 post, so we’ve clearly got some critiquing to get through. Starting with the “new this year” and moving on to the “new to me” productions, let’s break down my Top Anime of 2025!
CITY The Animation
In a year featuring so much hardship on the global scale, it feels appropriate that the year’s finest production urged us to think local, to consider how we fit into our communities, and to celebrate all the tiny ways we enrich each other’s daily trials. CITY The Animation is a stunning realization of that message; like many of Kyoto Animation’s masterpieces, it successfully applies its incredible formal ambition to the most humble and personal of dramas, offering wild multiplanar tableaus, incredible screen-in-screen flourishes, and consistently character-rich animation that nonetheless embraces the expressive simplicity of Keiichi Arawi’s original designs. From that fond opening call of “hello dear my friends,” every episode of CITY offers countless reasons to celebrate the joy of coexistence, and the remarkable passion that Taichi Ishidate’s team bring to this lovely drama. CITY proves there are still wonders in the world.
Shoushimin Series Season 2
At the far philosophical end from CITY, Shoushimin Series offers its own echo of a Kyoto Animation classic, following up on the unimpeachable Hyouka with a darker, stranger series that is quick to ask “aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to go apeshit?” If CITY is my anime of the year, then Osanai is clearly my character of the year, a smoldering ball of vengeance with few redeeming qualities to speak of. Which is, of course, precisely what makes Shoushimin Series so compelling, as a series that’s willing to spotlight precocious and insightful yet genuinely antisocial characters, characters who can’t simply go with the flow without abandoning everything that brings them joy. Elegantly captured within Mamoru Kanbe’s isolating, emotive layouts, Jogoro and Osanai are examined from every possible angle, an analysis that makes their own fearsome humanity impossible to deny. No matter the sharpness of our angles, we all want to be understood.
Chainsaw Man: The Movie (Reze Arc)
If the curvature of prestige animation is to be believed, this is Tatsuki Fujimoto’s world and we’re all just living in it. And indeed, the particular desperate tenor of Chainsaw Man feels like one of the only sane reactions to the deprivations of modern society; with all of us facing our own cold-eyed Makimas, it’s little surprise we’d want to rip the chain and tear it all down. Embracing loose, expressive animation and thin-lined characters echoing Fujimoto’s own style, the Reze Arc film sees both the poignancy and chaos of Fujimoto’s manga realized more sharply and ecstatically than ever before. And frankly, Fujimoto’s talent for narrative humanism is so great that I found myself lamenting how much of this film was taken up with (undeniably well-animated) action spectacle, rather than the simple, universal tragedy of two exploited kids not quite joining hands. Still, with none other than Hirokazu Kore-eda taking the next swing at Look Back, it seems the world has recognized that Fujimoto is one of the great storytellers of our era.
The Summer Hikaru Died
Given my clear, emphatic love for both folk horror and psychological drama, it’s probably little surprise I enjoyed last summer’s horror-tinged tale of queer awakening within a remote village. But frankly, anyone who enjoys sharply drawn characters, atmospheric execution, or things that go bump in the night will find much to love in Ryohei Takeshita’s adaptation of Mokumokuren’s gripping narrative. Beyond the story’s propulsive twists and turns, Hikaru offers an alternately nostalgic and stultifying portrait of rural Japan, crucially drawing as much paranoia and horror out of its setting’s prying eyes as it does from the beasts that haunt their hills. Takeshita mitigates the need for copious fluid animation through a myriad of inventive visual flourishes, while the core bond of Yoshiki and Hikaru offers reflections on identity, society, grief, inheritance, and much else besides. A show that stuns from the start and only rewards further inquiry.
The Colors Within
Last but certainly not least among our recent productions, I absolutely adored Naoko Yamada’s latest film, the whimsical, musical, and unsurprisingly colorful Colors Within. Centered on a trio of charming youths forming a high school band, the film feels like a career retrospective for Yamada, calling back to points ranging from the nostalgic tea breaks of K-On! to the wild colors of Tamako Love Story, and onward from the pinpoint sound design of Liz and Blue Bird through the delicate, tactile designs of Heike Story. And while describing Colors Within as a synthesis of Yamada’s talents feels accurate, it still doesn’t come close to describing the grace and warmth of all those passions in motion, or the personal thrill and sense of fulfillment in watching the artist who has most consistently fostered my love of animation demonstrate she’s still in a league of her own. Yamada’s work inspires me to reach out into the world, to herald my love of art from the rafters, and to even add my own humble contributions to the works that make us sing. The Colors Within reminds me that there is still joy in this world, and that it is all of our jobs to protect it.
Of course, alongside productions that were either just or generally released within 2025, I’ve also continued to munch through the treasures of anime’s grand history. Within that process, some of my new-to-me favorites of the preceding year include:
Inu-Oh
It feels unfair to describe Inu-Oh as Masaaki Yuasa “playing it safe,” considering the film involves a millennium of historical and musical revisionism, bounces between aesthetic traditions on a dime, and culminates in possibly his most ambitious implementation of Flash-based 3D animation to date. Nonetheless, the film at least sits comfortably within Yuasa’s wheelhouse, demonstrating much of what has made him an influential fixture in the industry for decades. It feels particularly refreshing to see Yuasa so apparently carefree; in spite of offering some of the most pointed narratives in animation, it feels like his truest passion is simply the magic of shapes in motion, morphing and flowing and surprising with every turn. Ecstatic musical numbers, poignant personal reflections, and a generally fluid, character-rich animation style all make for a fitting swan song to Yuasa’s Science SARU era.
Slayers
It is a source of persistent frustration to me that high fantasy is so underrepresented within anime. We’ve got endless isekai productions that take place in Basically Dragon Quest, but vanishingly few shows that actually take their own fantastical setting seriously, attempting to create a marvelous world and populate it with people who’d convincingly live there. Well, Slayers isn’t exactly that, but it certainly is a charming blast of ‘90s action-comedy irreverence, with an endearing cast of characters and an unexpectedly dogged commitment to high-stakes fantasy worldbuilding. While Lodoss War is anime’s prestige adaptation of a D&D campaign, Slayers offers the experience of actually taking part in a D&D campaign, with all the squabbling and sidetracking and sudden flights from explosions that were only partly your fault that entails. Lovely art design, a fun crew to hang out with, simply an easy and delightful time.
SDF Macross (plus Do You Remember Love?)
Having munched through a significant portion of the Gundam library over the preceding two years, it felt past time to check back on another titan of robot history, with the very first Macross series. Turns out I was seriously missing out; while I can well appreciate Tomino’s “men are pawns in the great game of history” approach to drama, my sentimental heart yearns for a story where love truly can conquer all, and a song shouted across space can right all the wrongs of the universe. Of course, Macross offers a lot more than that, from the delightful realization of its space-faring city to the genuine chemistry shared by its long-suffering leads. And then, once you’ve watched the full-length depiction of its winding drama, you can treat yourself to one of the great triumphs of bubble-era animation, a film that embodies the glory and yearning of a true golden age. This medium holds many treasures.
Black Clover
Look, we watch some shonen in this household. We watched Naruto, we watched Bleach, we watched One Piece forward and back. We attempted to dig into the modern era’s polished adaptations of inferior products, and ultimately we found only one show is truly carrying the banner of sturdy, wide-ranging, ever-scaling action in the model of the ‘00s titans: Black Clover, the presumed runt of the litter, which has steadily been amassing a fine collection of likable characters, fun powers, and grand conflicts. If you yearn for the days when shonen dramas felt practically endless, and when action scenes weren’t buried in ten layers of post-production glop, you might want to give Black Clover an honest chance. Personally, my house awaits the return of the Black Bulls with great anticipation.
Genius Party
I somehow doubt you need me to tell you that an anthology featuring Shoji Kawamori, Masaaki Yuasa, Shinji Kimura, and Shinichiro Watanabe is an excellent time, but in case you haven’t heard – holy shit, check out Genius Party. The masters are basically firing on all cylinders here, from Yuasa’s visually inventive, philosophically bleak Happy Machine to Kawamori’s action-packed spectacle to Watanabe’s somber Baby Blue, a piece that resonates with the yearning of Cowboy Bebop and Kids on the Slope alike. The story of anime’s history is one of brilliant creators perpetually struggling to acquire the time and resources needed to make their ecstatic visions a reality; works like Genius Party offer an undiluted injection of those visions, reminding us of animation’s limitless potential.
So that basically covers my year in animation, barring a sort of general gesture towards the cyberpunk bubble features (Megazone 23, Venus Wars, Dominion Tank Police, etc) that enlivened many of my evenings. While conditions within the industry have sadly not improved, the hard-won creations of animators past and present continue to inspire me; frankly, even the work I’m doing on my own creative projects only emphasizes to me how fully and completely anime has infected my imagination. I’m looking forward to a fresh year of animated wonders, and can assure you that when my own sappy fantasy romance nonsense is nearing workable condition, I’ll be far too excited to conceal it. For now, I’m grateful to you all for reading, supporting, or just accidentally stumbling across my little blog, and hope the coming months offer you everything you could hope for. Let’s make this year at least marginally better than the last one!
