#THE BEST ANIME OF 2017 FULL#

All of the surface components of a great film are there, with stunningly crisp animation, charged fight scenes, and a tasteful use of computer graphic imagery to accentuate these sequences. The story follows that of Ren, an orphaned boy who, after stumbling through an Alice in Wonderland-style passageway into a world of mythical creatures, is adopted as a pupil by the brash and indolent swordmaster Kumatetsu, who vies to become the lord of all beasts. Such is the case with The Boy and the Beast.

#THE BEST ANIME OF 2017 FULL#

It is our hope that in curating this list we have created an entry point for both the expert and the layperson, the Otaku and the neophyte, to trace the rich and varied history of anime’s evolution across both film and popular culture, and to offer newcomers a comprehensive guide through which to learn, rediscover, explore and debate the full potential the genre of Japanese animation has to offer now and into the future. Given the shared evolution between anime film and television and the aforementioned significance of the home video revolution, this list includes not only traditional features but also original video animations (OVAs) made for home video and anthology films-with the stipulation of each entry having at some point premiered in theaters. To that end, Paste is proud to enlist the curatorial talents of Jason DeMarco, on-air creative director of Adult Swim and co-creator of Toonami, whose unique role in anime’s emerging popularity in the West has helped to hone this list to its best. This list of the top anime movies is an attempt to do just that: to create a primer of one hundred of the most influential and essential films that Japanese animation has produced offer a thorough aesthetic, technical and historical breakdown of why these films matter. But where does one begin to tackle the aesthetic and historical precedent that anime film has left on pop culture and global entertainment in the last century?

Anime film owes much to the evolving means of production and distribution throughout the late 20th century, the breadth and audacity of the medium’s content widening and contracting along with its running time to cater to the emerging palettes of audiences both new and old, at home and abroad. The arrival of home video catapulted anime to its commercial and aesthetic apex, fanning outward from the island nation of Nippon to the far shores of North America and back, before again being revolutionized by the unprecedented accessibility of the world wide web throughout the nineties and early aughts. Television expanded the medium during the 1960s, birthing many of the essential genres and subgenres that we know today and forming the impetus for the anime industry’s inextricable relationship to advertising and merchandising from the 1970s onward. Anime has morphed through countless phases-from amateur efforts, to nationalist propaganda fodder, to niche cultural export turned eventual global phenomenon-each iteration conforming to the shape of the times in which it was produced. From the five-minute shorts of Oten Shimokawa in 1917, to the feature-length animations produced during World War II, to the pioneering production cycles of Tezuka in the ’60s and the auteurist innovations of the likes of Miyazaki and many others towards the latter half of the last century.

Anime, despite being one of the now-most ubiquitous cultural properties of the 21st century, is especially difficult to define, owed to over a century’s worth of the medium’s evolution and reinvention.

The best anime of 2017