The Mike Toole Show

The Lost Decade

Well gang, we're cruising into a brand new year, which means that it's time to look back and pick my top ten anime for 2010. Wait a minute, I don't really like top ten lists. I am totally not doing that.

Of course, my deadline is looming large, and while I have about a dozen columns in various states of progress, there aren't really any that are ready for prime time, mainly because I like to be thorough and am still waiting to hear back from interview subjects and haven't finished checking my sources. So hey, we're at the end of the year, and the end of a very interesting, turbulent decade for Japanese animation. We saw the meteoric rise of DVD continue through 2001 and beyond, augmented by the emergence of blu-ray midway through the decade. We saw Studio Ghibli win an Oscar. We watched in dizzy joy as anime fandom seemed to catch fire, with the country's top conventions ballooning to gatherings of 20,000 or more. Then things started to level off; a perfect storm of crashing home video markets, unexciting content, and internet piracy brought the curtain down hard on the anime business. The industry is in the midst of adapting, experimenting with home video releases and cheap or free internet video streams to compete with the bootlegs.

Plenty of venues are going to be talking about the best anime of the past decade, so obviously it was necessary for me to spin the idea in a different direction. Instead of a list of smash hits, critical darlings, and fanboy favorites, here are ten anime titles from the past ten years that should've hit big, but didn't. Some of them are obvious favorites that were fixtures on the Hulu any minute now!

Okay, so there's ten good ones from the past ten years that just haven't had things break their way. Could I talk about more? Absolutely. I could probably write about this subject for days. I guess I'll just squeeze in a few honorable mentions: Bartender, Basquach, and Shin Mazinger Shougeki Hen. There ya go. The funny thing is, though, an awful lot of these shows are from the middle part of the decade - almost all of the good stuff from early in the 2000s got released in some form or another thanks to the anime boom, and most of the best stuff from the past season or two has at least gotten simulcasted. The part of the decade when anime DVD sales started to decline, but before streaming sites got up to speed, is a blind spot. Hopefully, we won't see another blind spot like this in the next decade - I'm afraid to think about what awesome shows might slip by, undetected.

Got a favorite that you thought should've been on the list instead of, say, Kaiji? Well, too bad, Kaiji is awesome! Seriously, an awful lot of the last decade's goodies are out there and easy to find - but not all of 'em. Talk about your own hidden favorites of the 2000s in the talkback thread, and follow me on twitter at @michaeltoole if you want to hear more ramblings from a crazy old anime dork in this brave new year of ours.