Ranking Every* Anime I've Watched
I’m writing a lengthy “prequel” to my post on anger (which you’ll recognize by its header image, which will once again be taken from a Rocky movie), but I thought I would take a break to post something informal.
Here is my ranking of every anime I’ve watched, from worst to best, excluding Pokémon—which I watched 27 years ago as a child—Dragon Ball, and an anime or two that I watched while distracted and therefore cannot judge fairly.
I watched each of these in Japanese with subtitles.
#4 — Neon Genesis Evangelion
Note: I watched the original series and the original movies.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is unintelligible Freudian garbage, valuable only as an object lesson on the idea of “getting it.”
All creation is caused. Therefore, there is always something to “get.” However, that a creator was motivated by an idea does not matter if it is not “gettable” from his creation.
The show’s only virtues are its ‘90s-anime style and its central twist, which upends a cliché in an interesting way but is wasted on this disgusting nonsense.
“Cliché” is the word to use, by the way, since “trope” is an anti-concept that implies that classifiability is invalidating, which is anti-identity, and therefore anti-existence, and therefore anti-you.
#3 — Cowboy Bebop
Alfred Hitchcock often said, “Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.”
Cowboy Bebop is certainly not cake. It’s a slice of life, even if the life in question is that of an interplanetary bounty hunter.
It took me a week to get through it, but it felt like it took months.
My experience with the show would have been even worse if I had not watched it immediately after Evangelion, compared to which boredom was a relief.
In a way, however, Bebop is worse than Evangelion.
Would you rather be stuck in traffic for hours without your phone, the radio, or company, or be in that same situation except that right outside your window is a massive wreck with blood and guts splattered everywhere?
The latter is at least more stimulating.
I liked one moment in Bebop, which was when Faye ate the last of the food and told the dog, “Those who don’t work, don’t eat. Go find your own food. Me? I’m okay. Women are grand by birth.”
Hot.
