The anime community is still reeling from the deadly arson-started fire at Kyoto Animation Studios. While you may have donated to a fund to support the victims, sometimes the best thing you can do to support a company is to watch (legally) and buy their products.
It is the only way of showing a company and their employees that you love what they do.
Kyoto Animation is long beloved in the anime community for churning out shows with addictingly fluid animation and characters so cute that even the most stalwart of the anti-moe brigade can’t help but appreciate them. Furthermore, they made a pretty big impact in the industry itself by being one of the first companies to pay their employees a salary rather than a by-the-frame wage that results in overworked and underpaid animators.
If you are looking to support Kyoto Animation in the only way you really can, then give these amazing KyoAni anime series a watch.
Best Kyoto Animation Anime
Beyond the Boundary
There’s a scene in the first episode in Your Lie in April (not a KyoAni series, but also good) where the whole world has this grey-ish tint to it until the chronically depressed the main character sees this girl and suddenly everything comes alive with very vivid color. That is what Beyond the Boundary did for me and anime when I first watched it.
Beyond The Boundary follows a demon slayer who can manipulate blood into weapons as she hunts down demons born from negative human emotions with the help of an apathetic half-demon who cannot die. Although you will have to hunt down the movies if you want any hope at being satisfied by the story, Beyond the Boundary is a series that keeps you well-distracted from its plot by it likable characters and fluid animation.
Everything from the emotion-charged bounce of fluffy hair and glasses sliding down the nose to the perfect spatter of spilled blood feels very alive in the series. Furthermore, it earns charm in the beginning by following the cutest bespectacled demon hunter that you will ever see, but becomes no slouch when it comes to the city-rending action later on.
Clannad
Clannad is not quite a prime example of KyoAni’s beautiful animation ability, that is more due to its sheer age and the “Oops, all gigantic eyes” art style of the visual novel that it was adapting.
But you don’t watch Clannad for its art. You watch Clannad to have a good long cry at any one of the many touching or relatable moments.
These girls are all tragedy and much of the first season is the main character helping them through it while conveniently ignoring his own dramatic problems. However, Clannad is likely most beloved for its second season where – the emotion hurts as much if not harder – but it does something you rarely see in romance anime – you get to see the main couples’ married life together.
Free
Did you know that KyoAni was founded by the husband and wife team, Hatta Hideaki and Yoko, who still runs the studio today?
As Hatta Yoko was an animator from another studio before founding Kyoto Animation with her husband, she made sure the company hired more women and promoted them into prestigious roles that the anime industry often reserved for men.
So it is no surprise that Free, perhaps the finest example of female fanservice, came out of KyoAni.
Free follows a male swim team as they attempt to revive their school team and overcome their personal problems. While Free injects a charming amount of emotion into its more subtle complex personal relationships, it is not unfair to say that more than a few people watch Free for the glistening wet, bare flesh in tight, tiny swimwear.
Nichijou
There are a few anime by Kyoto Animation that specialize in what I like to call “normalized chaos,” where everything seems normal but is actually increasingly spiraling out of control. Nichijou is one of those anime series.
Nichijou is about three school girls living their lives. However, in the process of doing that, there are things that go completely upside down like the principal suplexing a deer or a tsundere busting out a bazooka to blast her feelings off to outer space.
Nichijou mixed both the slice of life aspect that fits the pastel color palate and insanity of absurd comedy masterfully, embracing the best of both extremes.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid
Like Nichijou above, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is a series that also likes to revel in chaos.
In Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, an office lady’s life is invaded by dragons when she saves the life of one while drunk, and it decides to become her loving maid in repayment. Soon all her dragon friends start visiting the human world, and several other humans find their lives thrown into glorious chaos.
While slice of life anime don’t exactly need to bust out the vibrant animation to be successful, there are a few spots in this series where you can see KyoAni flexing their muscles. Watching dragons play in a field or play dodge ball didn’t need to be as intense a scene as a fight scene in Jujutsu Kaisen, but here we are.
K-On
While Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid certainly rivals it in modern times, its seems like a fair take to say that K-on is probably KyoAni’s most famous and successful anime.
K-on is a quintessential Cute Girls Doing Cute Things series as it follows a series of cute girls as they sort of stumble into creating a rock band, even if at least one of them can’t even play an instrument.
While K-on has at least some music, the charm of the series isn’t in dope beats like most other music anime. The charm of K-on is sitting back and getting distracted from your own worries as you watch cute girls be dumb friends with each other.
K-on honed a successful slice of life formula, but in its time, the sheer magnitude of the success of the series also shifted the aesthetics of anime. There is a reason you see a lot of anime that looks like K-on now, and it is because it was, for a time, a money-printing machine.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
In the beginning, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya told a familiar school life story about an apathetic boy getting pulled into the shenanigans of a more assertive girl.
If it wasn’t for the line about not believing in aliens, espers, and time travelers in the beginning that makes you so sure the main character is about to meet all three, you might think this series on course to be a simple charming school life romance.
While The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is that, it also goes so much further into manifesting a intricate supernatural story that really showed audeinces that romance anime could have complex plots too. Even if it did troll its fans with the same eight episodes right in a row in a way the series may never recover from.
Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions
The large part of KyoAni’s appeal as a studio is that – damn – they know how to create a cute character.
Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions is puts that on full display while serving it with a heaping plate of cringe that might be too relatable for anime fans.
Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions follows a recovering chunibyou boy hoping to make a successful high school debut and leave his life as the Dark Flame Master behind. However, those hopes are swiftly dashed by a cute girl still in the throes of chunibyou delusion that quickly latches on to him as her emotional support person.
While a cringe-worthy and cute, Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions is also a sweet romance with those charged emotional moments that you come to appreciate Kyoto Animation for.
Violet Evergarden
Anime fans of a certain age will remember when Violet Evergarden came to Netflix, and everyone was like “Oh god, my eyes! It’s too beautiful.”
Violet Evergarden follows a child raised to be a soldier after she comes home from the now-over war. Only raised for combat and coming home after losing her arms, she gains a mechanical set of arms and decides to become a sort of typist that transcribes letters for other that are supposed to appropriately convey the emotions of the the sender. Throughout Violet Evergarden, you watch the titular heroine wrestle with her work as she tries to grasp emotional responses that she has never had.
While Violet Evergarden’s plot moves, at times, too sluggishly for its own good, it is never not just absolutely gorgeous. Kyoto Animation showed just how far an anime studio can really go with the visuals, and I like to think they went on to inspire studios like Mappa, Wit Studio, and Cloverworks who now rival it in terms of animation quality with the work they did in this series.
Kyoto Animation survived the arson attack, but will certainly need to rebuild and heal from it. What are your favorite Kyoto Animation anime? Let fans know in the comments section below.
