4 Animated Shows to Brighten Your 2020
One of the solaces into which I've retreated over the last several months--because for whatever reason, I can't quite concentrate enough to read or even listen to a book--is good, long form TV. I've been able to sit and rewatch Breaking Bad from beginning to end again for the first time in several years. Like a good novel, I've noticed things I didn't see the first time.
However, most of the TV I've been doing this with has been animated shows.
I love animation and have since I was a kid. When we were young, my brother and I would get up every weekend to watch Saturday Morning Cartoons (my generation, I think, is the last to ever observe that childhood ritual). I was never an early riser, but he was, so to make sure I'd never miss any of the shows, we started recording them on video cassette (a detail that really shows our age), and we kept doing that until the channels we could watch--we never had cable--stopped carrying a cartoon block every Saturday (the bastards).
Animation is easily one of the greatest mediums for visual storytelling. It's pure realized fantasy. I love animation so much in fact that, of the three times I've actually been moved to tears watching a movie, two of those times have been while watching animated movies (but that's a story for another time). With that said, although I go back to favorites frequently, I'm always on the lookout for new shows to watch too. Since the lockdown, I've found four great ones that I think might move you as much as they've moved me.
1. Castlevania
This show has been on Netflix, actually, since 2017. My friend Luis--who found it before I did--kept urging me to watch it. When I finally did, I cussed him out the next day because the first season was only 4 episodes long, and I wanted more. (Why the hell would you make a show this good 4 goddamn episodes long? WTF?)
Castlevania is that rare creature in television: a show based on a videogame property that actually works. Why? Because, rather than following the plot of a video game and thus running the risk of feeling too "video game-ish" it feels like a real world, populated with real people, with real stakes.
The show's blend of darkness, action, fantasy, and, very importantly, humor enhances its charm. However, the core of the show are its complex, likeable and understandable characters. Each of them has their own motivations for doing what they do. Most of all, the showrunners don't treat them like they're invincible. It never seems inevitable that our protagonists will vanquish Dracula or other dark force they face. They're vulnerable beings in a world that is unforgiving and full of darkness, which makes their victory all the more satisfying.
2. Erased
I'd never heard of this anime until I started watching it on Netflix, but once I began it, I was sucked in.
Erased is the story of a young man, who suddenly has the ability to go back in time to mitigate events that have disastrous consequences. When a phantom of his past, which he's done his best to forget, suddenly reemerges in his present life, he must go back in time further than ever before: back to the moment when, seemingly, his life took a turn for the worst when a young girl he knew as a kid died.
I don't want to go into further than that because it might spoil things for a new viewer. This show elegantly mixes elements of thriller, mystery, and science fiction to tell a human story with a single message at its core: the smallest choices we make can have the most unexpected of ripples throughout our lives. It also asks a fundamental question about our linear lives. If we could go back and change one thing about our pasts, how big an impact would that have and how different a person would it make us?
Once the plot hooks of Erased dig into you, you'll have no choice but to keep watching until the end.
3. The Promised Neverland
Erased, easily, has one of the finest plots of any of the shows I'm talking about here, but the award for most twisted show on this list has got to The Promised Neverland.
Another anime, this one based on an ongoing manga series, Neverland is an emotional and psychological punch to the heart. The first episode alone is a total feint. At first, we're introduced to a seemingly ideal world, where young children living in an orphanage are free to play and just be kids. And every so often, one of them gets adopted and leaves, never to be seen again.
Now, when you've studied storytelling for as long as I have, you know, above everything else that the key ingredient to every good story is the same: conflict. In the first episode of Neverland, it seems as if there is none...until there is.
Like nearly all apparent paradises, there's always something unseemly residing just beneath the surface, and in The Promised Neverland, you get a full view of it. Watch the first episode, and if it doesn't hook you in, then nothing else will.
4. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts
I('ll close with this one.) Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, is no where near as dark as the other shows I've talked about here, but it's easily one of the best things to come out of 2020 as a year.
I came across this show after the first two seasons had been released mere months apart early this year. And I'm glad I waited. In fact, I have Twitter to thank for suggesting it to me. Someone actually wrote the perfect elevator pitch for this show that, to this day, still aptly describes it:
"It's Mad Max meets The Wizard of Oz."
If that sounds totally weird, that's only because...well, it is. But the combination of the two--the sometimes insane goings on of a Road Warrior movie with the whimsy of an Oz story--makes for an entertaining and original story and world that will keep you entertained from one episode to another. And with the third, and apparently final, season of the show now available, you can binge the whole story of Kipo and her friends from beginning to end
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