Season Preview / Series Introduction

Winter 2009 Preview!

Sorry this took so long to get written up – leaving for a week set me back a week in terms of working on this. Regardless, the new year is upon us and with it is another new season of anime. Since this isn’t a spring or fall season, there are relatively fewer new offerings, but that still leaves around 24 major titles, not including the kiddie shows and some long-running shows. As usual, I’ll try to watch the first episode of most shows within certain parameters (in other words, not the kiddie shows), and what I list here are the chances of me actually blogging something based on my initial impressions from promotional material. However, even if I list the chances for a show as good or guaranteed, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll stick with it for more than a few episodes.

By no means does this list reflect every single anime series that is going to be aired, though I did try to be as comprehensive as I could. Check out MOON PHASE for an entire listing, syoboi’s calendar for specific air-times, and Fansub Wiki’s Winter 2009 page for who’s tentatively subbing what.

Technical Note: All times are given in a 24-hour, relative-day format where times are extended to show which day they belong to. For instance, Friday morning at 1:30AM would become Thursday at 25:30 to show that the episode aired late Thursday night.

RIDE BACK
http://www.rideback-anime.jp/
Premiere on January 11th, 2009
Airtime in Japan (JST, GMT+9): Sundays at 24:00
Airtime in U.S. (EST, GMT-4): Sundays at 10:00
Information Links: ANN Encyclopedia, AnimeNfo, AniDB, MyAnimeList, syoboi
RIDE BACK is a very intriguing story about a time of great political turmoil in the not-so-distant future, but it focuses on a girl who was raised as a dancer and is attending a university. She accidentally gets involved with the Rideback club – Ridebacks are a cross of motor bike and mecha – and puts her dancing skills to use on a Rideback just as things start to erupt politically. The original manga is very good, and I’m really looking forward to this anime adaptation that’s being done by Madhouse and Digital Frontier and has Mizuki Nana in the lead role. Trillian is just as excited about this series as I am and might be blogging this instead of me since I have a fairly busy Sunday schedule.
Odds I’ll Blog This: Good
Hetalia Axis Powers
http://hetalia.com/
Premiere on January 24th, 2009
Airtime in Japan (JST, GMT+9): Saturdays at 25:52
Airtime in U.S. (EST, GMT-4): Saturdays at 11:52
Information Links: ANN Encyclopedia, AnimeNfo, AniDB, MyAnimeList, syoboi
It’s hard to describe Hetalia Axis Powers as anything but cute. Based on a popular webcomic, the series follows the adventures of the male personifications of various countries of the world, including the cowardly Italy and hard-working Germany, in a comedic parody of history (not always WWII-era and not always the Axis side). Studio DEEN is animating this, and each episode is only five minutes long, so it might be worth watching as just a quick dose of humor.
Odds I’ll Blog This: Decent

Note: This is a rather long and fairly comprehensive list of January shows. Much much more after the jump, including a bunch of promo videos.

Best of Anime / Miscellaneous

The Best of Anime 2008

Now that 2008 is over, here’s a look back at some of the best series the year had to offer. Also included at the end are the final results to the Reader’s Choice Poll.

Disclaimer: These are purely my personal opinions based on the shows that I saw in the past year (and in the case of Best Comedy, the shows that Divine has seen). For a show to even qualify for consideration, it had to have met the requirements outlined in the Reader’s Choice Poll. That means that series like Toradora! and Soul Eater are not up for awards this year – they’ll be saved for 2009.

Miscellaneous

Concerning the Poll

As you may have noticed, the Reader’s Choice poll is showing wildly inaccurate vote totals right now, much of it thanks a few individuals who thought that ballot stuffing would be cute. Now part of this is my own fault for not having the correct poll settings to prevent this kind of cheating and so that the results weren’t visible until the conclusion of the poll, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to tinker with it and run a second poll.

So what does this mean? I’ve closed the poll early, and network admin Maestro and I have gone through the database of votes. We found that the last legitimate total before the massive ballot stuffing began was at approximately 7AM server time. We’re going to take the results at that time and go with it since it’s pretty clear who the winner will be anyway. Final results for all choices will be posted tomorrow with my Best of 2008 post.

In the future, we’ll be looking at alternate, more secure solutions for polling.

Miscellaneous / Poll

Reader’s Choice – Favorite Anime 2008 Poll

It’s time for the Third Annual Reader’s Choice Poll!

Every year there are so many good choices, and I’m still in the process of choosing my own favorites (GEASS, Macross Frontier, and true tears are at the top of my list), but below, you can vote for your Favorite Anime of 2008 from a list of every single series that’s ended this past year.

The criteria for a series being included on this list is that it had to have been a complete TV series that ended in 2008 or will be ending very soon. The general idea here is that you can’t really judge a series until it’s over, and that means that fans of shows like Toradora! will have to wait until next year’s poll. I also wasn’t able to include any OVAs because there were just too many of them, though I’ve added Detroit Metal City and Kara no Kyoukai to the list by special request. In addition, I’ve combined series that were split into two parts into one listing (i.e. Vampire Knight and Vampire Knight Guilty). Still, if there’s anything you think I omitted that fits into the above criteria, feel free to email me, and I’ll add it to the list.

Choose your favorite, tell your friends to come vote, and the winner will get included in a post later this week!

This poll will close Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:59 PM EST.

Edit: There were some problems with the polling software, so voting got frozen for a few hours. Please try voting again if you weren’t able to earlier.

The poll has been closed early. Please see this post.