Ask John: What Anime Has the Best “Style?”

Question:
This is a question about which anime has the best animation style and art direction. I am not talking about the best action sequences and fight scenes. In my opinion I think that Cowboy Bebop has the best style. It has to be the most stylish show that I have ever seen. Every character is done so jazzy and funky to set the perfect mood for each episode. The planets and cityscapes are done really well also. These are my close runner-ups:

1. Lain
2. Rurouni Kenshin OVAs
3. Princess Mononoke and Grave of the Fireflies
4. Memories

What is your opinion?

Answer:
I agree with some of your choices. Cowboy Bebop definitely deserves credit for being exceptionally stylish, as you’ve proven, but it’s not at the top of my list. I can’t think of any anime series that’s more stylistic that Boogiepop Phantom. The entire series seems to be more of an experiment in audio and visual style than an actual, linear narrative. That’s not to say that Boogiepop Phantom is better than Cowboy Bebop, because it’s not. It’s just more stylistic. The show uses odd camera angles and occasionally blurs the focus, and a washed out color palate, occasionally making scenes grainy or over-saturating scenes with light to make them appear as though the color had drained out of the picture. The music, if you could call it that, alternates from traditional BGM to virtual white noise to absolute silence. Even watching a perfect copy of the show occasionally makes one wonder if there’s not something wrong with the audio and/or video quality of the copy you’re watching. The Rurouni Kenshin OAVs are simply a masterpiece of visual style and the characteristic understatement and subtlety of classic Japanese cinema. The deliberately slow pace, great emphasis on character development through close up examination of characters’ actions, and the ample use of natural background settings make the Rurouni Kenshin OAVs a direct descendant of the Japanese masters: Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Masaki Kobayashi, to name a few. Lain would certainly rank very high on the list, yet it seems, in comparison, to be stylistically little more than a preparation for Boogiepop Phantom. I consider Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg one of the most stylistic anime films I’ve ever seen. The entire film is absolutely pure visual cinema at its finest. The minimal story is literally indecipherable, (Mamoru Oshii himself has admitted in interviews that even he doesn’t understand what the film is about) and there’s less than five minutes of dialogue in the entire movie. The entire goal of the film is to present a world so totally ethereal and unlike our own, and in that Angel’s Egg succeeds like no other movie. Another seemingly odd addition to my list is Di-Gi-Charat. No one will ever accuse the Di-Gi-Charat television animation of having haunting, lyrical beauty or photo-realistic art, and that’s exactly why it merits inclusion on my list. Di-Gi-Charat, superficially, often has absolutely awful art and character design, looking like something a grade-school child drew. Then it instantly becomes highly detailed, conventional anime. What makes Di-Gi-Charat worthy of consideration is that this wild fluctuation in artistic style never seems out of place, jarring as it may be. It’s wonderfully daring to take a character, who always appears in beautifully detailed art in her role as the mascot for Gamers, and so totally change her presentation in the animation, yet still make the animation totally involving and wonderful. When you consider how fun Di-Gi-Charat is, and how great a reaction the show gets from viewers, Di-Gi-Charat is a testament to the wonderful staff of Madhouse.

Mononoke Hime, unquestionably, has some of the best art direction to be found in anime, but stylistically, it’s little different from any other Studio Ghibli films. Graveyard of Fireflies captures the spirit and tragedy of World War 2 brilliantly, but while it’s one of the classics of anime, I think it’s the story and character development of Graveyard of Fireflies that makes the film exceptional rather than any particular cinematic “style.” Of course, it could easily be said that this realism and character development are exactly the “style” that should make Graveyard worthy of inclusion. I think that the best example of a Studio Ghibli film for inclusion in this list is Whisper of the Heart. Whisper presents an absolutely convincing, virtually photo-realistic picture of modern Japan. The film is essentially a slice-of-life. It’s mastery is in its ability to be totally involving and captivating when there’s no real conflict, tragedy or adventure involved.

In my own opinion, Memories is a tough sell, not because it’s an anthology picture, but because each segment of the film is so wildly divergent for the other two. Again, this itself could be cited as an example of high style, but when actually watching the film, there’s no sense of unity or cohesion to the overall picture. The Metallic Rose and Cannon Fodder segments are wonderful in and of themselves, but when taken together, along with Stink Bomb, as a single film, memories is too inconsistent and uneven for me to consider is a truly successful film.

Readers, would you like to share your picks for the most stylish anime? Send me your list. I’ll tally the results and post a list on the AnimeNation news page next week.