{"id":35895,"date":"2016-01-02T15:20:52","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T19:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/?p=35895"},"modified":"2025-08-09T10:30:58","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T14:30:58","slug":"ask-john-what-were-2015s-best-broadcast-anime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.animenation.net\/blog\/ask-john-what-were-2015s-best-broadcast-anime\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask John: What Were 2015’s Best Broadcast Anime?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By my personal rough count, 2015 premiered 217 new television & web broadcast anime. My list excludes new seasons that continued the name and episode numbering of the prior season, OVAs & movies broadcast on TV such as Digimon Tri<\/em>, and non-Japanese produced animation aired on Japanese TV networks such as Chu Feng Bee<\/em>. Of those 217 programs, I was fortunate enough to watch one or more complete episodes of 211 of them. I deliberately chose to skip watching the premiere episodes of the second seasons of Aldnoah Zero<\/em> and Fate\/stay night Unlimited Blade Works<\/em>. During 2015 I was never able to access any episodes of Fuusen Inu Tinny<\/em> second season, Isobe Isobee Monogatari: Ukiyo wa Tsurai yo<\/em>, or Neko no Dayan: Nihon e Iku<\/em>, and I’m not even completely sure that a complete episode of Momokuri<\/em> was actually released, but I’ll include it on the list regardless. As a reflection of what I actually watched and didn’t, I may not be able to provide a definitive critique of the year’s best broadcast anime primarily because I didn’t watch a sufficient amount of the highly praised Noragami Aragoto<\/em>, and I personally wasn’t engaged by the highly regarded Ore Monogatari<\/em>. So I can only provide my own subjective but reasoned list of personal picks of the past year’s new anime series.<\/p>\n


\nBased on what I watched, I must call Gatchaman Crowds Insight<\/a> the finest “new” anime of 2015. Despite being a continuation of the 2013 series, “Insight” existed as its own largely self-contained narrative. While sustaining the stylistic aesthetic and dynamic animation of the first series, the 2015 season took aim at the fundamental nature of Japanese social ideology, provoking viewers to not only think for themselves but even to merely recognize the pervasive dangers of the established Japanese cultural philosophy of hegemony. Plenty of anime have analyzed and criticized Japanese society and culture, but few shows have ever been as forthright about chastising the complacency and unethical discrimination inherent in Japan’s culture of going with the flow. The show’s frighteningly believable depiction of an amorphous Fascism developing out of complacency, misguided social responsibility, and simple laziness shines a harsh spotlight on a real aspect of Japanese culture that’s widely overlooked and rarely given serious consideration, especially in popular media.<\/p>\n