Anime Feminist has been in operation since Fall 2016, which means nine years! We’ve written about hundreds of shows, and recommended plenty of them, and as the years go on it’s easy for titles to get lost in the shuffle. That’s why we decided to try out a “backlog” series. People are getting into anime for the first time or coming back to it from a long time away all the time, after all!
When putting together this list, we placed the cutoff in early 2021, just to really let comparatively older titles shine. Plus, it leaves some options on the table if decide to circle back to this topic in a few years! We also didn’t include any titles that are already on our pinned recommendation lists.
Have you seen any of these already, or plan to look them up now? Let us know in the comments, along with what you’d be interested in for future “flashback”-type articles–more stuff from the vaults? Staff picks by vintage year? We wanna know!
Kabukibu! (Spring 2017)
Recommended By: Amelia, Dee
What’s it about? High schooler Kurogo Kurusu gathers together a diverse group of students to form a kabuki performance club so he can share his passion with others.
The most striking element of Kabukibu! is the atmosphere of acceptance it creates for characters to challenge expectations of both gender and sexuality. By the time the full ensemble is introduced, the high school kabuki club includes a Takarazuka-style woman who consistently plays male characters, and one character who is almost certainly a trans woman, speaking openly at the horror of feeling her male teenage body become more masculine.
There isn’t any romance but there are several easily supported ships across genders. You get the sense that if any of the characters were out in queer relationships, they wouldn’t suffer for it socially.
This atmosphere of acceptance feels completely natural in the thematic context of Kabukibu. Main character Kurusu, whose sweet determination pulls the kabuki club into being, builds the club around the idea that kabuki is for everyone. On the one hand, this means challenging the all-male tradition and approaching potential members regardless of gender.
On the other hand, this means he enthusiastically explores options like translation and subtitles to make sure his high school classmates will be able to enjoy kabuki as much as he does. By the end of the series the characters are all full of love for the artform and affection for each other, and I enjoyed every step of their journey to get there.
Clean Freak! Aoyama kun (Summer 2017)
Recommended By: Dee, Vrai
What’s it about? Aoyama is the soccer club’s ace, but he’s also obsessed with cleanliness, wearing gloves on the field and refusing to let the ball touch his bare skin. Still, his team would be lost without him.
Despite having a premise that sounds rife for exploitation—the school’s soccer ace is also severely germaphobic—Aoyama-kun wound up being a great example of the Nice Comedy genre. The core cast is understanding of Aoyama’s compulsions and the episodic shenanigans are about building a character up or, at most, gently ribbing them. It’s a low-stakes character piece that let me spend time every week with a cast I liked.
The show’s format of focusing on a different character every episode is something of a double-edged sword, since it keeps introducing new cast members almost all the way to the end rather than giving more time to the characters we’ve grown to like. The beach episode is also, as always, the worst one: it’s the most egregious fanservice episode (which is still fairly minimal) and strains the show’s tone somewhat. But overall this was an unexpected treat that provided one of the most empathetic portrayals of mental illness I’ve seen in anime (and, for OCD, in media period).
—Vrai
Run With the Wind (Fall 2018)
Chosen by: Caitlin
What’s it about? When Haiji Kiyose finds Kakeru Kurahara fleeing after an apparent shoplifting, he recruits the college first-year to move into his dorm. Then he springs it on all ten residents of the dorm: he wants them to enter the grueling Hakone relay marathon.
Content Warning: Some uncomfortable comments from adult characters about a teen girl
In the premiere review, I remarked on the grounded atmosphere of the first episode of Run with the Wind, and how it felt like it could take place in the real world. Twenty-three episodes later, that hasn’t held quite true. The story certainly stretches credibility in places, but in service of a greater and more satisfying emotional truth than the most realistic one.
Haiji’s quest to get the residents of his apartment into shape for the year’s Hakone Ekiden (relay marathon) isn’t at all reasonable, and I wasn’t sure the show would end with him successful. After all, Ekiden runners are Olympic-level athletes and many of the characters were rank beginners.
But the point isn’t whether that’s realistic, it’s about each character’s personal arc, especially Kakeru and Haiji. It’s about acknowledging and resolving the tensions between the inherent contradictions in their lives, much like the oxymoronic nature of running as a team. Out on the road, you’re alone. And yet, through a system of mutual support and camaraderie, your teammates can be an incredibly important motivating factor. The way Run With the Wind addresses that paradox is an important part of what makes it special.
There are plenty of fair criticisms to level at the story. The way Haiji gets the other residents to agree to run are, quite frankly, manipulative, and he never really faces true consequences beyond a few moments of introspection. It romanticizes pushing your body past its limits to the point of threatening your own life and health.
And then there’s Hana. Poor, underused Hana. The sole female character, she was introduced as a cute high school girl whose entire point was to motivate the horndog boys of the team with her presence. Her slight character arc is that she maybe, just maybe, is attracted to one of the guys herself. But there’s no individuality to her, no sense of her own motivations and hopes and dreams. Just a girl who exists to support the boys, adding her to the long list of sports anime female managers that fail the “Sexy Lamp” test.
On the other hand, there are quite a few things that the series does well. There are unmistakable queer overtones to the story, the kind of heavily implied romantic pairings that step just short of canonical confirmation. The script handles them deftly enough that there is, as the kids these days say, “no heterosexual explanation for this” without it feeling like queerbaiting or exploitation.
There’s also Musa, an international engineering student from Tanzania. His story line specifically deals with how he’s perceived due to his Blackness, when many competing schools have Black students they recruited on athletic scholarships. He has a sweet, mild-mannered personality, unlike stereotypical aggressive or wild dark-skinned foreign characters. Anime doesn’t have the best track record with Black characters, and it’s not my place to determine whether he’s “good” or “bad,” but he certainly comes across as a well-rounded, sympathetic figure to me.
Even if it didn’t inspire me to dust off my own jogging shoes, Run with the Wind blew me away week after week with its heartfelt, character-driven story. It may be problematic, but it’ll be a fave for me for a long time.
O Maidens in Your Savage Season (Summer 2019)
Recommended by: Caitlin, Dee, Vrai
What’s it about? Sex! For the girls of a certain high school’s literature club, it seems to be everywhere. The books they read have erotic scenes couched in poetic language. Everyone is having it or talking about it… except for them, it seems. Join these girls for their journey through the often-painful, often-hilarious experience of sexual awakening.
Content Warnings: Depictions of pedophilic grooming; stalking; nonconsensual groping; masturbation (non-explicit); nudity (bathing scenes, non-explicit); queerphobia; misogyny (internal and external); brief fat-shaming; attempted teacher/student relationship (unsuccessful).
When O Maidens works, there’s almost nothing like it. The show’s cast of teens feel like only slightly exaggerated versions of people you might’ve known or been at that age, each facing problems across a spectrum of sexual experiences.
It tackles things like the internalized misogyny of feeling Not Like Other Girls, not being nearly as excited to talk about boys as your other female friends, and not yet knowing that being attracted to someone isn’t always the same as being in love with them. The best scenes handle the awkwardness around sex and adolescence with a careful balance, both aware of how ridiculous teen angst can be but also how all-consuming and terrifying it is when you’re in it.
Where it gets rockier is when it tries to branch out beyond its sweet but fairly conventional (cis, allo, hetero) romances. Bookworm Hongo’s attempts to seduce her teacher feel the most “anime” and contrived. It’s uncomfortable in ways that don’t always feel intentional and too willing to play into troubling “she came onto me” narratives used to absolve predators. The teacher also vacillates between humoring or even encouraging her behavior and pushing her away, just to keep the subplot going to the end (though the relationship is not consummated).
More successful is the exploration of former child star Niina’s struggles as the victim of grooming by her acting coach. Unfortunately, that subplot also falls prey to Okada’s tendency to realistically depict real-world systemic abuses (see also: Hisone and Masotan) but shrug off the system as inevitable, focusing instead on personal catharsis. The show’s queer character, Momoko, is likewise painfully well-realized and lovable, but trapped in an unrequited love plot (albeit one that affirms the importance of their platonic friendship even after the confession).
I am extremely glad I watched O Maidens. Hell, I’d watch it again. It’s the kind of show that crashes only because its ambitions are so high; and for me, its successes were worth the price of its failures. But that’s a decision each viewer will need to come to on their own.
—Vrai
Stars Align (Fall 2019)
Recommended by: Dee, Vrai
What’s it about? When the notoriously terrible boys’ soft tennis club is in danger of losing their student council funding, team captain Toma Shinjo manages to recruit (or rather, bribe) his old friend Maki into joining and lighting a fire under the team. The club may be on the rise, but the boys face as many challenges in their homes as on the court.
Content Warnings: Depictions of emotional and physical parental abuse, implied spousal abuse, fat shaming, dissociation, compulsive lying, stalking, queerphobia, transphobia, anxiety, depression, and bullying.
Stars Align is an easy show to love. Its depictions of middle school awkwardness are painfully and warmly familiar by turns, and its ensemble cast is made up of good kids who’ve gravitated together because it often seems like the rest of the world won’t have them.
It’s also a show determined to talk about important and sometimes difficult issues. This includes representation of trans characters (one who is x-gender/nonbinary, one who is a trans man) as well as an exploration of the many faces of parental abuse, from neglect to physical abuse to controlling helicopter parenting.
The show’s determination to bring light to these issues, many rarely discussed in TV anime, often leads to earnest monologues written with all the bluntness of a two-by-four. It’s the kind of show that will hopefully look clunky in a decade, when other series have been given space to explore the same issues with further nuance. But that shouldn’t at all discount its power now, which is to make anyone who relates to its characters feel seen.
It’s also a difficult show to recommend, because it’s literally unfinished. The series was apparently cut from two-cour down to one mere months before it was meant to air. Rather than try to chop it into something that would fit 12 episodes, the crew proceeded as planned. It ends on a brutal cliffhanger, and because it’s an anime original, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get to know how it ends. Still, I don’t regret one moment of the time I invested in it.
—Vrai
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (Winter 2020)
Recommended By Caitlin, Chiaki, Dee, Peter, Vrai
What’s it about? Asakusa Midori has wanted to make anime since she was small, but her talents lay mostly in drawing backgrounds and concept art. Add in Mizusaki Tsubame, a rich girl whose parents want her to go into anything but anime, and savvy money-grubbing Kanamori Sayaka, and their dreams might just be able to get off the ground.
Content Considerations: For photo-sensitive viewers, there are flashing lights in the opening theme.
If you’re part of AniTwitter in any way, you’ve more than likely seen a tweet or two (or twelve) emphatically urging you to watch this series. Eizouken deserves every bit of praise that’s been heaped on it, but for those who missed getting on the hype train, the actual details of what makes the show so special can get a little lost.
It’s not just that the show is a vivid love letter to the process of making anime, with fantasy sequences that bring abstract concepts to life and infuse them with the giddy imagination of teenage friends bouncing ideas off one another. Nor the story’s extremely sly usage of school clubs as a metaphor for the politics of getting an anime made, with a blunt honesty that arguably puts it ahead of even beloved anime-about-anime SHIROBAKO.
It’s not even (just) the show’s dedication to gender-neutral animation of its characters or the creation of a world that casually embraces both racial diversity and accessibility, though the thorough normalization of those elements is a benchmark to which other shows should aspire. It’s the fact that the series weaves all of these elements together into a warm, funny, tightly woven twelve-episode experience that reaches out to anyone who’s ever made or loved art in any form.
It’s a truly special, singular experience with an open but thoroughly satisfying conclusion. I will miss my three precious gremlin children very much.
—Vrai
Diary of Our Days at Breakwater (Summer 2020)
Recommended By: Cy
What’s it about? After transferring to a new school, Hina finds herself blackmailed into joining the fishing-centric Breakwater club. Unfortunately, the many creepy-crawly critters of the ocean leave her more than a little faint.
Content Considerations: Depictions of animal death; mild fanservice; alcohol and alcoholism
When I first started Diary of Our Days at Breakwater, I didn’t expect to finish it, in large part because I don’t particularly like fishing and tend to get squeamish at the sight of live fish. But as the summer season continued, I found myself looking forward to each episode in a very low-key way, if only because I knew each episode would ultimately end on a pleasant note.
Diary of Our Days at Breakwater is not doing anything new for the genre it functions in. Much like Laid-Back Camp, Hakumei and Mikochi, and Flying Witch, Breakwater neatly fits into the iyashikei (healing) sub-genre of anime: not only is Breakwater a slice-of-life series, it’s a relaxing slice of life, set at the breakwaters of rural Ashikita in Kyushu’s Kumamoto Prefecture.
All of this unfolds from the perspective of Tsurugi Hina, a character so darn relatable that you’ll quickly find yourself charmed by her and her growth as a member of the Breakwater Club. In fact, as I sank into my weekly watchthrough, I found myself charmed by pretty much all of the members of the club. After all, there’s something lovely about watching friendship bloom between a bunch of good kids who like fishing.
Sometimes, it’s nice to have simple shows, especially in a year like 2020, where hope seems to be limited somedays. Breakwater feels like the animated version of a thick, fleece blanket. There’s something comforting about coming along for the ride with Hina. Something wonderful about learning little tidbits about fish and fishing. There’s even something nice about seeing the Breakwater Club indulge in their catch, though do be aware that there are regular instances of on-screen animal death.
Diary of Our Days at Breakwater not perfect by any means. There’s little things that will bother critical viewers, and little things that bothered me. I wasn’t a fan of their alcoholic club advisor in the least; then again, I’m never a fan of that particular trope. I also wasn’t a fan of how abrasive Natsumi, one of the club members, could be. I’m still mad at the octopus in episode one.
Yet there’s something nice about a show where happy endings come with the sizzle of a fish being grilled or fried or just simply cooked, and the promise of another day at the breakwater and a few smiles.
—Cy
BACKFLIP!! (Spring 2021)
Recommended by: Cy, Dee
What’s it about? Futaba Shotaro has been fascinated by gymnastics ever since seeing it in middle school. As a brand new first-year student at Soshukan High, he decides to join the rhythmic gymnastics team, where he makes a new friend who just so happens to be a famous student gym star.
Content Warning: Sports injuries; competing while injured (not romanticized).
I’ve been looking for a show that captures the absolutely frenetic energy of sports anime ever since Yuri!! On ICEaired way back in 2016 (which is shockingly almost five years ago). I’ve yet to find it, but Spring 2021’s Backflip!! might be the closest I’ve come to feeling passionate about a group of boys again, even if it doesn’t have that positively feral fandom energy I crave.
It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what makes Backflip so darn enjoyable, but I’ll start by saying it’s the friendships. There’s something so nice about seeing a group of teenage boys be soft around one another; something even nicer about seeing that same group of young men be friends without the mediator of girls to help them emote. Instead, what we get in Backflip are boys that feel: boys that are determined, boys that get upset, boys that cry. It helps that every single character is likeable, a feat that I haven’t seen since, well… Yuri!! on ICE, a show that deeply cares for each and every male character in it.
In the mid-season check-in, Caitlin remarked that while good, Backflip wouldn’t be super memorable. I cosigned onto that because in a slightly tragic way, it’s true: even with the upcoming movie, I don’t think Backflip will be remembered, by and large, outside of those fans who really loved it. And that really is a shame, because the show is a bright ray of sunshine with a group of teens who earnestly care for one another and make you want to soar with them as they flip, tumble, and rhythmically move through the cour. And at times, Backflip is so breathtakingly beautiful that I was moved to tears—not necessarily sobbing, but earnest tears, which is how I grade all good anime.
After spending a week rewatching this show, I’m determined to convince you to give it a try and fall in love with it. Come for the heartfelt message, for the joy of watching some kids have fun with a sport, for the emotionality and bird imagery and even the animation, which is a real treat. Stay for all that, and I promise you: you’ll find a hidden gem of Spring 2021 that’ll give you a healthy dollop of optimism in the middle of everything happening in the world.
—Cy
Comments are open! Please read our comments policy before joining the conversation and contact us if you have any problems.