Personal Standout Anime of 2013

2013 marked fifty years since Osamu Tezuka adapted his Mighty Atom manga to animation on television, and I did spend part of that year keeping up with the posts on a weblog that marked the anniversary by looking at all the years in anime since. So far as the conventional wisdom sloshing around went, there remained outcroppings in those commemorations of “anime just isn’t what it once was”; for that matter, too, I did eventually take in a stronger reminder or two there had been animation in Japan before Tezuka, perhaps in advance of criticisms he put the industry on a path to overworking underpaid artists. (However, his work in comics may do more to protect him in the estimation of others than William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s work in theatrical animation did to protect them against judgments of their own television work from the 1960s.) In getting past that anniversary year, though, I can look back and think some series from it have wound up impressing me, even if I can’t quite single one out as better than all the others.
( My selections )