The most famous anime of all time

What a great goal for Prime Video to bring the original anime of ‘Captain Tsubasa’ or, as it was known in Spain, ‘Champions: Oliver and Benji’ to its platform. This 1983 series became famous in our country in 1990 when Telecinco broadcast it daily at the now-unthinkable 8:30 p.m.

Prime Video’s version is remastered, so the image quality is much better than Telecinco’s 1990 version, but we can’t enjoy Gustavo Toro’s famous song, which a generation of children sang for months. Amazon has the 128 chapters of the original series, based on Yoichi Takahashi’s 1981–1988 ‘Shonen Jump’ manga.

Story is well-known: Oliver Atom, a talented youth footballer, is rising in the leagues. He competes fiercely with talented custodian Benji. Both will advance in football and fight repeatedly.

‘Oliver and Benji’ shocked at the time because it showed football matches on screen to show the players’ effort: fields distorted to infinity, frozen moments that allowed us to contemplate the reaction of all the players and spectators, absolutely impossible shots on goal… an extreme narrative that today we easily relate to anime but which took Spain by storm in 1990.

Despite being one of the most pervasive cultural properties of the 21st century, anime is hard to define due to its century-long evolution and reinvention. From Oten Shimokawa’s 1917 five-minute shorts to World War II’s feature-length anime films, Tezuka’s 1960s production cycles, and Miyazaki and others’ auteurist innovations in the latter half of the last century. Anime has gone through many phases, from amateur efforts to nationalist propaganda to niche cultural export turned global phenomenon, each reflecting its time. Television expanded in the 1960s, spawning many of the genres and subgenres we know today and igniting the anime industry’s inextricable link to advertising and merchandising from the 1970s onwards. Home video brought anime to its commercial and aesthetic peak, spreading from Nippon to North America and back, before the internet revolutionised it again in the nineties and early aughts. The late 20th century’s evolving means of production and distribution changed anime film’s breadth and audacity, as well as its running time, to meet the tastes of new and old audiences at home and abroad. Where does one begin to address the aesthetic and historical impact of anime film on pop culture and global entertainment over the last century?

This list of the top anime films aims to provide a comprehensive aesthetic, technical, and historical overview of 100 of Japanese animation’s most influential and important films. Paste is proud to have Jason DeMarco, on-air creative director of Adult Swim and co-creator of Toonami, curate this list. DeMarco’s unique role in anime’s rising popularity in the West has helped optimise this list. Given the evolution of anime film and television and the importance of the home video revolution, this list includes traditional features, original video animations (OVAs) for home video, and anthology films, all of which must have premiered in theatres. In curating this list, we hope to provide an entry point for both experts and laypeople, Otaku and neophyte, to trace the rich and varied history of anime’s evolution across film and popular culture and to give newcomers a comprehensive guide to learn, rediscover, explore, and debate the full potential of Japanese animation now and in the future.

Mobile Suit Gundam F-91, set 30 years after Char’s Counterattack, is quite unusual in the Gundam universe, but welcome. Yoshiyuki Tomino decided to start a new Gundam story a generation after Char and Amaro’s final battle’s hard-won peace. Tomino assembled a “greatest hits” of his former collaborators, including Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Kunio Ookawara, for the series. Internal conflicts early in production shelved the series for unknown reasons. To avoid abandoning the project (approximately 13 episode scripts had been written), Tomino condensed the story into a movie. Mobile Suit Gundam F-91 is a messy but worthy Gundam entry. The Crossbone Vanguard, a separatist group, attacks the Earth colonies after years of peace. The story centres on Amaro analogue Seabrook Arno and his Gundam, F-91. This entry has some of the most brutal fight sequences in Gundam history and sleek Gundam designs—Tomino wanted smaller Gundams that felt more like “Mobile suits” than giant robots. Starting off like most Gundam stories, with clean faction divisions and a clear focus on key characters on both sides of the conflict, the third act gets messy and ends with a clumsy and unearned happy ending. As usual, Tomino’s work features thrilling action sequences, vibrant characters, and mobile suits. Mobile Suit Gundam is an underrated reboot that doesn’t require knowledge of the Universal Century timeline. Don your suit. Jason DeMarco

The most famous anime of all time

By b0oua

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