The Best Anime I Watched in 2022

Here we are, another trip around the sun and another list of anime recommendations! While nowhere near as prolific as some people (I admire the dedication!) I feel like I managed to keep up with a solid set of seasonal shows this year, wired in once more by my work for AniFem and the coverage of my fellow staffers. Note as in previous years that some of the material in these personal reviews is adapted from my season recs over on the site. Make sure you give those articles a read, and keep an eye out for the staff’s forthcoming recommendations from Fall 2022 and from the year overall!

I also dug into a bit of my “classics” backlog, watching some older, iconic shows for the first time. I won’t cover those here, though: it’s difficult for me to add anything to the convo around Neon Genesis Evangelion other than “it was good! It was weird! Shinji is my son!” and I already wrote up my feels about both seasons of K-On! here.

Without further ado, let’s get into my personal faves from 2022, from hobby shows to fantasy adventures to… crime dramas? Technically? Well, see for yourself…

The Orbital Children’s Rejection of Ecofascist Ideas

In Iso Mitsuo’s newest sci-fi, The Orbital Children, the heroes are faced with a cosmic conundrum: they are asked, “is it worth sacrificing the few for the needs of the many?” The heroes of The Orbital Children unilaterally say “no”.

This ambitious, colorful sci-fi story takes place in space, yet deals with themes that are strikingly down to earth. The narrative draws on very real, very present, and very dangerous ideologies like the myth of overpopulation and the way fascist groups weaponize notions of “the greater good” and environmentalism. It positions these ideas as a villainous mindset that must be overcome, not only to save the world, but in order to imagine a better future in the first place.

Read the full post on AniFem!

Winter 2022 Three-Episode Check-In

Welcome to the season of rom-coms and gender feels.

As the weeks go by, so do the anime episodes! Come read new impressions on these developing stories from me and my hard-working team.

Read the full post on AniFem!

Premiere Review | The Orbital Children

What’s it about? Touya, the last child born on the moon, now resides on the commercial space station Anshin—and has to play host to the tourists visiting it from Earth, much to his annoyance. The latest interstellar holiday quickly goes awry when the AI that runs the station suddenly and mysteriously reboots, and a comet leaves Earth’s atmosphere on a collision course with Anshin.

The Orbital Children is a two-part film series that Netflix has, for reasons best known to Netflix, segmented into six episodes and released as a series. As such, the double-length “premiere” is not so much the first episode but the first act of the first movie… something that admittedly feels a little odd to review. Whether or not it was initially intended to be sliced off into its own episode and discussed as such, this is what we’re working with, and I can certainly confirm that the first forty minutes of Orbital Children make a strong impression.

Read the full review on AniFem!