In The Wake of Tragedy, Here are 9 Amazing Kyoto Animation Series to Watch

The anime community is still reeling from the arson-started fire at Kyoto Animation Studios. While you may have donated to a fund or bought some of the high quality digital images off their website, sometimes the best thing you can do to support a company is watch (legally) and buy their products. It is also a way of showing a company and their employees that you love them and are thinking about them despite never actually meeting any of them.

Kyoto Animation is pretty famous in the
anime community for churning out shows with addictingly fluid
animation and just stupidly cute characters. Furthermore, they made a
pretty big impact in the industry itself by being one of the first
companies to pay their employees a salary rather than a by the frame
wage that results in overworked and underpaid animators. It makes
their tragedy all the worse.

Beyond the Boundary

There’s a screen in the first episode
in Your Lie in April (not a KyoAni series, but also good) where the
whole world has this grey-ish tint to it and the main character sees
this girl and suddenly everything comes alive with very vivid color.
That is what Beyond the Boundary did for me and anime when I first
watched it. The story of the series ends a little wantingly and I
suspect that is either to direct you to the movies or the light
novel, but the way it is animated makes it well worth the watch.
Everything from the hair and glasses sliding down the nose to the
spilled blood feels very alive as it follows the cutest demon hunter
you ever will see.

Clannad

An example of KyoAni’s beautiful
animation ability, this is not quite. The art style from the visual
novel makes the the characters all eyes and legs, but it has its
moments. What you watch Clannad for is to have a good long cry at any
one of the many touching or relatable moments. These girls are all
tragedy and much of the first season is the main character helping
them through it. The second season is something different, but still
has its sting. It perhaps one of the greatest romance and drama
series you will ever see.

Free

Did you know that KyoAni was founded by
the husband and wife team that still runs the studio today? As Yoko
was an animator from another studio before founding it, she made sure
the company hired more women and promoted them into prestigious roles
that the industry often reserved for men. So it is no surprise that
Free came out of KyoAni. It is a show about a male swim team. A male
swim team with beautiful wet bodies in skin-tight speedos. More
impressive is that it is not an outwardly boy love show either, which
is usually what these things can turn into. It is fan service for
women, and there isn’t anything wrong with producing a few shows like
that considering there is a whole ecchi genre for men.

Nichijou

There are a few shows by KyoAni that
specialize in what I like to call “normalized chaos,” where
everything seems normal but is actually out of control. Nichijou is
one of those shows. It is about three school girls living their life,
but then there are things that go completely upside down like the
principal suplexing a deer. Some of this chaos is also used to accent
emotions like the tsundere busing out a bazooka to symbolize her
explosive feelings. It mixed both the slice of life aspect that fits
the pastel color palate and insanity that you can feel in normal
life, but turned to the extremest of extremes.

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Like Nichijou above, this is a series
that also likes to revel in chaos. In it, an office lady’s life is
invaded by dragons when she saves the life of one while drunk and it
decides to become her maid in repayment. Soon all her dragon friends
start visiting and her and several other humans find their life
thrown into the most wonderful and wholesome chaos by them. While
slice of life shows don’t exactly need to bust out the vibrant
animation, there are a few spots where you can see KyoAni flexing
their muscles when the dragons do things like play fight in a field
or play dodge ball. (It’s more badass that it sounds)

K-On

This series is probably the studio’s
most famous series. It was super huge for a long time, and there are
some that credit it for the shift towards more moe girls in anime, as
KyoAni kind of specializes in moe. It is about a bunch of school
girls that start a band. They often fail, but do so in a cute and
endearing way. It is K-On’s powerful success that likely spawned
other music shows by the studio like Hibike Euphonium.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Right there next to K-On is KyoAni’s
other most popular series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Even
after trolling their fans with eight of the same episode in a row,
this series is still beloved for the way it melds mystery, comedy,
and cute club shenanigans. It tells a surprisingly complex story that
is all wrapped up in what looks like your standard school life
series.

Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions

The large part of KyoAni’s charm is
that – damn – they know how to create a cute character. Rikka is
one of those characters that can really get stuck in your heart.
Yeah, she is a little damaged and super cringe sometimes, but she is
adorable and you just end up rooting for her before you know it.
Everything about Chunibyou kind of ends up that way. When it comes to
creating lovable characters, I see this as one of their greatest
successes.

Violet Evergarden

Remember when this series came to
Netflix and everyone was like “Oh god, my eyes! It’s too
beautiful”? Pepperidge Farm remem- I mean, I remember. This series,
though it can be a little…boring at moments in terms of the plot,
it is never not just absolutely gorgeous as KyoAni showed just how
far an anime studio can really go with the visuals.

I really could go on, but at a certain
point, I would just list all the series. Like, I pretty much did
anyway, but this studio truly does some of the best work in the
industry and we can only hope they get back on their feet soon.