Anime is a vast and vibrant universe, and possibly Japan’s greatest export. The medium has been around for decades, but has only gained popularity in Europe and the US in the 80s and the 90s. Directors like Hayao Miyazaki – whose film Spirited Away won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2002 – and Satoshi Kon gained global acclaim with their films, helping to bring anime to a wider audience.
From soot sprites and super robots to the Dragon Slayer and a superhero schoolgirl, anime offers a peek into a thousand different worlds, each offering an earnest reflection of the country behind them. In Ultimate Anime, fans and newcomers alike can chart the course of the medium’s most influential directors, recurring tropes and key genres across more than one hundred emphatically championed movies and television series.
We spoke to author Joe O’Connell – the creator behind the ever-popular YouTube channel ‘Beyond Ghibli’ – about why he fell in love with anime and what makes it so enduringly captivating.
Eight years ago, Japanese animation was going through something of a renaissance on the international stage. Your Name – the newest picture from anime auteur Makoto Shinkai – was breaking records and making waves around the world. Anime had enjoyed similar watershed moments in the past – the debut of Pokémon in the West and Spirited Away’s Oscar win both come to mind – but for the first time in a long time, it felt like everyone was sitting up and asking the same question: what is anime?
Led by the limitless imaginations of Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, Ghibli is to anime what Disney was to the cartoon: foundational, largely family-friendly and utterly fantastic.
Their curiosity for Your Name would lead many to stumble upon – and consequently devour – the library of Studio Ghibli. Led by the limitless imaginations of Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, Ghibli is to anime what Disney was to the cartoon: foundational, largely family-friendly and utterly fantastic. Filled with giant cuddly forest spirits (My Neighbor Totoro), courier witches (Kiki’s Delivery Service) and flying pigs (Porco Rosso), anyone who went to dip their toe in such a bewitching body of work often emerged utterly enamoured a few weeks later, desperately searching for their next anime fix.
As someone who had been obsessed with the artform for two decades at this point, I also found myself in a renaissance of sorts during this period, with friends and family reaching out for recommendations: ‘I’ve watched everything from Studio Ghibli… what’s next?!’
It was here that Beyond Ghibli was born – a YouTube channel where I could answer that question with each and every upload. It was never intended to become such a substantial work: I was a hobbyist video editor with a rinky-dink microphone and a handful of favourites to champion. I had no experience with the platform, and after hitting ‘Publish’ on my very first video (an introduction to my favourite anime directors and their best films) I allowed myself to hope that fifty people might happen upon it. That video now has over one-million views.
Anime is so special for so many reasons: it plays host to stories from storytellers we’ve never heard from.
YouTube has no shortage of critical thinkers: indeed, the platform is packed with video essays exploring and dissecting any subject you can imagine, and anime was well represented long before I ever arrived on the scene. It’s heartening to every lifelong anime fan to see the medium – one that was so often reduced by its detractors as something inherently worthless – to be taken seriously, to warrant such vigorous critique. Luckily for me, that war had already been won by those that came before, and it was through their efforts that I never had to critique or review anime on my channel – instead, I was allowed to simply celebrate it. I believe it was that unbridled positivity that helped set me apart from my peers.
In the years that followed my first upload, ‘celebration’ has been my north star. Anime is so special for so many reasons: it plays host to stories from storytellers we’ve never heard from. It looks and sounds like nothing we’ve ever encountered before. It’s wonderfully strange, surprisingly earnest, heartbreakingly beautiful and unflappably horny – and often it’s all of these at once, and so much more. For much of my youth it was derided as nothing more than ‘deviant cartoons from “Weird Japan”’. In 2025, anime is now celebrated as ‘deviant cartoons from “Weird Japan”’ – it’s subtle, but there’s a difference.
Ever since I watched Ash Ketchum set out from Pallet Town with a temperamental Pikachu by his side, my opinion has never wavered: anime is cool. I love anime. I love how effortlessly it can bring me to tears, how often I find myself doubled-over laughing, and how consistently unpredictable it is as an artform. Growing up with anime in the early aughts, I could watch a rambunctious rom-com between a loveable doof and his adorable robot companion (Chobits), a novice ninja engage in bombastic ninjutsu-fuelled fisticuffs (Naruto) and a mournful treatise on the meaning of life from the viewpoint of a group of amnesiac angels (Haibane Renmei) – and this was just one night of programming.
I love anime. I love how effortlessly it can bring me to tears, how often I find myself doubled-over laughing, and how consistently unpredictable it is as an artform.
My relationship with anime would wax and wane as the years progressed. Sometimes I could keep up with all of my favourites, though oftentimes I would have to catch-up in a red-eyed binge. I never thought I’d watch as much anime as I did in those first few years, where I devoured everything I could get my hands on, but eventually I stumbled into a career where I was encouraged to fall back on such habits; where I made a living by sharing my favourites, and built a community of fans who were just as eager to share their favourites with me in return. I’m incredibly lucky to have lived a life coloured by anime, and when I was approached to turn that calling into a book – that is, Ultimate Anime – another lifelong dream came true.
Ultimate Anime was a joy to put together. Collecting one hundred of my favourite movies and TV shows (I sneakily crammed in far more than one hundred, but don’t tell my publisher that…), it represents a lifelong obsession with anime, and a culmination of the strange journey I’ve been on over the last eight years. Each essay is an impassioned plea to watch any number of titles that I believe are life-changing. From the erotically charged arthouse tragedy of Belladonna of Sadness to the unhinged insanity of Chainsaw Man, each and every entry is – you guessed it – a celebration. This isn’t just a predictable list of megahits from Anime’s storied history, however, but a weird and eclectic selection that I hope manages to surprise anyone who picks it up, from earnest newcomers to diehard otaku.
Each essay is an impassioned plea to watch any number of titles that I believe are life-changing.
I wish I could tell you that whittling down the list to one-hundred titles was hard, that I agonized over each and every inclusion and died a little inside each time I had to make a cut. But that would be disingenuous: putting together Ultimate Anime was a joy. For every absent masterpiece (that I’m sure I’ll hear about endlessly online!) I gleefully included a strange favourite or odd curveball. A show where a man’s hand is replaced by a miniature woman (Midori Days), a psychedelic crime epic where two snot-nosed kids leap buildings and scrap with the Yakuza (Tekkonkinkreet) or a depraved musical comedy where an earnest and kind-hearted poet has to moonlight as a bat-eating frontman to a death metal band (Detroit Metal City). If Ultimate Anime ever warrants a Volume 2, I can promise it’s only going to get weirder.
Ultimately, it’s because I believe that it's those oddities that make anime as special as it is. I’ve spent my life watching it, and yet over two decades later I still stumble upon shows and movies that utterly reshape what I think the medium is capable of - that shake me to my core, blow my mind and remind me, above all else: anime is cool.
Words by Joe O’Connell
Ultimate Anime by Joe O’Connell is available now
