I got a rare peek into the anime series world through a friend of a friend. We watched the first episodes of 5 different series. Based on the experience I'm gonna keep sticking to anime movies, thanks.
The first one was a slice of life called "Mono" if I remember correctly. It's a moe slice of life about high school girls in a photography club. And that's all I really need to tell you: very cutesy, very relaxed, and very uneventful. Which makes sense, since it's based on a four-panel manga. Not saying it's bad, but this kind of thing is just not my cup of tea. I have My Neighbor Totoro when I want to watch a cute slice of life where nothing happens, I don't need a whole series for or of that.
The second one was the latest season of a long-running series called "Umamusume", where in a parallel world horse girls (just human girls with horse ears and tails) race each other. And of course it's set in a high school training future racers. For a premise that by the looks of it just seemed like an excuse to merchandise the various character designs it was decently engaging. The animation was also pretty nice, there's a genuine sense of speed and weight to the racing scenes. But as someone with zero interest in sports or sports anime I was mostly just bored. Impassioned speeches about what it takes to be a true racing superstar don't really get me engaged in any way, and there wasn't any interesting worldbuilding either.
The third one we checked out was basically a softcore hentai called "Please take them off [insert-name]-san". It's about the loser in a high school in love with the prettiest girl in school ("class president" tropes were firing on all cylinders), who turns out has the ability to turn back time by taking off her underwear. It's incredibly horny, low-brow and crass in all the ways you can imagine from that synopsis, but I have to admit I got decent entertainment value from just staring at it in slack-jawed disbelief. I genuinely though this kind of thing would have gone extinct long ago with the advent of internet porn, but I guess not.
The fourth, and unequivocally the best one we watched was called Lazarus, and it's the latest creation of Shinichiro Watanabe and Studio Mappa, also featuring Chad Stahelski from the John Wick movies as action coordinator. It's a cyberpunk-ish story about a miracle drug humanity's been enjoying turning out to have been a trap set by its creator, who makes an announcement that anyone who's ever taken it will die within 30 days of the announcement. Then the race is on to find him and the cure he has before humanity faces extinction. This one we watched for three episodes, and it was pretty good. Not being set in another fucking high school felt instantly refreshing, the animation was really good, the world was interesting and the story engaging. It did seem like it could be one of those "blow the budget in the first 2 episodes" type deals, but what we saw was all good. The premise is also incredibly hokey if you start thinking about it, but the characters and plot were engaging enough to distract from it.
The last one was called Kowloon Generic Romance. It's a "5 seconds in the future" story set in a new Kowloon walled city, and is about two office workers falling into a romance. Sounds straightforward, but right from the outset it's clear that something's off. We didn't get to what it was all about, but there's clearly either some identity confusion or memory manipulation going on á la Total Recall or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The mystery regarding the main character's seeming lack of a defined past and the confusion with her being a doppelganger to another woman the man was involved with was pretty interesting. I just wish the pacing wasn't so glacial: it felt like the anime took three episodes to get to where Companion got in 15-20 minutes. I might check out the manga, because then I won't have to sit through more slow-paced scenes of the characters eating lunch or staring wistfully into each other's eyes.
