What I Learned From Years of Anime Catalogues
I used to be a big anime fan, and I got a perspective into the fandom that I didn’t expect (at all) when I journeyed down this path. There is a lot to learn about anime fans through MyAnimeList, which catalogs virtually every anime in existence, and allows users to rank them from 1–10. It helped me descend into the anime fandom, deeper into the iceberg than I believed possible. I found a world unlike I’d ever experienced before. I may not be as active in anime, but it still fascinates me nonetheless. So today we’ll take all the artistic nuances of the medium, and disregard them as we look into numbers. We’re gonna abandon our pre-determined notions of high quality, and evaluate other people’s statistics on anime that I haven’t finished.
Buckle up, dear readers, grab a waifu body pillow and a karaoke microphone set to your favorite Pokémon opening. We‘re going to get a crash course into the sexy topic of anime rankings!
What The Hell Is A MAL?
MyAnimeList (referred to as MAL moving forward) is an anime database that fosters a sizeable English speaking anime community within its pages and forums. It’s not the only database of this nature, with others including kitsu.oi, anilist, and anidb. MAL is the one I have used in the past, and the one I know the most intimate juicy details about. Like IMDb, it serves as a database, and as a way to categorize anime in various rankings. MAL uniquely combines TV and Movies onto the same Rating and Popularity lists, which can help us understand these fans. It’s within these walls that we start to learn the depth that the anime fandom has, and find some wild trends.
Have you ever heard of the Legend Of The Galactic Heroes? If not that’s ok, I only know a few people that have heard of it, and less people that have seen it. Only 50,000 or so MAL users have completed it, out of the 200,000+ users that have acknowledged it in their profiles. In terms of popularity, it doesn’t chart anywhere significant on the database. I ask this question because it’s 1–10 ranking is the 7th highest on the website, it’s been in the top 10 for years, and I don’t expect it to change anytime soon. The show consistently stands as one of the highest rated shows on a website that has well over 10,000 anime entries in its database, with no rating drop in sight. Remember this difference because we will see it again, but for now we need to ask what’s happening?
Much of the anime conversation is dominated by long running shonen series, (One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, and most recently Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia). There’s nothing wrong with these shows, to be honest, but there is so much more to anime than this format. Few shows can afford to run for multiple years over hundreds of episodes. Most anime last around 12 or 25 episodes. There is a difference in spending 200 episodes (and possibly 100 hours) of time watching one anime versus 9 different ones. Most MAL users are the 2nd kind of anime fan, that’ll watch a multitude of shows and movies. But they can be the 1st kind as well, right?
Many of the users become anime fans through gateway shows such as One Piece and Naruto, the latter of which is still in the Top 10 most popular anime on the website. But it’s through Naruto that we again see divide in ranking categories.
Naruto has 1,115,000+ users that have watched →finished →rated →scored the series on MAL. Another 600,000 that have already started, or plan to start the show, and have not finished yet. The Godfather: Part II, for instance, has less user ratings on IMDb despite it being the 3rd highest rated movie on their website, and frequently considered one of the best movies in cinema history. . Even though it has so many users that acknowledge it on the site, it isn’t even in the Top 600 highest rated anime. It is a reverse scenario of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It’s still hugely popular, as Naruto’s impact on the community still exists, partially through the sequel series Shippuden, and the spin-off Boruto.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood seems to reign supreme on the site. Being the #1 rated anime, #3 most popular anime, the #1 most favorited anime, and it’s protagonist Edward Elric is the 7th most popular character on the entirety of MAL. It is relatively short, but more importantly, complete. Hunter x Hunter (2011), while longer than FMA:B, is also complete in its run. While the manga extends the story, this 2011 anime has ended after 148 episodes. There’s something special about these fans in the eyes of MAL, there are unconfirmed rumors that the MAL Algorithm (the MALgorithm) favors users that complete anime for rankings. It infers that someone rating HxH a 9 without finishing it isn’t worth as much as someone rating it a 9 and does finish. Since FMA:B and HxH have both finished, fans are more likely to catalogue and rate those shows on their MAL profiles, which benefits their MALgorithmic rankings.
Flagship shonen series may not appear on Top Rated of MAL, but shorter and more impactful shonen do show up. Shonen does mostly dominate the anime sphere, but it looks a little different on MAL. We can try and talk about other genres and stories, but the influence of shonen remains strong.
Since films and series are combined on the same lists, we see that films aren’t as represented on MAL. There are only 24 films on the Top 100 Rated list, 0 of which are in the Top 10, and half of those movies follow-up an existing anime series. In MAL’s sitewide Most Popular anime board, there are only 3 films in the Top 50. Original anime films, in theory, should have more representation because they have less time commitment to them, and are shown to wider audiences, which makes them great gateways into the anime fandom. We’ll talk more about anime films, on this article, and in our future here on Medium. But MAL’s users gravitate towards anime series, which means we have a lot more content to sift through.
Attack On Titan, whose final season is airing right now, has 3 entries in MALs Top 100 highest rated anime, two of which are climbing the Top 10. MAL has a habit of making different entries for different seasons for shows. For Attack on Titan, it means that each season is a different entity to the website. One Piece is kind of an outlier in this regard, as its damn near 1,000 episodes are under the same ongoing entry in MAL. This is the same with FMA:B, HxH, and even the original Naruto. Since some series go months or years before releasing new anime, it’s worthwhile or a website like MAL to have cut-off points for various entries. This works for Attack on Titan’s anime, and the fans enjoyment of the series is hitting its peak as we speak. It naturally has a huge presence on the site, and therefore the fandom.
But there is another long-running shonen on that list though. It transcends a mere ‘presence’ on the site, and therefore the fandom. Instead, it opts for an otherworldly domination of the MAL users and admins.
Gintama: The God of the MALgorithm
Gintama is a long running shonen parody series. It’s not that it is ranked on MAL’s Top Rated chart, because that would be too little for the series. It opts for 10 DIFFERENT ENTRIES on MAL’s Top 100. 6 of these are in the Top 20, and 3 of those are in the TOP 10, and one of those is Top 3.
Gintama Movie 2 is the 3rd highest rated film on the website. It has a higher rating than Akira, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away (actually, every Ghibli and/or Miyazaki movie) Redline, The End of Evangelion, and every Pokémon and DragonBall movie. It has a higher rating than every anime film on the USA Netflix catalog, with one exception.
I cannot understate the amount of love Gintama fans have for their franchise. You’d think based off of this that we should be crushed by the Gintama fandom running berserk in the streets begging for random citizens to give Gintama a chance. You’d think that the anime fandom as a whole is being carried by Gintama stans. But it’s not…
Gintama laughs in the face of one simple organized entry like One Piece. Since it aired on and off for years, MAL splitting up it’s arcs and seasons into different entries created a clusterfuck of Gintama pages on the site. The first season (200 episodes or so) has 220,000 people that finished it, while the second season has about 180,000 people that finished it. This trickles down until the final season which had 60,000 people finish it. That season is the 1,291st most popular anime on the site, but ranked Top 20 on Top Rated. Gintama is the perfect example of MAL users watching large amounts of the show, and rating every unique entry. The only kind of people doing this are the ones that enjoyed the show enough to continue such a daunting task. Well over half of the users that rate Gintama give it an 8,9, or 10/10 score.
We shouldn’t be too surprised honestly, a good sequel/follow-up season should be rewarded if done well, and MALs rankings showcase that. March Comes In Like A Lion, Clannad, Mob Psycho 100, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu all have 2nd seasons on the Top 50 list. Mushishi, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Monogatari Series, and the Fate franchise all have multiple entries within the Top 100. I can only speak for Clannad and Kaguya-sama, which I do agree had stronger sequel seasons. They are the success stories, yes, and for every one of these, there is a second season of a different anime that tanked so hard that MAL users crater their scores and rankings.
If you’re unaware of any of the above anime, that’s ok. They are still representatives of the anime fandom, Kaguya-sama and Rakugo are wildly different shows, while Monogatari bares almost no resemblence to them. It’s wrong to say that they’re highly ranked because they’re sequels to shows that aired recently. It’s right to say that they do represent different factions of anime fans.
Let’s return our thoughts to a standalone entry that we mentioned before, Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It’s 110 episodes long, and there were no legal avenues to watch it, analog or digitally, until the launch of anime streaming service HiDive a few years back. Since it’s an OVA (Original Video Animation), every individual episode came out direct-to-video starting in 1988. It went under-the-radar for years, but was highly acclaimed by the few people that did see it. As piracy and streaming technology improved, more people checked it out, and it’s reputation as THE hidden gem of old-school anime only grew. Once it was available legally, there was a broader conversation about the series within the fandom. It’s the perfect representation of an older anime, from older parts of the fandom, that predate the anime world we know today.
What This Means For The Fandom
The anime fandom isn’t one singular organism. It’s a multi-faceted conglomeration of fans that grow a greater community no matter the genre differences. Think of how film fans don’t exist as one monolith. Marvel film fans aren’t necessarily like international film festival fans, for instance. Anime is an ever-changing world full of unique* series and films, all of which paint a more beautiful world, all of which showcase unique voices of storytellers and artists, all of them are bankrolled by idol fans.
*Most anime are adaptations by nature.
Many anime production committees are unwilling to make anime unless it has a basis in manga, light novels, visual novels, or video games etc. Only a few truly get the chance to evolve into multiple anime seasons that run wild across our hearts and screens for years to come. Aside from the afformentioned Your Name. Code Geass, Gurren Lagaan, and Cowboy Bebop are the only anime originals in the Top 50. And this isn’t a problem. Most anime are created for the sole purpose of helping sell the source material. Anime works in tandem with it’s manga/LN/VN counterparts to create a multimedia experience for fans. Some anime work better in animation, while some stories blossom in manga. The industry wants fans to explore everything it has to offer, even if it’s not always clear about everywhere you can go to find it. If we look at a crowded room of sequels, we turn our minds off to the solid gold sitting right around them.
Anime movies are still wonderful gateways into anime. Many fans of international animation (that may not necessarily identify as “anime fans”) love anime movies, as many high quality ones have been released recently. I recommend Weathering With You, and Night Is Short Walk On Girl. Naturally, the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and the rest of Studio Ghibli must be considered. All of these can soon be found on HBO MAX by the end of the month. Many other animators are taking the place of Ghibli as its content has slowed down since 2015. Mamoru Hosoda has made some fantastic films including Mirai and Wolf Children. Even if we may not see as much fanfare on MAL for movies, it can be easier to talk about them. Letterboxd is a great resource for films, and the site is far less cluttered (with advertisements and weblinks) than IMDb, which should help identify more recommendations.
For those interested in more anime series, Ping Pong: The Animation, and The Tatami Galaxy are in the Top 60s range, and can both be found legally on Funimation’s streaming site. It’s easy to miss them, but you’d be mistaken to leave them behind. Each series is 11 episodes long, and adapted from obscure source material. They’re both directed by one of animation’s best directors currently working, Masaaki Yuasa, and sometimes fly under the radar in a shonen filled world. However, many MAL users still find themselves around these shows and fall in love with them.
They’re precisely the kind of series that MAL was made for. Short, powerful anime that fans can fall in love with fit in within MALs fanbase. Even series from the beginning of the 2000s such as Monster and Great Teacher Onizuka, that could/should have fallen out of favor in anime fans long ago, are fairly high ranked on the site.
Many of the resources I’ve talked about have a few thousand ways to recommend new shows to anime fans, new and old. In posting this, I hope to nudge a few more people into the world of anime, and hope I’m not overwhelming anybody.
From me, I also recommend Kids on the Slope, Toradora!, and Ouran Host Club. The last of those being my current favorite anime. They may not show up in the stats I’ve been talking about this article, but I believe they’re worth looking into…
The truth is, I doubt many anime watchers pay attention to MALs rankings unless fans coordinate campaigns to rank borderline pornographic shows to the very tops of the charts. I searched through these charts looking for any pattern to superimpose into a narrative. I’m confident that I could have done this same process with IMDb, for instance, and found similar wacky trends to cherrypick. MAL is a great anime resource for fans, whether they’re watching their 1st anime, or their 500th. It’s not a perfect representation of anime fans, as no anime database is. Film fans don’t consider the Shawshank Redemption the best movie of all time because IMDb said so, nor do anime fans consider Gintama the best anime because MAL said so. I can recommend anime all day, even if I haven’t actively watched anime in years. There is so much about anime that I don’t know, and may never know.
My aim here is to give you, dear reader, a start into the anime world, if you haven’t had one already. It’s worthwhile for you to know that your anime experience can and should be wholly unique. It doesn’t matter if you care about one websites petty rankings. MyAnimeList isn’t the only anime database out there, others may suit your tastes better. The snapshot it gives readers into the world of anime isn’t a tarpit to sink into, but a launch pad for you to explore the wierd wonderful world that anime is.
