Sometimes, entertainment can be too cozy and familiar. Romcoms are where one person runs to the other at an airport or train station. Horror films often feature a gross figure in a mask. Comedy films are about a derpy guy derping to the exhaustion of a largely straight cast. All media suffers from stagnation, including anime.
Fans may be tired of strained isekai stories now, but they had to deal with a surplus of magical girls, Pokemon clones, mech shows, and more in the past. It’s enough to make a person dig deep to seek the strange. Luckily, there are some anime shows and films out there that defy expectation, classification, or even comprehension. These are just a few of the many fantastic mind-bending anime.
8 Memories
Memories is a collection of three stories by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo and Perfect Blue director Satoshi Kon. Otomo’s stories, Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder are impressive displays of animation but aren’t particularly perplexing. The former is a comedy about a hapless guy who becomes a lethal bioweapon after taking the wrong pill. While the latter is basically a day in the life of a kid in an Orwellian dystopia.
It's Kon’s story, Magnetic Rose, that really stretches perception. It’s about two space engineers, Heintz and Miguel, who investigate a strange ship emitting a distress signal. They discover it used to be the home of former opera soprano Eva Friedel. Then Friedel appears, convincing Miguel she’s her former beau Carlo Rambaldi while showing Heintz hallucinations based on traumatic memories he kept locked away. It’s a visual treat that’s touching and strange at the same time.
7 Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
Based on Kōji Kumeta’s manga, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei got adapted into an anime series, two OVAs, and a bundle of internet radio shows. On the surface, it’s a tale about a teacher, Nozomu Itoshiki, who’s saved from a suicide attempt (and ironically almost killed in the process) by a strange girl called Kafuka whose bouncy peppiness annoys him into going to work. But by sheer coincidence, Kafuka is one of his students!
She isn’t even the strangest of his new students, as he has to deal with a control freak, a girl who hates being called ‘normal’ despite her name literally meaning ‘normal’, and more. It’s a wacky comedy that takes these traits to their extremes. Ones that Nozomu has to adjust to in order to help them move on from their own despair. The mix of light comedy, dark elements, and shifting period settings make it a brain-twisting take on school-based anime.
6 Neon Genesis Evangelion
Nowadays, Neon Genesis Evangelion’s reputation precedes it. Back in the day, people expected it to be a more typical, if dramatic, example of a mech show. Like a terrestrial Gundam with 1990s dark drama, or Macross without the weaponized singalongs. But it became more than that, as the plot got more intricate and meta as it went along.
Creator Hideaki Anno got more combative across the series in reaction to toxic fan feedback and strained production. Like later episodes containing long, lingering shots or pretty but unfinished-looking sequences. Religious references result in bizarre figures and concepts, like ‘angels’ being amorphous…things, which threaten to make all of humanity one, and not in the peace & love kind of way. No wonder Shinji and Asuka get increasingly on edge.
5 Tatami Galaxy
Still, Evangelion is a giant series with so many films and so much lore. So, why not try something a little shorter? Based on Tomihiko Morimi’s novel, the 11-episode series Tatami Galaxy is less of a time commitment, but still as baffling. Initially, it sounds simple enough as an unnamed college freshman bemoans his situation and wonders if things would’ve gone differently if he joined a different college club or ‘circle’.
So, each episode has the protagonist joining a different ‘circle’ in search of his ‘rose-colored campus life’ and ‘raven-haired maiden’. But he isn’t joining them concurrently. They’re parallel universes showing the outcome of each choice he makes. It’s all part of a ‘proxy-proxy’ war between ‘the god of matchmaking’ Higuchi and lecherous love-doll lover Jōgasaki. Until he figures something out, the protagonist will remain trapped within their tatami galaxy.
4 Serial Experiments Lain
Things only get stranger with producer Yasuyuki Ueda’s Serial Experiments Lain, if the panting, cackling voice proclaiming “Present day! Present time!” at the start of each episode didn’t give the game away. Nor the eerie portrait of its title character that, admittedly, worked better on old CRT TVs than modern flat screens. As cyberpunk as it is, its version of the internet, or ‘Wired’, and other points betray its late-90s origins.
What has aged well is its surreal take on the themes of identity and reality and the internet's impact on them. Lain and her classmates get weird emails from a deceased friend who claims she isn’t dead. She just left her physical body, entered the ‘Wired’, and found God. As Lain investigates, she learns more about the ‘Wired’, the people behind it, and who she really is. She isn’t as ordinary as she thinks and may be more in control of reality and perception than she knows.
3 Cat Soup
Subversive manga was a trend in Japan during the 1990s, and few were as subversive as Chiyomi Hashiguchi’s strip Nekojiru Udon (Cat Soup Udon). It followed two cartoonish yet not-so-cutesy cats Nyāko and Nyatta in their trippy, dark adventures inspired by Hashiguchi’s own dreams. She sadly passed away in 1998, with her husband Hajime Yamano continuing the strip on and off since then. So, she never got to see her work animated in Tatsuo Satō’s short Cat Soup from 2001.
It’s only 34 minutes long, yet it’s hard to describe. Nyatta briefly dies and fights for Nyāko’s soul with a Jizō (a Japanese guardian of children), accidentally tearing it in half. Nyatta’s revived, and after giving Nyāko half of her soul back, the two travel in search of the remaining half. The adventure leads them to see a bird that causes a flood, a pig that unzips itself to offer food to eat, and an elephant made entirely of water that hydrates them in the desert. Whatever it is, it isn’t typical.
2 Mind Game
Made by Studio 4 °C, the same studio behind Memories, Mind Game is based on Robin Nishi’s manga of the same name. The plot is odd enough. The lead character Nishi gets wrapped up in an encounter with the yakuza, dies, comes back to life, fights the yakuza, escapes into a whale, and then things get weird from there. The only thing odder than the story is the art style, as it constantly shifts with each scene.
Most of the time, the characters look typically cartoony. Other times they can look rotoscoped or like planted live-action footage. Even then, the cartoon look can look slick and fine, or crude and scratchy. It can be dull and dingy in one scene, then overwhelmingly bright the next. It managed to beat Howl’s Moving Castle to get the Animation Grand Prize at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival, so it was doing something right in being outright weird.
1 Paprika
From one Satoshi Kon project in Magnetic Rose to another. Paprika was his last completed work before his death in 2010. It was based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, where a research psychologist enters clients’ dreams as a figure called Paprika. She works with a detective to take down a terrorist who plans to use their dream device to threaten targets’ minds.
While Tsutsui’s novel focused on the psychological side, Kon’s film focused on bending reality and perceptions. Dr. Chiba shifts between being herself and Paprika, who adopts a variety of guises within the dream world. Likewise, Detective Konakawa finds himself in different looks, or at a bar where Kon and Tsutsui serve him as bartenders. Those are just the more straightforward parts of the plot too, as the climax tests the barrier between fantasy and reality to breaking point.