My two favorite anime: What and why?

Lately, I’ve picked up watching some anime again. For those of you who have no clue what anime are: they are Japanese animated series. The most famous ones here in the Netherlands are Pokémon and Digimon and such, but anime isn’t meant just for kids. There are a lot of anime that tell stories about more grown-up subjects and that aren’t as childish as Pokémon. So here I’ll list my two favorites, tell you what they’re about and why I like them so much.

Angel Beats! – This would be my all-time-favorite. Angel Beats! tells the story of a boy, Yuzuru Otonashi, who wakes up lying on the pavement of a high school campus. There’s a girl sitting close to him, equipped with a sniper. She tells him he has died, and that he’s now in a world after death. Wanting to find out how he died – since he lost his memory, Otonashi joins the girl’s rebel group, the SSS: a group that fights against God and the injustice in their former lives.

I like this anime a lot. It manages to handle a lot of subjects; love, action, music and tragedy. It’s an anime that really manages to reach your heart and the ending made me tear up. A great anime overall.

Stein’s;Gate – Also a big favorite of mine. This anime tells the story of Okabe Rintarou, who invents a machine that can be used to send text messages to the past, thus altering the present. He experiments with this, trying to better the life of his friends. However, this drastically turns around when things start to take his loved ones away, and Okabe has to do all he can to get back to the way the world once was, sacrificing what he has accomplished so far.

Once again, an anime that really sucks you in and manages to make you feel along with the characters. You feel their pain and despair, and you’re excited to see  what happens next. This one, again, also made me shed a tear. Besides that, it also involves some action and a more complicated storyline, which makes it interesting to “think along”