Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster

An Interest Stack version of the challenge as found in the Anime Watching Challenges Club in the AWC Staff Collections

Anime Watching Challenges Club - https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=70446

AWC Staff Collections Post - https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1800705

Critics & Connoisseurs was a club that was founded in 2008 and ended club activities on the 31st of 2022.

The goal of the club was to come up with a list of highly recommended quality shows that are exemplary either within its genre or universally. An anime needed a 70% approval rate in our voting to get on the relation list. The following anime are all part of said list.

You can see the club page here:
https://myanimelist.net/clubs.php?cid=2913

Anime Relation List Part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/324
Manga Relation List: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/334

After watching just about all of the OVAs released in the 1980s, I rated (or plan to rate) all of these OVAs a 7 or above and consider them to be the best of the bunch.

Anime that contain the otherworldly and enigmatic beings from space! Even if it's just for a single scene, if it has 'em, it's here.

Interested in the genre? Despite what people might say, mecha is a rich character focused genre with a variety of incredibly unique stories to tell. Here's a collection of shows with short, straight-to-the-point descriptions about each. Note that some of these were translated by fans, and aren't available officially/legally. A good amount of these are available on various streaming services, tho as for all well you might have to sail the high seas a bit. Disregard my personal scores, as its subjective at end of the day and you might like it. Also please don't dismiss some of these just because they're really old, they pretty much all hold up well even today. Check each out, and see what strikes your fancy. Any shows I personally haven't watch I got info on from fellow mecha friends of mine:

All shows featured in Super Robot Wars T
Not including: Crossbone Gundam (Manga)

short anime with less than the standard 12 episodes, including some movies under an hour long and a select few ONA projects

We've all experienced that frustrated feeling of enjoying an anime, only to find out that the rest of the show will never be fully animated or it has a horrible, rushed, incomplete, unsatisfying ending. Here is a list of anime with endings that are so fulfilling and complete that they will leave you with nothing but a heart full of contentment and/or bittersweetness. List was created through collective data from multiple websites of people's answers as to what shows are considered to have satisfying endings.

Every animated media that has been made, in some way has the idea to tell a story, and to express a feeling onto the watcher. But then, there are some series which has a particular way to evocate it's emotions, and they use different tools to do that. Thought provoking writing, displaying the characters' internal monologues, their struggles and fears, using very particular cinematographic angles, and using contrasting styles of animation, colouring and highly symbolical and metaphorical imagery - these are some of the few hallmarks that the said animation is having psychological themes, and that it is avant-garde in it's approach. This is not limited to any genre, as well.

I do realize that animation like this may not be for everyone, but I do firmly believe in it's artistic merits and integrity. Media like this allows us to peek into the human psyche and probably our own too, and it does provides us with often interesting viewpoints of our world, even if fractured through the prism of the animated fiction. Shows like that also likes to ask us questions without answers, to give us moral dilemmas without solid conclusion, or to put it short, to make us think.

The shows that were picked follows a pattern, the ones which are more straightforward, less abstract and easier to get into will be first, while the list goes down, the more complex and obscure the works will get.

List of Original Anime Series' (not including sequels/specials/movies)
Original Anime are anime without source material

Most unic anime form 1980s

The new anime release format that appeared in the mid-80s brought new opportunities for studios and various works began to be released on videotapes. Some of them were frankly terrible, but some became classics with a recognizable style and aesthetics. I bring to your attention works worth viewing.

List of series featured in SRW1 - SRWAlpha

Real robots are a subgenre of the mecha genre, in which the mechas are depicted as realistic warmachines as opposed to the superheroistic depiction of the super robot subgenre. It was started in 1979 by Mobile Suit Gundam.

Just some of the most popular Mecha anime, not the greatest. Some of them that I still need to watch too!

The mecha genre is specific to the anime medium, for the reason that what once started from an interesting concept, over the decades and the various artistic interpretations it had gone through, did managed to reach it's full development and thematic recognition.

It's origin can be traced way back to the end of World War 2, and the notion of the general populace at the time, that the technological breakthroughs, and their further usage to help and safeguard mankind are the way that we should develop as a species, so that's when the bipedal metal giants were born - a figures with humane limbs and features, that are controlled by a person and which allows them to wield this overwhelming power in service of a greater good.

In this interest stack, I've presented the ways in this genre had changed, and the specific shows which had major impact upon the development of the mecha as a concept, and the ways it had branched out of the established norm for this genre exploring a broad spectrum of themes. The order of the shows is in chronological order, since that way the slight alterations and changes can be presented in more simple and efficient manner.