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Avant-garde anime don’t just color outside the box, they erase it. Through their off-the-wall storytelling, unique characterization, or innovative art style, these anime challenge popular conceptions of what the form is or should be. They are a refined taste, too strange or difficult for some. For those with a flexible imagination and taste for the bizarre, there’s nothing better.
10 Gankutsuou: The Count Of Monte Cristo
It’s not often that anime audiences think about texture, but it is essential to Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo. Characters and scenes in the series are a disorienting blend as if all the world’s patterns and surfaces had melted together. The effect is that of a tapestry in motion, everything weirdly flattened yet alive. It’s hard to overstate how strange everything else feels because of this effect.
What’s even more surreal is that the series is an adaptation of the classic Alexandre Dumas novel, albeit liberally interpreted. Unlike explicable series like Gintama,Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo borders on the hallucinatory at times due to its unique visual style, but that’s all the more reason to recommend it to fans of the strange and exceptional.
9 Texhnolyze
Viewers who demand breakneck pacing and constant action will need to look elsewhere because Texhnolyze is as slow-burn as anime gets. Its plot and themes are contemplative and difficult, unspooling themselves in an ever-winding thread. What contributes most to its avant-garde effect is the unusual detachment from the subject matter.
Conventional anime, whether intentionally or otherwise, push viewers towards feeling a certain way about the events that transpire within. In most series, viewers are meant to praise, adore, hate, or pity the characters. In the underrated science-fiction of Texhnolyze, nothing is spoonfed, and as simple a change as that may seem, the objectivity lends everything an alien feel.
8 Mind Game
An anime film caught somewhere between collage, fever dream, and disco nightmare, Mind Game changes its mind about how it wants to look and what it wants to be roughly every five seconds. It’s a kaleidoscopic patchwork of seemingly every decent artistic idea from the last century.
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What Mind Game isn’t is subtle. Its colors are garish. Its characters scream. Its plot is best likened to the derailing of a train transporting flowers and fireworks. It is, in a word, eccentric. Mind Game is perfect for fans of the visual arts, cinema, and that time in childhood when reality seems negotiable.
7 Cat Soup
Not all surrealist works are avant-garde, and not all avant-garde works are surreal, but Cat Soup happens to be both. Its protagonists are anthropomorphic cats, which should be enough to make the entire experience kawaii, but it isn’t. It’s too violent and unnerving for that. Unlike series known for their memorable quotes, the absence of conventional dialog here only accentuates the feeling of foreboding.
Watching Cat Soup is akin to reading a fable that one knows will end poorly. The avant-garde is by definition the unusual and experimental, and Cat Soup is undoubtedly that. Just don’t be fooled by the cats.
6 Kemonozume
Kemonozume (“Beast Claw”) is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, except Juliet is part of a race of flesh-eating monsters, and Romeo is a martial artist trained to slay those monsters. Here is a series that forces one to reconsider what anime villains look like. This eccentric spin on the classic Shakespearean plot might not be enough by itself for the series to be considered avant-garde, but Kemonozume also boasts a unique art style unlike anything else in anime.
It’s hard to appreciate the impact of its aesthetic without seeing it in motion. The look of Kemonozume is transformative, shaping the series into something truly singular.
5 Tekkonkinkreet
The story of two orphans trying to defend their town from those that wish to destroy and replace it with an amusement park, Tekkonkinkreet somehow manages to feel adult while looking like a children’s book.
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Its style, a mixture of hand-drawn animation and CGI, includes hyper-detailed backgrounds and flowing action sequences that form a visual blend unlike anything else in anime. With a plot involving gangsters, superpowers, and nefarious real estate developers, it’s safe to say that Tekkonkinkreet is comfortable blazing its own trail. If that weren’t enough to recommend it as a unique visual achievement, it was produced by the same studio that created The Animatrix.
4 Paranoia Agent
A rollerblading teenager nicknamed Lil’ Slugger is menacing Tokyo, assaulting random pedestrians. On the surface, Paranoia Agent is a mystery series about the ensuing investigation. Series director Satoshi Kon understood that expectation perfectly, turning viewers’ preconceptions against them at every turn.
The result is one of the most haunting, emotionally effective, and downright bizarre anime in existence. These characters go through hell.Paranoia Agent is surrealism wearing the mask of the familiar. In it, everyday scenes take on a nightmarish quality, where viewers and characters alike feel that the internal logic of the world has somehow slipped away.
3 FLCL
“Weird” is a word that gets thrown around a great deal in discussions of FLCL, and it only takes a split-second to understand why. 12-year-old Naota grows a horn on his head after being hit by the Vespa-riding, intergalactic menace Haruko. Then a robot explodes out of the horn. That’s only episode one.
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Each of FLCL’s three seasons is its own twist on this chaotic premise, but the deranged story is only part of what makes the series so mindbending. From the art to the whiplash tonal shifts, every element of FLCL conspires to disconcert its audience even as it amuses and engages them. Though brief, the series is undeniably one of the most fun anime of its kind, with every new season a revelation.
2 Mononoke
Many beautiful styles of anime illustration exist, but few are as distinct as that of Mononoke. It’s a historical series that looks like a traditional Japanese painting come to life. The actual story it tells – that of a wandering medicine seller who destroys evil spirits – might be similar to that of other anime, but no other series feels quite the way Mononoke does.
As disparate as its plot and thematic elements are, the series is held together by its singular directorial vision. Like many avant-garde works, Mononoke creates an effect that’s hard to describe and almost impossible to capture.
1 Serial Experiments Lain
The boundaries that Serial Experiments Lain pushes are thematic ones. It’s a series that doesn’t necessarily care whether its audience understands it. Confusion is arguably part of the appeal. Calling Serial Experiments Lain an anime about technology is like calling War and Peace a novel about war: it’s that but so much more.
It explores identity, consciousness, the division between the real and the virtual, and a dozen other topics just as deep and difficult. If Serial Experiments Lain is unpalatable to some, it’s for the same reason that it’s beloved by others: it’s weird and tough in the grandest of ways.
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