Favorite AMVs of 2022 (#10-#1)

10. Hands – A Unico Tribute
editor: Arthas James
anime: The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, Unico in the Island of Magic
music: Jewel – “Hands”
VPR warning: flashing images

This blog has a habit of going dead for at least a few months every time I finish posting one of these year-end lists. If that’s the case once again, then we’ve got a while ahead of us where this post will be the first one that loads when visitors occasionally stumble in here from only God knows where, meaning this AMV and its embedded YouTube will be the first thing (and sometimes the last!) that any of them see. If anything should happen to me this year, maybe this AMV will have the headlining spot on this URL for as long as Automattic keeps the now archaic and surely unprofitable WordPress.com service up and running. So yeah, I’ve spent the last dozen-plus years here on a futile quest to find the absolute coolest AMVs that I can vicariously attach myself to in perpetuity here, and I’m leaving the door open for that to end in the most fittingly ironic way imaginable.

I started playing guitar again this year. I’m hesitant to bring that up at all because I worry it sounds boastful, yet the sort of self-deprecating addendums I feel compelled to add to such a statement–“no, I actually suck, you don’t want to hear me play, you’d hate it, trust me!”–are possibly even more insufferable to read, so yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. My point is, I’m suddenly drawn to playing trying to play music that I used to want nothing to do with. Maybe there were a lot of reasons for these feelings in the past, but they usually included not meeting a certain standard of coolness that, as the leading teenage authority on in the entire Midwestern United States (a position I held for several years before resigning to take a leadership role in our regional online chapter of the Twentysomethings With Amazing Taste organization), I knew in my heart mattered very, very much. Suddenly realizing that these things aren’t as set in stone as I used to believe has rocked my world to its core. “You Were Meant For Me” is a song I enjoy playing. It’s a good exercise in simple fingerpicking. I guess her lyrics are “sentimental,” a word that always has pejorative implications, but there’s something refreshingly raw and direct and free of the all-knowing worldly artifice that’s now draped over every song that gets a go at the Top 40. “Hands” is even more vulnerable and precious, maybe even pushing the limits of how far that approach could really go in the last days of the pre-Internet world (yet still easily piercing the top ten, albeit for the last time in Jewel’s career). It’s a song I had almost completely forgotten about until this AMV appeared in my feed.

“Hands” (the AMV by Arthas James) is not an impressive technical feat, although I’m confident in saying that it’s exactly as polished and tuned as it needs to be to work on its own terms. It’s somewhat loose in terms of flow but the scene selection here works miracles for me. There are a couple of moments of perfect sync that happen just when they most need to. And there’s a disarming sense of sentimentality flowing through the whole thing that I rarely encounter in most AMVs, unsurprising given that most AMVs are an editor’s attempt to isolate a sense of “cool” in their sources or even to embody it themselves. This video takes me back to a childhood I never had where this cartoon was my favorite thing in the world. To put it mildly, this AMV was an unexpected delight.

9. Same, Sis
editor: CamiChan19
anime: Shugo Chara
music: The Veronicas – “Revolution”

I’ve been “into AMVs” since the very early 2000s but didn’t become any sort of active participant in the hobby until 2008 or 2009. “Same, Sis” feels like a time capsule from that era, maybe for reasons that are super obvious, maybe for others that I was going to go into here in excruciating detail but will hold back on for reasons. Future Me may want to talk about a certain AMV that came out around that time (one that I can’t quite put out of mind while watching this one) and I don’t want to steal all his thunder right now. And just comparing this AMV to different one that CamiChan19 might not have ever seen feels a little rude, for lack of a better word, not to mention that it might imply that this AMV isn’t an original idea that succeeds completely on its own terms.

“Same, Sis” is the antidote to the cynical posturing that now passes for the norm in this hobby. It’s a joyous celebration of that stupid euphoria you can only experience in your tween years. It’s a wholesome sugar rush of an AMV, the kind of naive joy you used to have with this stuff but somehow got inoculated against years ago. It’s a perfectly-synced “fun” AMV in every sense of the word, coming right out of the gate with the sort of intensity that shouldn’t be sustainable but somehow is, reaching new heights and rebuilding its own ceiling when that shouldn’t be possible. There’s a lot of nostalgic appeal here–I shouldn’t even be the audience that can experience that feeling for something like this but here we are–but look, I’ve never seen this anime and have no attachment to it. This AMV just goes. It’s a love letter to the MySpace era and it channels the potential that “simple” AMVs always had to make people like us feel like the deranged freaks we are.

8. Venture
editor: ClaiN
anime: Wings of Honneamise
music: Sea Power – “Want to Be Free”

Unlike the typical Wings of Honneamise AMV, “Venture” contains absolutely zero shots of the instantly-recognizable protagonist or any other characters from the film. There’s the occasional clip here or there where there’s an actual person somewhere in the frame, certainly never shown up close and never onscreen for more than a two or three seconds. Most of the focus of “Venture” is on shots of the film’s climactic rocket launch and scenes of aircraft taking off and in various stages of flight, soaring majestically through the air or tragically plummeting back to earth. This probably sounds incredibly grand and adventurous, and it is! But this is absolutely not the celebration of the joy of flight that I might be making it out to be. Nor is it a “sad” AMV but it is a decidedly somber video from beginning to end, not exactly “tragic,” per se, but far more understated and brewing in complex emotions than the palette of its vivid and dynamic animation tends to be the typical building blocks for. Military otaku of yore likely adored this movie for its detailed renderings of planes and tanks; this visual appeal is no small part of what I loved about this AMV, but I also found the entire experience of it, the gradual ascension away from the violence and chaos of the surface and even the skies themselves, the leaving behind of all of that stuff, to be an unexpectedly profound payoff. If anything, it’s a rebuke of all that “heroic” violence that old audience probably would have loved it for. The last thirty seconds of this video is one of the most understated but fittingly perfect endings to an AMV I’ve ever seen.

7. Vision
editor: vivafringe
anime: various
music: El Búho – “Island of Socotra”
VPR Warning: motion, strobing

As the spiritual cousin of “Sit Around the Fire” and two sibling AMVs that vivafringe all released this year, “Vision” feels like a return to those videos’ themes of nature, existentialist thought and the cycles of life and death. If I’m already losing you here then you’ve obviously never watched one of his AMVs before, and if you’re not up for that, well… how did you find this blog, again? Sure, these are heavy themes to work with in theory, but this is art that you feel and not a manifesto requiring philosophical proofs or answers to the most difficult questions of life. It is also a very different experience from anything that almost anyone outside of a very tiny corner of this hobby commonly recognizes as an AMV in terms of what that can look or sound or feel like. Yes, this is a fan edited music video in every sense of the word, but it’s one that you (yes you, Random AMV Fan, sorry to pick on you here but you knew I was coming back for you, didn’t you?) are just not going to be able to approach on the same terms that you’re used to. That’s just how it is, I’m sorry.

There are a few editors who made multiple AMVs this year that I especially enjoyed and admired, in which case it’s sometimes difficult for me to choose a single work as a favorite that really stood out or personally appealed to me on some deeper level than any of their others. Perhaps I felt this most with the work of vivafringe, and depending on the day I probably could have picked one of four or five of his 2022 edits as a favorite that spoke to me on some subconscious level or just clicked with me in terms of how well its flow synced with whatever was happening in my brain on this day or that. “Vision,” released in early November, had the honor of getting a last crack at me, so maybe there’s some recency bias, or perhaps the sense that it exists as the latest in the editor’s ongoing investigations of life, the universe and everything else, getting us just a little closer to the spiritual sense of closure that we’re all seeking. The opening half of this AMV is vivafringe at his loosest and most relaxing, employing beautiful scene selection that invites the viewer to pause and meditate on soothing visuals that play out with an unhurried pace. The second half of the video takes a very different approach, not just in terms of visual content but pacing and flow as well. AMV editing is not necessarily a binary between those two modes, but “Vision” is a wonderful example of both at work and easily one of this editor’s best creations to date.

6. I got fired so I watched anime, fell asleep, and woke in a new world
editor: Paul Geromini
anime: various
music: The Midnight – “Gloria”

Ideally, I’d like to point out a bunch of small things I like about this video while slowly working my way up to the what it is that I love most about it, but I’m afraid I have to do just the opposite simply to get this mini-review off the ground in the first place: all this works as well as it does because the editor knows these scenes inside and out (sure, as most of us do or come to do through the course of making any AMV) but also because he has a gift for subtle physical comedy that comes through in every scene, always delivering a punchline that’s easy to understand, usually with no dialog at all, and never upstaging the other onscreen characters in the process or coming close to breaking the illusion that he’s so painstakingly crafting here. I can see the temptation to really ham it up to sell these jokes, which are only ever given a few seconds to register before moving on to the next one, but what I love so much about this AMV is how effectively the editor (presumably the person who’s inserted into all of these scenes) only ever does just enough to step out of the would-be motionless presence of an anime background character. Via the simplest of gestures or actions during these often mundane moments, like standing in a crowd or waiting in line at a store check out, the concept of the video is executed with an unexpected subtlety that was the last thing I was expecting from it.

I love the many comedic moments of this AMV, but I found the overall experience to be poignant and oddly emotional in ways that I never saw coming–no, I’m not forgetting about the joke this whole thing closes on–and that I think it’s fair to say very few editors or filmmakers would work towards such ends with a concept like this. Yes, this could all be solely in my own subjective experience of the work, which could be very different form the editor’s intent or any other viewer’s response to watching it. But I do think that “I got fired…” operates in the same space that he was exploring in a previous AMV that also combined anime with his own live action footage, a video that was an unapologetic celebration of daydreaming and escapism, themes explored once again here against the backdrop of, let’s face it, a depressingly relatable fate that I’ve never had to endure but imagine would personally crush me if it ever came to pass. I mean everything I just said with all the gravity that entail but I want to make this much clear: this video is not the downer I’m probably making it sound like, there’s just an unexpectedly bittersweet undercurrent that runs through the whole thing, admittedly buoyed by the emotive song but but also by the scene selection and unexpectedly dry humor of the whole thing. It is hilarious and inspiring and one of the few times that I feel like really seen someone take risks and put themselves out there in a way that this hobby, by design, shields its creators from. This is not my favorite AMV of the year, but it’s one of the very few where there’s not a single element or a single frame that my usually-hyper critical, control freak brain wants to see changed in even the slightest of ways.

5. I Don’t Believe in Titles
editor: Pablo Shoe
anime: various
music: My Chemical Romance – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)”
VPR Warning: flickering images

Composed entirely of storyboards, animatics, and various anime production materials, “I Don’t Believe in Titles” feels like a rebuke of the modern world of AMVs in all its fixation on “better than reality” animation, hyper-stretched out framerates and pointlessly bloated resolutions. This is an AMV that, for much of its runtime, is literally comprised of pencil and ink drawings, to the point of even including a blink-you’ll-miss-it shot of an artist flipping through a sketchbook. Modern anime being what it is, most of this AMV’s shots are digital animation sequences in various incomplete stages of production, all likely originally gleamed from DVD or Blu-ray bonus features before making their way to Sakugabooru. This is an original idea that I’ve never seen attempted before, but I can’t emphasize enough how the effect of watching these scenes torn down to their unpainted bare essentials is so much more fun than the already intriguing concept ever even hints at. Maybe anyone could have tried this and I certainly would have taken notice, but we’re talking Pablo Shoe here. I’m not picking an Editor of the Year, but it’s impossible for me to come up with a short list that doesn’t have his name on it. This was his most unconventional work from last year, but it has the hallmarks of all of his “normal” videos all over it: terrific sync and flow and a real knack always coming through whenever I needed to watch something fun and uplifting.

4. Blood In The Wine
editor: Silent Hero Studios
anime: Princess Mononoke
music: AURORA – “Blood in the Wine”

I’ve had plenty of time to think about how my favorite AMVs from Silent Hero Studios succeed as well as they do or even win me over on a personal level and it’s embarrassing to say but once again I’ve got nothing for you. His editing can be extremely expressive and engaging and while I recognize the techniques he’s using to achieve these goals, I really can’t articulate just how he’s using them better or more effectively than anyone else who’s operating with the same toolbox. “Blood In The Wine” is a rather straightforward action/adventure AMV that presents scenes from its film in a fairly linear fashion. Again, you’ve seen these kind of videos many times: they’re usually enjoyable or moderately successful, as the movie and its gorgeous visuals either do the heavy lifting on their own or have a way of inspiring editors to step up their game to meet the material halfway. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an AMV that captures the grand scale or the spirit of Princess Mononoke quite as well as SHS does here.

Like the best of his work, it’s a masterclass in sync and pacing, stringing the viewer along from one big moment to the next. The Morricone-esque soundtrack adds a timeless feel to this that is a wonderful fit for these scenes. Analyzing this too closely actually kicks the legs out from under my critique: this AMV was a Secret Santa present for another editor who happened to be a fan of the singer of this song, so that’s pretty much the whole explanation behind this combination. I’m still sold on how perfectly the spaghetti western-tinged track lends itself to a mystical feudal Japan setting: maybe music is only ever as “fitting” as an editor can convince you it is, and since I’m left with the impression that this song is an absolutely perfect expression of this film, there’s only one person who’s truly responsible for making that happen. The lyric sync in this achieved with a sense of effortless subtlety, introducing scenes and shots that never feel too on the nose but are specific enough to preserve a constant sense of narrative and meaning in every visual. AMVs like this, which don’t introduce groundbreaking techniques or eye-popping effects, are easy to take for granted. “Blood In The Wine” doesn’t invent anything new, but it’s as ideal of a refinement on the past thirty years of AMVs as you’ll ever encounter.

3. Attack on (Some) Titans – Part 1
editor: Under The Box Productions (Davis 51)
anime: Dinosaur War Izenborg
music: The White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army”
VPR Warning: zooms, flashing images

I realize that editing with a series like this at any point in the last thirty or so years (at least) requires an editor to be in on the joke and aware of the visual absurdity of this material; even the most obsessive Godzilla fan or tokusatsu otaku has to know that Dinosaur War Izenborg, for all its charms that I will not deny, is not exactly a high water mark of the genre. So yeah, I’m absolutely certain that this editor knows how silly this all looks and is leaning into it by choice, because how could he not be? That’s probably where a video like this would begin and end for most AMV editors, but Davis 51 (AKA Under The Box Productions) goes the extra mile and creates… my favorite action AMV of the year.

There’s never a moment in “Attack on (Some) Titans” where I’m not smiling ear to ear. The internal sync in both the animated and live action shots is never less than superbly pulled off. I really can’t say if this video will connect with viewers who love traditional action AMVs without a trace of irony or comedy in them, but since I’m the opposite of that sort of fan, this hooked me from the start and I instantly had a feeling that I would be sitting here five months later trying to think of a way to talk about it without just pointing at all of its best parts (everything from 0:01 to 4:15, I guess) or flashing my Attack of the Super Monsters DVD just because I finally have a reason to. “Seven Nation Army” is now twenty years old and doesn’t need anyone to point out how great it is, but watching this AMV finally broke down the last of the walls inside me that kept me from realizing it’s, like, the best song of this whole worthless century so far. This video is a celebration of animation and filmmaking and easily the biggest and boldest work this editor has ever released. I should learn not to get too excited about AMVs that appear to be promising future sequels, but if “Attack on (Some) Titans” really does get a Part 2, I will be there for it at midnight!

2. Like The Rain
editor: janken
anime: NieA_7
music: Simon & Garfunkel – “Kathy’s Song”

There’s a real sadness at the core of NieA_7 that can be uncomfortably relatable and which inevitably swallows up the goofy humor that first draws viewers in and defines the first half of the series. I have always wanted to see an AMV that “gets” this. I tried to make my own but… well that just didn’t really work out. When I first watched “Like The Rain,” I realized I was watching the NieA_7 AMV that I’d always wanted to see or even make on my own, yet it encompassed so many emotions I’d never considered trying to wring out of such a project. It and also helped me realize why I connected with the series as much as I did years ago. The setting of the story, a desolate small town on the outskirts of the Tokyo suburbs, has never looked and felt as hopeless or isolated as it does here. I’ve watched this series three times over the last twenty years. Maybe I just needed some more distance from my initial impressions of it, or maybe something in my older age has given me a different perspective on the story. I really can’t say for sure. After watching this AMV, I feel like something about its essence is finally clear to me for the first time, which is funny because I’ve been staring it in the face all along.

Growing up in a rural small town that could barely be described as a suburb (though never by anyone from the major city near me or any of its “real suburbs”), I grew up feeling trapped and bored and inferior to everyone else who lived anywhere else but here. It is peculiar how those feelings can follow you into the big city when you’re finally stepping out there on your own for the first time, and how the journey to from your childhood home to that place that was supposed to fulfill you never delivers on its promises, but just asks more and more of you the longer you stick with it. The commute kills you; endless trains or traffic jams suck hours out of your day and where you can never fully be in the moment. The work drains you; tedium you could find anywhere, but a hollowness to the core of the work that you had to go out of your way to experience for yourself. You’re never dressed well enough and you still wouldn’t be “cool” even if you were, but you’re a broke country boy so even that’s nothing but a hypothetical what-if. There’s something there you’re longing for but it’s always going to be just out of reach because most of you is always going to be stuck here. Maybe some people can get out and leave, you even knew some of them back then, but you were never going to be one of them, were you? Of course, by all this “you” I’m still just talking about myself. But maybe you’ve been there. Or maybe you will someday.

Fortunately, I can’t relate to this series’ protagonist when it comes to losing a parent, but that feeling of being rudderless or no longer even knowing what you really want anymore is the sort of thing that hits close to home and is the sort of narrative that we don’t get anymore from anime and probably never will. Even when it was released in 2000, the setting of this anime felt antiquated and completely removed from the optimism of the new century or the excitement of being young and on the cusp of the rest of your life. It is a story about watching the world from the outside in and being too consumed with just scraping by to have anything left you could use to pierce that division except the people around you who you’re just stuck with, an absolutely quaint and unthinkable notion today as we simply take for granted that we can customize our social lives down to the most specified list of needs or wants that we can imagine. (Maybe the fifty-five year old song this AMV is much more fitting for this old world setting and its reflective, listless mood than any song I was imagining would pair with it “so perfectly.”) NieA_7 is about so much more than all of that, I don’t mean to reduce it to a late coming of age story (which we’re always up to our neck in, though never with the sorts of stories we truly need). Yes, it’s currently pulling a 6.86 on MyAnimeList.

“Like The Rain” is one of the simplest videos on this entire list. I can picture it being released twenty years ago on the heels of the series’ initial DVD release and still getting overlooked or even critiqued for not incorporating any of the series’ slapstick comedy or science fiction elements. It is not a complete NieA_7 AMV, but I think it’s one of the realest depictions of late adolescence I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of what I can relate to (whatever stock you’re willing to put in my one-sided perspective), but its honesty concerning such matters is so unglamorous that it’s just not going to excite or flatter most potential viewers. “Like The Rain” sticks to the absolute basics of AMV editing, clearly expressing a theme, emotion and syncing extremely effectively to a song that’s not laying out a rigid blueprint for when and where to cut clips. I love this video. Please settle into something cozy and watch it if you haven’t already. Drink it in attentively and with an uncluttered mind. Unlike a lot of AMVs on this list, it’s simply not going to fight its way through everything else that’s vying for your attention right now. Search high and low, you won’t find much else quite like it.

1. untitled4
editor: Abrogate Need
video: Possessioner
music: gavagai – “untilted4”

There are about ten discernible cuts in this nearly three minute-long edit, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Abrogate Need makes no discernible effort to hook viewers off the bat or indulge the cravings of any “normal” audience with this edit of a mid-90s Japanese computer game, visuals that are decidedly retro in all the best ways yet nothing quite like anything I’ve seen in any AMV old or new (or GMV, in this case). This is an incredibly slow video that’s alienating in its pacing and completely icy in its tone, mostly thanks to the distorted, lo-fi soundtrack that feels poignantly fitting to pair with a game that looks like it’s been lost to time. I keep harping that this video is a slow one, also conveniently omitting the fact that animation in these clips is kept to an absolute minimum even by 90s videogame cutscene standards, but it’s paced with the exact velocity that it needs to ease viewers into its cold and seemingly lonely world. As far as I can tell, this setting is not a ruinous cyberpunk hellscape by any stretch, yet something still feels just a little off about the future world that’s depicted here, and way these scenes unravel gives the viewer plenty of time and subtle cues to lose themself in the mystery of just what that might be. Gazing into these scenes and getting lost in the detail of them is a time-bending experience for me. There is movement in these scenes, actual animations, and the contrast between the stillness in every frame and the elements that do change and move completely transfixes me. It is like a series of paintings, not literally of course, but never before have I felt so prompted to just drink in every nook and cranny of every shot in a way that feels like it’s a series of works all painstakingly crafted to individually draw the viewer in. I’ve watched this video enough to anticipate every cut and every shot, but I’m continuously surprised by how abruptly it unfolds and eventually draws to a conclusion. This editor and his work have taken me to some strange places over the years, but maybe none as strange or unexpected as this. “untitled4” is not his most ambitious effort, and even acknowledging that many of his “experimental” videos have proven to be unexpectedly accessible to an audience bigger than you’d expect, I don’t really expect this AMV to join those ranks. What this video really means to Abrogate Need or will ever mean to anyone else, I have no idea. It just clicked with me and lead me to acknowledge possibilities in this medium I’d never considered (why aren’t more MMVs done in a low-key style like this?). You might feel the same. Or you might experience a reaction so contrary and so powerful that it will prompt you to discover new truths of your own! Find out for yourself.

A complete playlist of my top AMVs of 2022, including the top 20 listed on this blog along with a bonus 20 AMVs that I failed to write entries for, can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3GuT5JoUhP4UD0iYnQN-rxrtG9FYPgK

If you want even more good AMVs from 2022, here are even more that I enjoyed (presented in alphabetical order): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3GuT5JoUhMFaKicoj3xJrw8ks8SU_VU

AMV chronicles #47: Tainted Donuts

I’ve known about this AMV for a really long time.  We’re talking years, here. And I’ve known, more or less, what it was all about and also that it was supposed to be really good and maybe even important. I put off watching it for so long because I hadn’t gotten around to watching Trigun until a few months ago, and I didn’t want my experience of this video to be ruined (or tainted) by spoilers. And to get the most out of it, I’d want to know what I was looking at and understand the context of it all. I think this was a smart move, yet at the same time maybe it’s like someone putting off listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band because they hadn’t yet watched Help!. Maybe that’s an arbitrary comparison but maybe it’s not. For a long time, when critics or music fans of a certain age would discuss the greatest album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s was always part of the conversation. That’s not really the case any more, nor would most Beatles fans even call it the best Beatles album. Likewise, this AMV was a bfd for a long, long time, and hung around the top of the best AMVs list for most of the 2000s. Fewer fans recognize its pioneering status today, but no video can stay trendy and popular forever (find any other fifteen year-old AMV that actually has and prove me wrong).

Of course, utilizing two of the most popular and iconic anime series of all time probably helped ensure its popularity, and it probably would have been well-received if the editor (E-Ko, who disappeared from the hobby over a decade ago) had put in even as little as one-tenth of the effort that they spent on it. But having put in that extra 90% (or 900%, I guess?), the end result is the video we have now and it’s really startling how well it all paid off. Where did I first hear about this video? At a convention panel years ago? “It’s a cool video, it makes Spike and Vash look like they’re really fighting each other!” At that point, those kind of AMVs had already established themselves as a genre in themselves (and, conceptually, have changed very little in the years since) and I couldn’t imagine how yet another one was going to impress me. Rather than watch it and decide for myself, over a very long period of time I went ahead and let my own vision of what this video probably looked like slowly form in my head. I highly recommend doing this with something in your life, as it’s a very humbling experience when you finally give in and see how much the real thing puts your ideal vision to shame.

My first impression of this was one of complete surprise. This wasn’t simply two sources slapped together to to kinda sorta work together, but a video that presented an actual story that was easy to follow,  required almost no suspension of disbelief to accept on its own terms, and was assembled more convincingly than anything else like it that I’ve ever seen. Even when they don’t completely win me over, most AMVs usually like this leave me feeling very impressed by the sheer effort that was spent on their creation. That’s certainly the case here, given the amount of masking that was required to bring the characters from these two series together into one world. And yet, the end product feels so seamless that it somehow feels completely effortless at the same time. I realize that doesn’t make any sense but these are just my impressions and when a video or any piece of art can make you feel comfortable with such contradictions, then you know it’s doing something special.

This AMV has stood the test of time not because it was “innovative” or “ahead of its time,” but because its pioneering use of effects was all the service of bringing a simple story to life. Maybe that could be said of a lot of AMVs, but how many have felt like such a natural extension or cohesion of two different worlds? I won’t attempt to search the archives of fanfiction.net for the depths of Cowboy Bebop/Trigun crossover episode stories, but I’m sure they’re out there. I honestly wonder if any of them at all could possibly bring together both series’ elements of comedy and action into such a perfect balance as “Tainted Donuts” does. This is hardly a bold proclamation; declaring that this video is a classic and twisting a couple of superficial observations into the shape of critical insights tells the average viewer nothing they didn’t already know or would quickly figure out on their own. But even if spilling ink over this AMV only serves to acknowledge its existence, that’s still a post that’s been overdue far too long.

AMV chronicles #44: favorites of 2015

I used to be really into making lists, especially at year’s end when I couldn’t help but join in as all my favorite magazines, websites and (especially) fellow Internet-posters would tally up their favorite music and films of the past twelve months. This was an annual ritual for me that I’d always put a ridiculous amount of preparation into, and the satisfaction of completing a lengthy list that I felt strongly about was, justified or not, a really satisfying sensation. In hindsight, I think this was a big waste of time but realistically I can’t think of anything else I’d have been doing instead that I wouldn’t say the same about. I’ve been busier than ever over the last two years, which has lead to a decline in the efforts that I put into this sort of thing and left me feeling like I’m doomed to become one of those people who gives up trivial stuff he enjoys because of… life? Even more detrimental to my regular list-making impulse was the breakdown of most of the Internet communities that played a huge part in motivating it in the first place. It’s hard to keep a message board going strong for over a decade, but the departure of key members, technical breakdowns and awful moderation (completely cutting off new members is a death sentence for any forum) slowly but surely whittled down my favorite board into a pathetic shell of its former self that signaled the death knell of its usual end-of-year music polls, which had all but become the engine for keeping the board going in the first place. For lack of a better term, general list-fatigue probably wore me out on doing this more than anything else, though.

I’d put the same effort into making lists for movies, but here’s where time and money really became a limiting factor into what I could do. Looking back on 2015, almost every movie I saw in theaters was a big studio release, and our regular trips to the city to see hard-to-find films were all but put on hold. What was my favorite movie of 2015? Inside Out? Star Wars? Those were legitimately good films, but not enough to justify making a list. And putting albums aside — my top 50 is a shaky top 10 this year — putting together my usual singles/songs list didn’t even cross my mind this year. I’ve heard all of two songs on this list and I’m afraid to dig any deeper to see how out of touch I’ve actually become at this point.

My AMV-viewing habits are kind of unusual and help to ensure that I probably miss out on a lot of good stuff every year (which I’m okay with if that means finding it next year or eventually even later). Half the time I spend watching AMVs is re-watching old favorites or digging through old videos of years past for forgotten gems or horrid-yet-fascinating disasters. Still, there were a lot of great videos released this year that I feel compelled to recognize in some way. This isn’t and could never be anything close to the list and commentary compiled by CrackTheSky over on his blog. And due to the effort he put into his list and the overall redundancy of my own selections, I wasn’t sure if there was any point to me posting a list of my own at all. And yet, here it is, not an extensive BEST AMVS OF ALL TIME 2015 manifesto, but a quick review of what I enjoyed most and hopefully a few words about the how and the why of it all. This is only a top ten, and since a short list dominated by a handful of names wouldn’t have been very fun, I’m limiting this to one video per editor. No countdown tension here: these are in alphabetical order because I’d rather get this done quickly than fuss over the order of it.

The Creepening
editor: Chikasole
anime: The Flowers of Evil
song: Jaymes Young – “Two More Minutes”

So yeah, usually I won’t watch a video if it features a title I haven’t already seen. I’m super-paranoid about spoilers when it comes to anything that I have even the mildest interest in eventually watching, and I’m sure this video is full of them. But rules are made to be broken, right? This is probably the coolest video I watched in 2015, which is probably a weird impression to have of something so unabashedly disturbing. I could do without the text — pleasing to the eye as it is — but there’s else nothing I’d want to change about this video. Howard Hawks’ quote about what makes a good movie (“Three good scenes. No bad ones.”) surely applies to this AMV; there’s too many memorable moments to list, which is usually what you get whenever there’s such a perfect synthesis of mood and seemingly effortless sync in every sense of the word.

Death Grips x Serial Experiments Lain AMV
editor: Bry__
anime: Serial Experiments Lain
song: Death Grips – “Hacker”

The continued exponential growth of Youtube has safely ensured that we all have enough videos to watch for a lifetime. This is true even speaking strictly of AMVs, a fact I came to grips with long ago but never understood the importance of until now. Even with a handful of giant channels dominating the site (and sometimes attempting to profit off it), there are still a number of self-contained microscenes with almost no connection to them, not to mention the Org, the convention circuit, or any of the expected hubs of activity in the hobby.  The “candy” AMV scene is probably the most notable of these (try as they may to ape and eclipse some of the best-known AMVs out there), while on the fringe, fans of vaporwave (a genre I feel extremely ambivalent about for reasons I don’t have room to ramble on about here) continue to mine the past for incidental brilliance like it’s still 2011. Occasionally, this takes the form of AMVs, ones which usually revel in repetition, slow-pacing and an aesthetic that’s too complicated to try to explain in a brief blurb like this, but has little to do with mirroring the styles and trends of popular editing.

This AMV (frustratingly untitled, as so many videos seem to be these days) comes from an editor working squarely within that scene, but amps up the effort past the typical aimless drifting or 90s fetishization you’d expect by several orders of magnitude. There’s nothing “vaporwave” about music from a band like Death Grips and Bry__ cuts this video with the pace that you’d probably expect with it. It’s a jarring four-and-a-half minutes that wrings every bit of ominous weirdness out of of Serial Experiments Lain, works it into a rhythmic fit of gltchy footage and anything-goes effects and splatters you right in the face with it. There have been plenty of AMVs that run Lain through the meat grinders of nu-metal or Matrix-club trance, but this is the first rap AMV I’ve seen for the series and it’s also one of the best, period.

Follow My Lead
editor: Koopiskeva
anime: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Baka and Test
song: Girl’s Day – “Female President”

I don’t care how many AMVs you’ve made or what software you’ve mastered in the process, none of that can fully prepare anyone to make something like this. Even with all the care in the world devoted to crafting a set, lighting it, and actually using photography in a video (to say nothing of the tedious work of accurately matching the choreography of the original video to a frightening degree), there was never any guarantee that any of this was even going to work. But the synthesis of live action with animated clips feels completely natural, integrated so smoothly that you’ve got to wonder if viewers might’ve overlooked it altogether (anyone who still needs convincing or craves a different experience should check out the all-dance version of the video). At this point, it was hard to imagine how an editor like Koopiskeva — wait, are there any others? — might return after such a long hiatus. He may not have topped himself here, but pulling off something as completely unexpected as this may have been an even bigger challenge with an even bigger reward: a rare AMV with no true precedent and a completely unique viewing experience.

Get Better
editor: CrackTheSky
anime: The Tatami Galaxy
song: Bleachers – “Get Better”

Honestly, Victims of the Night was my favorite CrackTheSky AMV of last year and I was looking forward to writing about it here. Tragically, it seems to have been removed from Youtube, or at least blocked in our part of the world, so I’m posting the also-amazing Get Better here in its place. But I’ll mention Victims of the Night anyway because I have a real anecdote that I wanted to share and I don’t want it to go to waste! We saw the video as part of the AMV contest at Anime Central, and although it didn’t win, it elicited the most enthusiastic response from the audience, surely none of whom showed up expecting to watch a Kimagure Orange Road video. On the ride home that night, my girlfriend commented out of the blue about how much she’d enjoyed it, despite having zero familiarity with the anime or even the song. One of the first videos to use “Shut Up and Dance” (preceding dozens or perhaps hundreds of others, all of which have been removed from Youtube save for those featuring cover versions of the song or the most grotesquely pitch-shifted versions of the original you could possibly imagine), Victims of the Night was definitely “old school” but felt every bit as vibrant as any brand new 1080p dance video. I know that reads like blurb hyperbole but I assure you it is not.

Having actually seen The Tatami Galaxy and knowing its story and themes, Get Better presented itself to me with meanings and a familiarity that I can’t bring to Victims of the Night, so fairly comparing the two is kind of impossible for me right now. Get Better isn’t necessarily better or worse but it feels staggeringly bigger, not simply in the sense of using a newer and more vibrant-looking source, but in how it pairs the anime and the song together to tell a story, deliver a lighthearted but sincerely hopeful message and invoke a genuinely cathartic response. So yeah, the lyric sync in this AMV is some of the best I’ve seen in a while, and the internal sync brings the whole thing to life in a way that elevates it beyond there mere act of pairing an anime with a suitable song and hitting all the beats.

It’s hard enough edit a single AMV that’s really great; only a couple of editors were able to do that more than once last year (PieandBeer, UnluckyArtist, Copycat Revolver, to name a few). As prolific and consistently great as those editors were (and still are!), I feel like the half-dozen (or so) AMVs released by CrackTheSky over the last twelve months represented a prodigious creative tear that was on a whole other level. I haven’t seen all of the videos he made before 2015 (there are quite a few!) but those I have seen are very good. Still, what he did last year amounted to the kind of big leap that you can count yourself lucky to witness up-close if you ever get the chance.

I’m Alive!
editor: Hirou Keimou
anime: Your Lie in April
song: Magic Man – “Texas”

I started writing a blog entry on Your Lie in April a few months ago, and I doubt I’ll ever finish it because it’s really gotten out of control and I don’t think I can rein it back in at this point. I’d love it if I could just talk about the series itself but instead I keep trying to talk about how it made me feel and why I related to it and why it is that I might feel that way and whether that’s a good or a bad thing and whether or not that matters… I don’t remember where I left off at this point but unless I have a burst of inspiration coupled with a temporary block in whatever self-consciousness is (probably wisely) holding me back, it’s probably never going to get posted.

One issue I keep digging into is the angst and tribulation experienced by the main characters, and how a viewer could “enjoy” watching such a depiction. Even if there’s an appetite for empathy at work here, I hesitate to bring that up as a valid emotional response to the series because I feel like it risks cheapening the emotional impact of the story. Sometimes feeling bad for someone else (in fiction, ideally) actually feels good! I’ve done a horrible job of explaining this in a few sentences, but what it boils down to is that I’d usually prefer watching a story about people in distress than one that’s all about comfort and happiness, so obviously this sort of thing is my bag, baby.

So it’s funny how this AMV emphasizes the happiness and fulfillment experienced by the characters, and has really made me call into question whether or not that was the whole point of the series in the first place. I’m Alive! does not turn the whole series on its head or put any kind of “positive” spin on its events. It’s simply optimistic and hopeful and, while not omitting the conflicts in the story, captures the series at its most joyful. This shouldn’t seem like such a radically unexpected move, and maybe it isn’t at all, but it’s so different from my personal perspective that it feels like a revelation.

Knucklehead McSpazatron
editor: Nellogs
anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion
song: Two Door Cinema Club – “Undercover Martyn”

This video still feels very new to me, but I have a feeling that I’ll still be watching it years from now. Lord only knows how many Evangelion AMVs I’ve seen at this point. Even some of my favorites have been derivative. It’s all been done! Or so I thought before I watched this. No one is ever going to ask me what anime music videos are or ask me to show them one as an example, but if they did, this would probably be the one I’d reach for (pray this never actually happens, it would inevitably turn out really weird for both us). Heck, will someone who knows what they’re doing just embed this at the top of this entry?  We need to reclaim achievements like this as a universal reminder of what this medium can accomplish.

Magical Morphin Power Rangers
editor: UnluckyArtist
anime: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
song: Ron Wasserman – “Go, Go Power Rangers”

“Parody” has never been my favorite AMV genre, but who doesn’t love a well-done movie trailer or television opening? This video not only succeeds by nailing a source combo that’s instantly recognizable, but is expertly-crafted to make a seamless product that’s convincing enough to stand on its own.

Neapolitan
editor: Copycat_Revolver
anime: various
song: Spoon – “Don’t You Evah”

You’re on your own with this one. What does it all mean? That’s up to you to decide.

Oneiro
editor: PieandBeer
anime: Paprika
song: Beck – “Dreams”

No AMV on this list grew on me over time quite like this one, which I certainly enjoyed the first time I watched it but didn’t give much credit to. Paprika is a movie with so many cool scenes and I’ve seen it featured in a few AMVs that played out like simple compilations of its most psychedelic and twisted visuals. That’s cool and everything, but never leaves much an impression on me. In the hands of a lesser editor, maybe that’s the kind of video Oneiro would have been, but PieandBeer syncs nearly every shot in a way that’s purposeful in hooking the viewer and bringing the film and the song into a synthesis that feels like it was meant to be. This was the first time I heard “Dreams” and now I can’t ever listen to the song without thinking about this AMV (as a bonus, PieandBeer’s audio edit shaves the song down to its most essential parts; even the radio edit of this song goes on for a minute too long). Paprika isn’t an old movie, but it’s refreshing to see someone pluck it out of the “old” sources pile and really do something exciting with it.

Paper Farewell
editor: shumira_chan
anime: Video Girl Ai
song: A-Ha – “Take on Me”

It only took a few seconds of cutting through those comic book manga pages in the opening of this AMV for me to get goosebumps, but I’ve always adored this song’s original music video. This isn’t a remake of that video but a reimagining of sorts using clips from Video Girl Ai. I haven’t seen that anime and although I know it was something of a big deal when it was made, I can only presume that its true purpose was to eventually end up in this AMV because shumira_chan fits it into “Take on Me”‘s narrative so naturally. With an iconic early-90s anime and probably the essential 80s song, brought together into an AMV that resembles a lost early-2000s classic (all aged in the best possible way), this AMV is a nostalgia bomb that crosses generations and will leave you wondering when it was actually made. This isn’t a novelty, though, but one of several videos released last year by a very talented editor that I hope gives us even more to watch in 2016. edit: I now see that this video is not from 2015 and is actually at least 5 years old. Oops!