Anime Street Scene Computer Generated

As we begin to pack up the year that saw comparatively more-normalcy return to Japan after the previous two, we can exhale and begin to focus on the important things: 2023 anime offerings, of course. 2022 in Japanese animation found itself dominated by chainsaws and spies, titans and pirates, and 2023 is set to see the continuation of at least three of these four topics. What else —and why else— will the majority of both casual fans and hardcore watch while waiting for Chainsawman to continue? Read on to find out!

Attack On Titan The Final Season, Part 3

The conclusion to Attack on Titan may well be the most anticipated of any show in the world, not just within the anime realm. While the manga launched in 2009, the anime’s bold and bloody first season about the remnants of humanity fighting mindless humanoid cannibals and the mysteries behind them quickly propelled the series to the world stage in 2013. It instantly became one of those rare anime that non-anime fans would tune in to watch. Those viewers only kept coming back in bigger droves from 2017, where we would start getting yearly instalments of the show, all leading up to the final part of the final season in 2023! 

Demon Slayer: Swordsmith Village Arc

Similarly, Demon Slayer, with its horror-influenced Shonen action and uncommon early 1900s period-piece setting took the globe by storm, partly due to ufotable’s lavish and stylistic animation rendering its many gruesome fights into fantastic spectacles, and in part a worldwide pandemic allowing its movie iteration Infinity Train to steamroll its way to the spot as highest grossing movie in 2020. With the Swordsmith Village Arc being the show’s third TV season after a very consistent first two, there’s no reason to assume people will hop off the train now.

Detective Conan: Kurogane no Submarine

The yearly Detective Conan film offering has solidified into an informal tradition in Japan over the course of the 2010s. Whole hoards of people who don’t watch the never-endingly long-running show about a highschool-turned-boy-detective head to the theater once a year for anime’s biggest-budget mystery spectacle. With Mob Psycho 100 director Yuzuru Tachikawa in the director’s seat, overseas audiences will also want to pay special attention here.

How Do You Live?

There’s no need to explain why Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live? ends up on a list of the most anticipated anime for any year. Being the Studio Ghibli maestro’s first film in 10 years and in all likely-hood his last guarantees a sizable worldwide audience that ranges from established anime fans to families, to even the cinephile crowd.

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Jujutsu Kaisen came out of the Yu Yu Hakusho school of comparatively mature Shonen manga, a space that remained largely vacant since Bleach first fell from grace a decade ago. Getting a picture-perfect anime adaptation by Studio Mappa just two years after its manga debut, the series that makes deep significance out of its own internal logic, won over many with its hard urban action and a cast of characters whose uniquity doesn’t fit any mold. The “Shibuya Incident” arc of the manga season 2 is called the series’ greatest by many. 

Oshi no Ko

Idols, murder, reincarnation, all in a candy-cute package. From the writer of Kaguya-Sama; Love is War, the significantly darker, higher-concept Oshi no Ko manga started turning heads so incredibly quickly upon release, we rushed to put it on our list of series to watch out in 2022. What even we couldn’t guess though— the show would get a 90-minute first episode, launching with a theatrical run before hitting TV screens and streaming services week to week. 

SPYxFAMILY Season 2

While SPYxFAMILY did crawl out of the pages of Shonen Jump, or at least the Jump affiliated online magazine Jump+, nobody assumed this tale of a makeshift family consisting of a spy, an assassin, and an adolescent mind-reader trying to maintain normal daily lives would become one of the biggest shows to come out of 2022. Of course, it helps that the beloved WIT Studio, which handled the first three Attack on Titans, adapted the material, and capitalizing with a Season 2 and a feature film so quickly after the first means fan retention should be close to 100%.

Tokyo Revengers: Christmas Showdown

A time-traveling multi-timeline epic about Japanese youth-gangs with their literally too-cool-for-school embroidered jackets, Tokyo Revengers owes equal debts to traditional Science Fiction and Great Teacher Onizuka. Another in the same realm of urban-action Shonen like Jujutsu Kaisen, the non-Shonen Jump Tokyo Revengers is becoming quite a craze. Selling over 70 millions copies, the manga just wrapped up in November of 2022, but with how big the series grew to be, fans should be able to enjoy anime installments over the next few years.