2014 Winter Anime Season Preview Picks

Welcome back to my picks for the Winter 2013/2014 anime season; just note that there are plenty of anime carrying over to this season including Kill La Kill, Samurai Flamenco and Hajime No Ippo: Rising.

This means that this season might be a bit lacking when it comes to newer titles, nonetheless I have come to provide my five picks for this season.

Also please note that Pupa, one of my picks for my last season, will be airing this season as well, so it might be worth looking out for that. Now with that out the way, let’s get started:

Space Dandy

This has had plenty of teaser promotion for a while, due to its announcement back at October’s Otakon in the US, Shinichiro Watanabe (director of Cowboy Bebop and Kids On The Slope) returns to work with Studio Bones in making this original Sci-Fi comedy – Space Dandy.

Space Dandy is considered one of the most ambitious shows to air this season and with such a wide range of big staff names including Dai Sato and Yoshiyuki Ito, it’s hard not to be excited for this – even I’m really looking forward to it, greatly.

Trailers look great and the music video for the opening has some funky beats; it’s catchy as hell. If there’s one show to check out this season, make it Space Dandy.

Silver Spoon S2

Silver Spoon was one of my Summer Season picks and I’m really happy that it was as it turned out to be a pleasant and funny show on agriculture.

Since the anime has taken a short season break, I’m hoping that it will continue its character building; all the characters are likeable and it does a great job of introducing and even educating us on various agriculture activities in the school.

Again, Sliver Spoon isn’t for everyone but I’m hoping that it continues to be a great Slice-Of-Life show.

Nobunaga the Fool

Back to new original anime for this season and it’s really hard to ignore the awesome promotional poster for Satelight’s new mecha show: Nobunaga The Fool.

That’s all I can say really at this stage; the poster is enough to get me excited and it’s also interesting to see western historical names like Jeanne d’Arc and Leonardo da Vinci in this. It will be fascinating to see how they play into the plot.

Hidekazu Sato is at the helm as director (he’s worked on almost all the Slayer anime series) and the show will be animated by Satelight (Bodacious Space Pirates, Genesis of Aquarion). I just hope this will be the best mecha fix for me this season.

Noragami

This will be the second anime series from Bones this season and will be airing alongside Space Dandy.

Noragami has me excited for quite a few reasons. Sure, the synopsis might sound like a generic shounen supernatural series, but I said that about a Bones offering last year, Blast Of Tempest, and that turned out surprisingly great.

This is Koutarou Tamura’s first anime series as a director but he has worked on other recent anime series from Bones, including Blast Of Tempest. Another staff highlight is the music, which will be done by Taku Iwasaki who has worked on the great Gatchaman Crowd and C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control soundtracks recently.

So there might be enough here to make Noragami one of the best shows of the season.

Nisekoi

My wild card is a harem manga which is being adapted by one my favourite studios – Shaft – into animated form but I’m being a bit more cautious with Nisekoi. The last non-sequel adaptation Shaft made was Sasami-san@Ganbaranai which was a really big disappointment in my view. Still, the great second season of Monogatari still gives me hope that this show will at least be entertaining.

Again, it will be directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and with no promotional videos out for it, I’ll be interested to see how Shaft animate Nisekoi. Will they go with their usual crazy animation style, or go for more of an action style, as they did with Sasami-san?

Hopefully Nisekoi will be more interesting and fun than other harem shows I’ve watched recently at least.