This review contains spoilers. Lets get one thing straight right off the top here. There is genuinely very little else out there like AnimeGataris. Like most reviewersamateur or professionalI tend to try to keep a sort of detached semiobjective tone when talking about the series I review. I will admit from square one that I do not have the chops to do that with AnimeGataris. Im not sure anyone does. If youre looking for your quick is this good or not? recommendation close this review and go watch this show preferably while knowing as little about it as possible. Its really hard to talk about a series like this for several reasons. For one it spends over half its runtime effectively in disguise pretending to be a referenceheavy comedy about an anime club think a sort of Lucky Star for new 10s and its actually very good at that The first half of AnimeGataris is a rock solid comedy series with no real major problems and fun characters that bounce off of each other super well if you like that kind of thing you will have no problems with episodes 18 of AnimeGataris. It is also not what I am going to spend most of this review talking about because after it sheds that facade the series then spends its remaining five episodes becoming one of the most weird and baldly ambitious pieces of metafiction since Grant Morrisons Animal Man. This series is a ride from end to end. 880https://i.ur.com/nVewxeg.png Where to even start? Ostensibly AnimeGataris thats anime talk incidentally which boy is it ever is the story of Minoa an entry into my favorite genre of anime protagonistpeppy girl with a big heart who is kind of dumband her quest to make friends by refounding her schools anime club. Along the way said club clashes with the student council who seem weirdly hardline about getting it shut down theres a reason for that as it turns out they go to Comiket and the storyline that sets up the shows complete 180 they end up making their own anime short as part of a school project. As an aside said anime short is shown in its entirety in episode 8 and is god awful in the most beautiful way I think Ive ever seen something be deliberately bad. 880https://i.ur.com/dbpUd5Z.png Their short is a hit. So much so that the schools other clubs start coming to them for advice or more specifically anime recommendations. Now that seems innocuous enough right? Well somehow or another its never really explained like all great anime AnimeGataris knows better than to sweat the specifics too much the clubs using anime as inspiration material leads to the boundary between the real world of the show and fiction breaking down. This leads to such things as Minoas friend / bcharacter a track runner getting a pair of robot booster shoes and the martial arts clubs banding together to build a ziggurat they can train on. Its a lot but if the series stopped there wed merely be in PaniPoniDash territory or Excel Saga at most. Way back in the first episode the impetus for Minoa getting into anime in the first place was to find a show from her childhood that shed forgottena pastiche of RahXephon Macross and about a dozen other things most of which I as a comparative neophyte compared to whoever wrote all this have never seenthis finally gets resolved in the 9th and 10th episodes. It turns out that the schools principal also responsible for the student councils hard stance against the anime club is in fact a failed director who directed that very same series. This plot wraps up and you might think that the series is now finally done but then you realize that there are still two more episodes left. And it is at this point that still referring to AnimeGataris as a comedy seems sort of well not quite enough? The final two episodes see the culmination of the reality/fiction boundary breakdown as seemingly the entire cast with the notable exception of Minoa herselfdown to her friends in the anime clubbecome very selfawaredly anime. This might sound on paper kind of funny. And to be fair it sort of is but its also around here that AnimeGataris pulls double duty as the Minoa slowly losing her mind as the world around her crumbles into madness show. Parts of the 11th episode are genuinely unsettling Minoa is being subjected to reality itself failing and everyone she knows lapsing into animeness. Its deeply weird and pretty damn creepy to boot. It doesnt help that when she tries to basically wake her fellow club members up they not only reject her but are outright hostile. 880https://i.ur.com/JuGrY7X.png This turns out to be a plot by one of the club members Aurora who we learn is an escapee from the anime world determined to.change his name because ultimately this series is still trying to be funny. Mostly. Aurora also gives Minoa a pair of glasses that let her see that the world consists entirely of drawings and she screams quite loudly. Comedy 880https://i.ur.com/5DnGwf0.png 880https://i.ur.com/r4K2Set.png Of course because AnimeGataris is an anime and is made by people who are clearly big fans of the medium it understands something very well which is that there is no force in the universe more powerful than a determined high school girl. 880https://i.ur.com/04KMok6.png The final episode consists of Minoa fighting back winning back her friends and dropping a Gurren Lagann reference for good measurebecause not even this show can escape the long shadow of Team Dai Gurren apparently. 880https://i.ur.com/ZlzgFeA.png The series ends with her using a magic beret to rewrite the entire world effectively rebuilding the destroyed fourth wall and placing herself and her friends in a fairly normal slice of life anime. The show ends where it began as we get some recaps of scenes from the first episode now with the characters slightly changed to fit the new reality. This is all a lot to process but it would be meaningless if AnimeGataris wasnt actually compelling. Thankfully it is. Even in the 8 episodes where its pretending to be a normal SOL its a pretty funny one. And after that well as recapped its a wild ride. Its a hard series to really articulate the main good points of because the two major ones are just that its funny and all of the weird metafiction flummoxery. If you find the latter obnoxious of course you probably wont like the series but if you have even a mild tolerance for it its impossible not to recommend. Theres a million little things I cant even begin to mention here as an offhand example: Minoas trackstar friend randomly shows up in scenes at the very start of certain episodes seemingly randomly and doing something quite unrelated to the rest of the episode. It is only by thinking about it for a moment that you realize she is a quite literal running gag. Is it the most meta anime ever made? Quite probably not but for sheer commitment to the bit you really have to hand it to AnimeGataris. There arent too many like this one. 880https://i.ur.com/d4CYdwJ.png