2023 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (10 – 1)

10. Karmelin – DOUBLE DUTY

Anime: Patlabor 2: The Movie
Song: “DOUBLE DUTY” by Karmelin

Nothing much happens in this video. If you discern any kind of drama or plot, it’s probably entirely from your own imagination — but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that other viewers’ brains are being tricked into thinking that there’s more going on in this video than the scene selection lets on. Karmelin plays with framing in this video — literally creating borders at odd angles to either obscure areas of the screen, or to superimpose other scenes from the movie. The result is something that is visually absorbing at every turn — as your brain starts to tune itself to this unique presentation, you begin to drink in the often complex interplays between foreground and background, appreciating the beauty in the asymmetrical slices that highlight the most interesting bits of a scene, or even partially conceal them, only sparking your curiosity further. By the time Karmelin starts introducing unaltered scenes from the movie with no interposed framing whatsoever, you are so used to the white borders and split-screen effects that your eyeballs immediately notice the negative space in these unchanged scenes, and you snap to analyzing the visual composition, understanding it on a deeper level and recognizing its beauty in a way that you probably never would have before. This video actually teaches you how to look at art differently.

All this is backed, as usual, by one of Karmelin’s own creations, a downtempo trip hop-adjacent track that imparts no tension or drama, but only the faint tint of sleepy nostalgia. It’s the perfect soundtrack to show off this movie’s absolutely stunning animation and wintry atmosphere — the city feels frozen and silent as we get our bespoke tour through it. Every piece of this video fits together like a puzzle — oftentimes that sensation is very literal — and it’s both calming and eye-opening, a mix that maybe only this editor could pull off so naturally.

2023 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (20 – 11)

20. dylann – things I have written down

Anime: Various
Song: Various

CW: Flashes, glitch & color effects

Sometimes, I struggle to accept the fact that there is an entire wave of AMV editors coming up behind me who are so divorced from my point of view on the hobby that watching their work sometimes feels like viewing art made by alien beings. I’m starting to embody all the Grandpa Simpson memes and while these days I am losing touch with entire subcultures-within-subcultures, every so often something pops up from this foreign space that resembles, even if in an abstract way, the things that I have come to look for and love within the hobby.

I need to preface the rest of this write-up by acknowledging that, yes, parts of this video (which is really a collection of four unfinished projects by this editor) are loaded with the effects presets that plague a lot of this part of AMV YouTube, and which often act as an instant turn-off and barrier to entry for me and many others who don’t move in these editing circles. Nevertheless, there’s something extraordinarily intriguing about these particular failed — or at least incomplete — experiments, even moreso when viewed together in the way they’re presented here, as if they were all part of a complete whole. There’s at least one neat little lyrical bridge that connects two of the pieces together and perhaps, if you look hard enough, some thematic arcs that bend across them all, but even if you take these as individual snippets, there’s an exhilarating creativity to the aesthetics being explored here — stuttery framerates and custom depth-of-field blurs give the Kare Kano section a striking, quiet intimacy, while the next section explodes all that into a monochrome blueprint motif that I really want to see expanded into a fully finished work. Every one of these scraps has its own distinct look and feel, but it’s not hard to see the similarities and feel like they naturally fit together into a unified work approaching something like cohesion.

Whether that was intended by the editor, I don’t know, but there are so many little emotional outbursts and fragments of feeling that fly around and through this video, and it all works together to suggest that maybe I need to pump the brakes on my knee-jerk reaction to anything made by an editor I’ve never heard of who has over 5,000 subscribers on YouTube — indicative as that seems to be of a style that I usually find immediately off-putting. Things I have written down is a fascinating peak into this whole other world of AMV editing, one I’m not likely to go all-in on anytime soon, but which I can maybe admit I’m more open to exploring in good faith after having experienced this.

2023 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (30 – 21)

30. Leafa – Jadeite

Anime: Various
Song: “Lost (feat. Chelsea Jade)” by Jai Wolf

Jadeite is a video that I could easily criticize for being too trite, for exploring territory too well-trod, or for stuffing itself full of hands-and-faces scenes that overdramatize everything in what I would normally call a cheap way. However — and I can’t emphasize this enough — this video is beautiful. Like, just super aesthetically pleasing — and not just from an animation perspective, either (although that’s certainly where it begins). It’s all stitched together in a way that undermines any criticism one could have about the content of the chosen scenes, creating something close to a continual, visually satisfying rhythm of every dramatic cliché to be found in the medium, its straight-faced approach only solidifying the emotion latent in this video into something that bowls me over in spite of my gut-level resistance to this style of editing. Is it saying anything of substance? Probably not, but who cares? Not every video has to make some grand statement and this is a lesson I’m repeatedly re-learning every year, whenever I make these lists. Sometimes it’s okay to just like a pretty thing because it’s pretty and not feel like I have to defend enjoying the dopamine.

Yeesh, that’s a lot of words to say, “I shouldn’t like this, but I do”, but it’s inevitable that a video like this worms its way on to my list every year, and for whatever reason I feel the need to preempt the comments that never come about this supposed inconsistency. This is a great video, and that’s all there is to it.

2023 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (40 – 31)

40. Lux – Tokyo

Anime: Oniichan wa Oshimai!
Song: “Tokyo” by Leat’eq

For some of you, this AMV may demonstrate how thin the line can be between “cute” and “irritating”, I get it — but I bought into this one from the get-go. Moe is not exactly my go-to anime genre (I say as if I haven’t gone way longer than I’m comfortable admitting here without actually watching any anime at all) but I found this video to be pretty irresistible, helped in no small part by Lux’s feverish editing, which manages to keep pace with the borderline-hyperactive song — it’s full of jump cuts and little scraps of internal sync that glue your brain and eyeballs to the screen from the moment you hit play. I think my favorite part of this video, though, is that in spite of its cute-terrier energy, it still radiates this wonderful warmth that manages to smother me in a happy haze — maybe it’s the pastel-colored animation that is doing all the work there, but I also appreciate just how well Lux leans into the anime’s intrinsic softness and delivers something that, when all is said and done, just makes me smile.

2023 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (50 – 41)

Here begins my Top 50 — these are my favorite AMVs from 2023! I want to once again urge you to at least skim through the ineligible videos list from a couple days ago, in case you missed or skipped it, because a certain video that a lot of people might be expecting to be on here is actually on there. I also, as usual, want to encourage you to seriously check on the Honorable Mentions posted yesterday, in case you haven’t already, because this was a very good year for AMVs and a Top 50 just isn’t big enough to encompass everything worth talking about. Neither does the additional 20 Honorable Mention slots, if I’m being honest, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Finally, I just want to reiterate that this list and these rankings are mine and mine alone! Don’t take this too seriously and we’ll all have a great time! And if you just haven’t gotten enough great AMVs after this is done, check out the intro text in the Honorable Mentions post for several other AMV countdowns/lists from other members in the community that you can enjoy!

Alright, here we go! Enjoy everyone!

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50. Rex Et Astra – Intermezzo Sinfonico

Anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Song: “Intermezzo Sinfonico” by Vicente Moreno

My saturation point for Evangelion videos — a point I never really thought I’d reach — probably came a couple years ago. When you regularly watch AMVs for the better part of two decades, it’s an inevitability that this will happen, make no mistake. Nevertheless, I’m always secretly hoping that, at least once a year, I’ll find some fresh take on the source, an anime that is near and dear to my heart. This year, the video that came closest was Intermezzo Sinfonico, an AMV that truthfully doesn’t do stuff that I haven’t seen before, but which presents it all in such an emotionally engaging way that it took me back to some of my more poignant moments of experiencing the anime for the first time. Backed by a slow-burn orchestral piece, the video moves through the anime’s biggest emotional sweeps, not bothering so much with setting context as with presenting you with the raw emotions of each moment, recalling for me both the confusion I often felt the first time I watched Evangelion, along with the undeniable, gut-level emotional response that would manifest in spite of my lack of understanding. The delicacy of the music does little to blunt some of this AMV’s harsher, more visceral moments, instead only underscoring how brutal, tragic, and broken the anime’s characters are. It’s a fascinating study in contrasts, and one that I’m happy to add to my now very large collection of great Evangelion videos.