2022 in retrospect: top 30 amvs (10 – 1)

10. SilkAMV – T.A.P.P.

Anime: Magical Witch Punie-chan
Song: “LORD” by Smokey Robotic

Look, people, what do you want from me? A three-paragraph commentary breaking down how an AMV whose title is an acronym for “There’s A Poop Part” made me feel and how it relates to the current AMV zeitgeist? I know Silk is reading these words and nodding his head vigorously, but I’m sorry, it’s not gonna happen. This video is on here because it kicks ass, because it’s twisted and goofy and over-the-top in all the ways most action editing simply isn’t, because it makes me laugh — and when I’m not laughing, it etches a sly grin on my face until the next time I do. It has the feeling of a total hidden gem, despite being created by a decently popular editor — maybe it’s the niche anime choice (an anime that has precious few AMVs to its name, at least on the .org) driving this feeling, but the comparatively low view count on YouTube is probably to blame, as well. I’m doing my part here, man!

I was actually somewhat surprised to see this editor mention in a Discord comment that he hated working with this source, lacking as it is in the sakuga-style clips that he tends to be more comfortable with, and on rewatching this I can see what he means — Silk adds all sorts of clever, simple editing tricks to give the often static scenes much more movement and dynamism, as in the opening scenes with the glitchy rewind cuts, the hilarious lip sync throughout, or abundant use of jump cuts and zooms at every other turn. The deft use of these techniques does help the visual energy to match with the song’s own intensity, and there’s never a point where the two feel mismatched or out-of-sync. Of course, in the end it’s the absurdist visuals and incredible lyric sync that make this video maybe THE definitive chaotic neutral AMV, and push its entertainment value above and beyond.

Oh look, we made it to the third paragraph, what do you know. I guess I had more to say than I thought — but then again, perhaps it’s not so surprising. T.A.P.P. kinda perfectly embodies a lot of the energy that I was craving this year — stupid, mindless fun that doesn’t require any kind of emotional engagement and features a lot of broken limbs. Uh, you can ignore that last part, and in any case I have to…go…

In the meantime, you go ahead and hit play, and don’t let the acronym put you off — but also realize it’s there for good reason.

2022 in retrospect: top 30 amvs (20 – 11)

20. Edit Station – Untitled Rush

Anime: Various
Song: “Untitled” by ev.exi

No, this AMV is not the kind of thing I can indulge in too often — like getting blasted at a party you crashed, making a habit of watching these AMVs that make heavy or exclusive use of anime opening/ending footage is probably unhealthy on some level, and it certainly bears insistence for the editors reading this that relying on this kind of hyper-stylized footage to pretty up your AMVs will instill bad habits that can be hard to break later. That said, there’s something absolutely thrilling about this kind of stuff when you take it in moderation. Edit Station handles this all like a complete pro, wrangling fist-pumping moments of internal sync every few seconds, whipping us from one energy ball of motion and color to the next, completely disregarding any attempt at trying to find too much that ties these scenes together.

It doesn’t matter. There’s so much going on in any single frame here that your brain creates connections out of thin air and convinces you after the fact that, yeah, that cut right there made complete sense, don’t question it. It’s pure, undistilled rush — a color-blasted, deafening rager where every part of you except your brain is invited. Let it stay home and ask the important, existential questions about meaning and purpose; it’d just get in the way here, trust me.

2022 in retrospect: top 30 amvs (30 – 21)

Today starts the ranked countdown of my 30 favorite AMVs from 2022. As a reminder, this post and the following two (which will be posted over the next two days) will contain 10 AMVs each, and there will be no Editor of the Year award, like there has been in previous years (if you skipped the Honorable Mentions post, take a gander at the introductory text there to understand why). Also, to reiterate — these are my favorites, and the only standard by which I judge them is my own taste. Hopefully these write-ups will do a good job at explaining why I feel the way I do, but as usual, nothing I say here should be taken as gospel. Each person reading this will certainly not like everything shared here, and that’s okay!

Also, at the end of the final post, I will, as usual, provide a link to a spreadsheet showing all 70 videos that I sorted through to get to this final list of 30 (plus the 15 Honorable Mentions from yesterday), in case you just haven’t had enough AMVs by that point.

Alright, enough babbling, let’s get going. Thanks for checking this out, and I hope you enjoy!

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30. Bauzi – 21st Century Metropolis

Anime: Various
Song: “Cirrus” by Bonobo

The city as a setting — even more, as a kind of manufactured, living organism — is a concept that has always fascinated me. Living near Chicago, I love going downtown and getting lost in its mind-bending complexity — there’s a mental stimulation that it provides to me that nothing else can. It’s an ever-shifting, unsolvable puzzle that is simultaneously alluring and repulsive, a bizarre amalgamation of organic lifeblood and mechanistic automation. I am captivated by these contradictions.

It’s probably no surprise then that 21st Century Metropolis is the kind of AMV I would latch onto with hardly a second thought. Bauzi puts the suffocating claustrophobia and churning, seething character of modern urbanism on full display, draping everything in a monochromatic, machine-blue sheen, flattening out all the wildly different animation styles into a single, all-encompassing uniformity. Meanwhile, the dizzyingly intricate arrangements of steel and concrete are put front-and-center — if people are shown, they are only ever portrayed as completely insignificant, subservient to the inhalations and exhalations of the metropolis’s inscrutable nervous system of power lines, sewer systems, and transportation arteries. The city doesn’t care about the individual — you are now one of millions in a setting where your staying or leaving, living or dying is completely immaterial to its continued, inevitable expansion. 21st Century Metropolis is a cold, artificial AMV, but that’s kind of the point. If you don’t get it, go watch a Mushishi video or something.

2022 in retrospect: top 30 amvs (honorable mentions)

Hello everybody, and welcome to my yearly look back at my favorite AMVs of the past 12 months! Normally I would take this opportunity to talk a little bit about things I’ve noticed in the AMV hobby over the past year — trends, themes, that kind of thing — but I’m going to forgo that this time and just kick this off by addressing the elephant in the room: last year, I had said that it was extremely likely that there would be no AMV list this year, what with my being a new father and having an eight-month-old kid to think about right now…and yet, here we are.

It’s true, I did not think I would be doing this at all until very, very recently — it wasn’t until about a month ago that I decided otherwise. Besides having less free time than I normally do, to be very frank, I hadn’t really watched many AMVs this year — at all. I will dive into this a bit more in a write-up that will be appearing in the following days, but until December of this last year I had watched embarrassingly few AMVs from 2022. As the end of November rolled around, it started to feel really weird to think that I wouldn’t be doing a retrospective this year. That kind of dug under my skin, and I decided that, in fact, I would try to make something happen here by hook or by crook.

2022 in retrospect: introduction

Hello everyone! Happy New Year! I hope your 2023 is off to a good enough start (I mean, we’re only 0.2% of the way through the year — yes I did the math — so there’s plenty of time for that to change, in either direction!). This last year was kind of a blur, dominated by the one single event that happened on April 23, which changed my life forever — the birth of my firstborn son! If you are a regular reader of this blog (or, you know, a personal friend) then you already know this — you may remember me mentioning this in last year’s Retrospective intro post, or this one, in which I said I probably wasn’t going to be doing this kind of thing again this year.