2021 in retrospect: top 50 amvs (30 – 21)

30. UnluckyArtist – Starlighter

Anime: Urusei Yatsura
Song: “Levitating” by Dua Lipa

If the title of this video is ringing a distant bell, that’s probably because you’re remembering UnluckyArtist’s Moonlighter from 2018, a video I really liked and put on my list for that year. And if you also liked that video, then something tells me you’ll enjoy Starlighter just as much — edited in much the same style, with little more than a handful of geometric wipe transitions (a stylistic callback to Moonlighter) and no other effects to speak of, the editing in this video is distinctly not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this editor’s work, but then again, all of my favorite videos from UA have been of the simpler, more down-to-earth variety. Starlighter feels like something out of a different decade, and not just because of the old (but stunningly gorgeous) anime — it’s in the looser editing, the carefree use of the aforementioned transitions, the feeling that this wasn’t made to impress anybody, but rather because it was just fun to make. I live for videos like this, where we get a glimpse into the editor’s passions and experience firsthand what brings them joy. Starlighter is exactly that, and when it plays I straight-up don’t want it to end.

29. seasons – I watched it, and it’s fine.

Anime: Alien Nine
Song: “Giallo” by Signaldrift

For me, seasons releasing a video is an event. As hopefully this list has and will continue to demonstrate, editors are finding new ways to bend the hobby into exciting and fascinating shapes, even when they are not pushing any well-established technical boundaries. But every time seasons releases a video (excluding his jokier ones), he explores corners of the hobby that few other editors seem to be interested in. None of his AMVs are really comparable to much else out there — even the editors that are exploring the same ambient/drone musical space as seasons are taking a different approach.

I watched it, and it’s fine continues seasons’ propensity for mystery and haze — the video remains at half-opacity for most of its runtime, and rarely deviates from a repetitive fade-in, fade-out motif. Its stuttery, slowed-down framerate accentuates the feeling that reality and dream are weirdly intertwined, and while calling this video “meditative” might come across as a bit cliché, I’m really struggling to think of a better adjective. I love the way the overlays near the end morph and blur and the boundaries between scenes become completely nonexistent. I love how the fade-ins and fade-outs are uneven, with the fade-outs usually quicker, synced to the song’s high notes — every scene feels like you’re about to surface from the beneath the ocean, only to be dragged back down again to suffocating depths by some unknown force. I even love the video’s title, which, besides being an explicit reference to the video upload process on a-m-v.org, seems to reassure the viewer that yes, this video is, in fact, supposed to look this way, and that you should check your rules about what an AMV “should” be at the door. It all just makes me wonder, though — where will seasons go next?

28. Shade the Novice – Right Click, Loop

Anime: FLCL
Song: “Stage 1 – Silver Surfer” by VinylCheese

One of the overriding themes of the videos that I tended to gravitate towards this year, as I mentioned in the intro post, was editors finding ways to push the boundaries of the medium. More often than not this was not realized through editors getting more technically savvy; instead, I was increasingly surprised and delighted to find editors thinking outside the box in ways that were themselves incredibly creative. Probably the cheekiest example of this from 2021 was Right Click, Loop, a video that to anyone not paying attention might just come off as a short, simple, fun little AMV that nevertheless feels incomplete. Of course, the instructions are in the title — right click on the video in YouTube, click “Loop”, and enjoy this never-ending barrage of goofy action and clever internal sync for all eternity.

Seriously, for such a simple concept, Shade chose the perfect song and anime — both as a pair and as individual pieces — to execute it. FLCL is only six episodes and so feels right at home in this more limited editing space, and the 8-bit video game music was made to be looped anyway. Together they complement each other in some obvious ways that Shade explores in his actual editing and scene selection, and I love how he brings everything back full circle by the video’s “end” — you might not even notice it if you’re not paying attention. The video feels like a completely self-contained piece that has no start and no end, and is completely unlike any other AMV I’ve seen. Just make sure that every time you fire this one up, you watch through it at least twice — otherwise, you’re doing it wrong.

27. TRUTH CRAB – Polymer

Anime: Voltage Fighter Gowacaizer
Song: “Polymer” by ALEPH

Look, I’m not about to tell you what to do, but if you’re not already subscribed to TRUTH CRAB’s channel, you’re missing out not only on a literal treasure trove of videos (this is not in any way an exaggeration, and if anything it’s an understatement — as of this writing he has over 800 videos uploaded in the last two and a half years), but you’re missing out on videos that use anime that nobody else in the entirety of the AMV editing community is using. Watching a TRUTH CRAB video is a practically guaranteed good time if only because you get to experience footage you’ve likely never seen in an AMV before, and may never see used again. Luckily, TRUTH CRAB has the editing chops to make these videos stand on their own, too.

Polymer is an action video that uses a wonky, glitched-out future garage track that most editors would probably approach very differently than TRUTH CRAB does here — there’s plenty of sync, make no mistake, but it’s not always where you expect, and a lot of the song’s most intense passages are allowed to pass by without getting the editing treatment your beat sync-addicted brain might crave. But this is all intentional — the crooked style just makes those moments that do align — and there are plenty — hit really, really hard. It’s a video that is so interesting because you never know where it will go from one second to the next, but it still manages to feel meticulously planned, with nothing out of place. I can’t help but think that TRUTH CRAB is on to something with this approach, but damned if I know how to replicate it. He’s a master at this lopsided editing, and even if it doesn’t strike the same chord with you that it does with me, at least you’ll be able to say you watched squints at monitor a Voltage…Fighter…Gowacaizer AMV in 2022.

26. vivafringe – Liquid Ditty

Anime: Various
Song: “Triptrap” by Symbolico

CW: Rapidly flashing scenes

Last year I put vivafringe’s Divine Moments of Anime at #25 on my list, but truth be told I didn’t expect many people to watch it — it’s a video that’s over 10 minutes long, and in today’s AMV culture it seems to be asking a lot for people to put up with such a time investment (although, paradoxically, there are apparently some niche videos bucking this trend, though it remains to be seen if this is just a weird anomaly in the wider context of the medium). If you find yourself in that camp, I would suggest that Liquid Ditty might get you the same kind of weird, psychedelic fix that viva pulled off so well in 2020, but this year he managed the feat in only half the time.

Yeah, this is an absolutely trippy video that, much like Divine Moments of Anime, relies on a lot of fantastically weird animation to do most of the work, but this isn’t to make any less of the end result — a video that morphs and melts and reconfigures itself into amorphous shapes at a constant clip. Viva chooses scene after scene centered around water, and they serve as the connective tissue between animation styles that are vastly dissimilar. Without that thematic consistency, I’m not sure this video would work so well, but it makes all the difference — these scenes combine with the watery, acid-infused psytrance track to create something otherworldly and totally engrossing. Viva’s occasional psychedelic color/texture filtering elevates the more mundane clips to a realm of abstraction that slots them nicely into the overall theme, and it all congeals into something slippery, mind-melting, and utterly hypnotic.

25. katranat – Reset the System

Anime: KARAS
Song: “The Wall (Buunshin Remix)” by ABIS & Signal

You want a crash course on what internal sync is and how to do it? Turn on Reset the System — and you know what, I’m not even going to give you any more instructions, this video speaks for itself, loudly. The way it reacts to the music is something I can’t really overstate my love of — internal sync is one of my absolute favorite techniques in all of editing (Ctrl-F “internal” in my Top AMV posts over the past 8 years and count how many times I reference it — actually, don’t do that, I’d like to maintain the illusion that my writing is not just me thinking of new ways to rehash the same three concepts over and over), and Reset the System is basically not playing if it’s not doing exactly that; the amount of cool that this video sheds every second could stop global warming. I could keep going but I need to write about the next video, and I think you get the idea.

Before moving on, though, you may have noticed that I haven’t referenced katranat at all in this write-up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that she’s the one who actually edited this! No, I have to believe that this video was spontaneously generated by the song itself as soon as katranat imported it into her editing program. To think that a human could have matched these scenes up so perfectly is ludicrous — this is the only logical explanation.

24. Nearphotison – (300) NoraBytes

Anime: Twinkle Nora Rock Me!
Song: “300MB” by Neil Cicierega

Admittedly, I didn’t “get” this video at first. I thought it was kind of funny, mainly because of the song, but it quickly left my brain and I didn’t think much more about it after I first viewed it. Then, for some reason or another, I watched this explanation of Twinkle Nora Rock Me! and why it’s one of the worst anime ever, and returned to this AMV by chance at some point after that; my mind was blown. This is one of those AMVs where the context makes all the difference, so if you don’t know about this anime, click that link before you watch this one.

There’s a rich irony in having Nora take on the “character” in this AMV of the spokeswoman for a hard drive of 300 MB, and making grand claims about how much space that is — the abysmal animation from Twinkle Nora Rock Me! just serves to underscore how much technology would change over the coming years, making her outdated claims feel as uninformed about the size that data would be in the future as Twinkle Nora Rock Me! looks when you set it next to something like this. The lyric sync that Nearphotison injects throughout the video is absolutely spot-on, the goofy dancing scenes integrated in such a way that they recall those terribly awkward tech conferences where the presenter is trying to be cool, the text flashed onscreen in so underwhelming a manner as to highlight the ridiculousness of the claims. Look, I get it, the audio sample was taken from a time when 300 MB was a lot of storage space, that’s not lost on me; but the end result here is something so self-consciously self-effacing that one can’t help but laugh — to me this is probably the funniest video of the year and one of my favorite comedy videos from the last several, and it deserves all the love it has coming to it from those of you reading through this list.

23. Thaddeus Bigsby – Wistful (Fata Morgana)

Anime: Various
Song: “Wistful (Fata Morgana)” by Baths

When I first saw this video, it just clicked. As someone who has become more and more interested in the concept of identifying the rules of the hobby for the express purpose of figuring out how to get away with breaking them, Wistful (Fata Morgana) felt like a cheat sheet. If there’s any story here, it’s abstract to the point of meaningless. If there is thematic consistency, it’s loose and probably only exists to make you think there’s more here than there is. There’s sync and effects work, but it’s haphazard and rarely repeats or falls into any kind of pattern. The video feels like an artist’s sketchbook, full of weird ideas and little experiments, held together by the thinnest psychedelic thread. Thaddeus Bigsby doesn’t take anything in this video overly seriously, and yet it’s never a video that’s actively funny, or even fun, really — just a calm, relaxing tour through washed-out nostalgia and mixed-media hallucinations that manages to never feel the least bit threatening or crazed. This video exists in the razor-thin space between order and disorder, harmony and chaos, and it’s wonderful.

22. TRUTH CRAB – Some Dream

Anime: Adieu Galaxy Express 999
Song: “Some Dream (Koreless Remix)” by Perfume Genius

CW: Some flashes/strobing

Trying to keep up with TRUTH CRAB’s output would be a full-time job. The sheer number of AMVs he releases each year guarantees that I will never see them all and be able to take them into consideration for my lists, so it becomes a game of checking in on his channel every so often and cherry-picking the ones that look the most interesting, or the most unique. Undoubtedly, I miss plenty that would otherwise find themselves on here, but that’s also part of the magic of his channel. When you find something good, you feel like you’re stumbling across something that even his other followers may have missed in the shuffle, and Some Dream especially has this quality — a true hidden gem.

Some Dream is a slow video, set to an experimental ambient track that’s little more than lingering synths and drawn-out sighs. Adieu Galaxy Express 999 sidles up to the song like it was always meant to be there, setting a whimsical sci-fi world with a huge sense of scale next to vaguely unsettling scenes and images that imply that things are not as they should be; there’s an indistinct sense of unease that resonates throughout this video, but it never fully manifests into something with enough context to interpret. TRUTH CRAB does a wonderful job of keeping all the details just out of reach, but tantalizingly so, finding the best moments to incorporate shrewd internal sync — no small feat with such a loosely-constructed song as this — and stringing us along to a totally unexpected conclusion that creates a desire to rewatch and figure out what exactly is happening in this weird, surrealistic, dimly unsettling world. TRUTH CRAB has demonstrated time and time again that he can tackle practically every genre of AMV and fit each one into his nebulous style, but it’s the mysterious, enigmatic videos like Some Dream that tend to take to it best.

21. Megamom – Un Amor Violento

Anime: Josee, the Tiger and the Fish // Ride Your Wave
Song: “Un Amor Violento” by Los Tres

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” — the AMV. That’s what rolls through my head as I watch this video, but I say it somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because I don’t want to minimize how great it is. Megamom deftly parallels the stories of these two movies, cleverly placing conceptually similar scenes from both side-by-side to give the video the illusion that not only are these stories playing out similarly in terms of what’s happening to the main characters, but that they’re taking place in the same physical space. They only barely intersect in the AMV’s closing seconds, but by then you’re fully immersed in the doubly-tragic storylines and it’s no stretch to see them come together, if only briefly.

That said, it’s hard to feel too much sadness by the end — it’s there, but so much of the video focuses on the good parts of the relationships that are on display, and the video takes on an almost eulogistic quality, as if it was created in order to remind everyone watching that those happy memories aren’t going anywhere. As much heartbreak as exists here, I can never watch this video and feel like that’s the point. Megamom’s artistic flair here seems to support this — the video’s happiest moments are overlaid with soft light leaks and live-action shots of the ocean, which enhance their vibrancy and make them feel much more real and significant than the sketchy outlines of a heart breaking in two when tragedy strikes. The contrast is striking, and gives weight to both sides of the event…but in my mind, anyway, it feels like the memory of the joys will stick around much longer than the feelings of sorrow, and it’s a message that I appreciate very deeply.