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.

9. Ileia – I Love Me

Anime: Various (Evangelion)
Song: “Yes Mom” by Tessa Violet

Look, we’re all thinking it, so I’ll just be the one to say it — this is maybe the smoothest AMV to be released since…geeze, I don’t even know (and there’s a good chance that the last video to have this honor was Ileia’s, too). As a tried-and-true Asuka character profile, you’re not going to walk away from this with any new insights into Evangelion or anyone in it — Kevin Caldwell was way ahead of the curve with this particular corner of the hobby. But my goodness this thing is absolutely undeniable — Ileia notices all the little details of the song that might go completely unnoticed by a casual listener and creates all these fantastic, tiny moments of internal sync. Jump cuts, match cuts, speed ramping, every trick in the book is employed here with incredible precision and care, to the point where your brain just can’t keep up.

The real hook here though is the phenomenal lyric sync. The dripping sarcasm and self-(over)confidence of the song personifies Asuka’s narcissism better than maybe any AMV that’s come before this one, but the very specific lyrical nods keep this one engaging even beyond that. Some of them go by so quick you won’t catch them on your first several viewings — “(Yes mom)”, “20/20 vision”, “…with ambition’s how I’m made” — but their presence works on that subconscious level that is so difficult to reach but, if you can, enhances literally every other aspect of a video. I will say that it was also a somewhat bold choice to include End of Evangelion in the pool of sources here, simply because of how clearly different its animation style is — in a video like this, where seamlessness is the point, having that visual shock of the EoE scenes could have been a kind of editing suicide. But Ileia’s use of them, peppered throughout the rest and always used to necessary conceptual or lyrical ends, makes their presence not just a non-issue, but a welcome inclusion.

Pure action AMVs truly didn’t get any hotter than this in 2022, and we can all bow down to our new queen. Er, actually, I guess nothing has really changed, has it?

8. katranat – The Light of the Moon

Anime: Various
Song: “Yin’s Piano” by Yoko Kanno

No, this is not the first night-themed AMV I’ve fallen in love with — heck, it’s not even the first one on this list. But it is maybe the most impressive for the sheer force of stubborn willpower it must have taken for katranat to convince herself that (a) she’d be able to find enough different clips of the moon for the concept to pan out, and (b) that she’d be able to deploy her editing skills and sheer creativity in sharp enough ways to prevent this from becoming a total snoozefest. While I love these laser-focused, conceptually-oriented multi-source AMVs, even I was skeptical as the video began playing that omitting characters completely and filling over three minutes of video with nothing but scenes of our nearest celestial neighbor could possibly be that interesting.

I was wrong. It mostly comes down to the clever and oftentimes subtle ways that katranat arranges her chosen scenes — color-based and compositional match cuts are used to give this video a kind of “flow” that I’m putting in quotation marks here because I’m not exactly using it in the same way it’s typically understood when talking about AMVs. This video doesn’t really feel “smooth”, at least not visually — the video is mostly (entirely?) hard cuts and they are often jarring enough to keep the video from having that satiny texture that a gentle piano piece like this might make you long for. Rather, by “flow” I mean more that the scene selection has a consistent internal logic that serves to help you mentally smooth out those jagged edges — there are a lot of cuts in this video, but each scene makes perfect sense in the context of what comes before it. Call it “thematic rhythm”, if you like. There’s this absurdly brilliant passage about halfway through that illustrates all this roundabout navel-gazing in brief: a series of rapid cuts, each shot of the moon slightly more zoomed out than the last; even though the animation styles differ wildly in each clip, it all runs together like a color gradient. It’s so ridiculously satisfying, watching this video progress.

And the video’s atmosphere is unmatched. It is completely calm, utterly lacking in any conflict or tension or anything to disturb the still, warm night air that wraps around you as it plays. There has always been a romanticism surrounding the moon, and this video proves that almost better than any other media has for me. It is sentiment in its purest form, with nothing between you and that bright lunar globe to distract you from your deepest thoughts and emotions. I simply adore this AMV, it’s one of the most delightful, surprising, and inventive of 2022 — don’t sleep on it, even though its subject matter might suggest that you do.

7. Megamom – Something Nice

Anime: Grave of the Fireflies
Song: “Money” by The Drums

I strongly recommend watching this AMV before reading my write-up below. Proceed at your own risk.

Megamom was busy this year — between remastering a ton of his older videos, he was experimenting with what an AMV would look like from a first-person perspective, or just going all-out in a high-concept, hugely technical demonstration mixing anime and live action in The Forest. And while all these things have merit and even reveal facets of what I love about Megamom so much as an editor, it was Something Nice that caught my eye more than any of it.

It’s always fascinating to observe the wheels turning in Megamom’s head — I fully believe no other editor is quite as on the bleeding edge when it comes to conceptual innovation in this hobby as he is, and while this will occasionally manifest in bigger, more FX-heavy projects, I tend to find my satisfaction in watching him find the new angles using nothing but the most fundamental editing techniques. Something Nice is exactly what I’m talking about — there’s nothing here that a complete amateur working on his or her first AMV couldn’t do within 15 minutes of turning on their editing program for the first time, but Megamom still managed to create one of the most unique Grave of the Fireflies AMVs I’ve ever seen.

The idea behind this video, which simply consists of Megamom reversing Grave of the Fireflies’ timeline to show Seita and Setsuko slowly finding their way back from desperation and starvation to their still-standing village and loving family, is nothing short of a masterful way to represent this song about wanting to do something meaningful for a loved one, despite not having the means — a central theme of the movie if ever there was one. No, the lyric sync here is not exactly literal, but I can’t imagine a more perfect song to use to tackle this concept, with this anime — the singer’s voice is filled with panicked distress, the upbeat melodies hiding something that almost feels like hopelessness. Even as the video progresses and things get happier, everything feels off — and then there’s that gut punch you come to expect from every AMV that uses this source, but Megamom had fooled you into thinking might just not make its appearance. Yeah, you should know better by now — there’s just no such thing as a happy Grave of the Fireflies AMV.

The layers that surround this video and its intrinsic emotions are many and complex — and the fact that Megamom wrings so much depth out of a video this straightforward and unflinchingly basic from a technical point-of-view should tell you all you need to know about how unique his vantage point is on this medium, and that if you’re not following this guy you really don’t have another second to spare.

6. SakuraBipolar – Lexapro Delirium

Anime: Needy Streamer Overload (+ others)
Song: “Lexapro Delirium” by Sewerslvt

CW: Extreme flashing, implication of suicide

Approaching discussion of this video is…not an easy task. Besides the obvious visual assault that greets you at nearly every turn, there’s the source on which this AMV is based in the first place — although SakuraBipolar taps all manner of other anime and media, not to mention reusing assets from at least one of his older AMVs, the foundation of this video and the guidepost by which it constantly orients itself is a visual novel about a streamer addicted to the notion of becoming Internet famous. Lexapro Delirium examines — albeit somewhat abstractly at times — the obsessive need that our collective culture has adopted for approval from complete strangers, focused through the lens of a suicidal girl with a webcam.

There’s an unmistakable bleakness that runs through this video, but you might not know it immediately — it’s drenched in vibrant psychedelia and bright colors, and layered with texture to the point where it often becomes an unintelligible mess that defies easy visual interpretation. Entire passages of the video are repetitions and rewinds that linger for extended periods of time — by about halfway through, your brain has entered a kind of stupored malaise. The video no longer engages with you at an intellectual level, instead just washing past your eyes and massaging your neural pathways in a way that would be pleasant if the video’s subject matter wasn’t so heavy. But I think this is the whole point — whether intentionally or not, Lexapro Delirium demonstrates how easy it is for us to turn ourselves off and let our culture stupefy us into desolate acceptance of its unambiguous ills, while it wreaks havoc on our corporate mental state. More immediately, this video is what it looks like when the AMV medium itself starts to crack at the seams, and the lights and colors on the other side start to show through — a fascinating exploration of the deep limits of what AMVs can be.

5. vivafringe – Time Lapse

Anime: Various
Song: “Age of Phase” by Bonobo

Vivafringe released his first AMV to the world in 2020 — two years later and he has basically perfected the craft of making these wonderful multi-source AMVs that orbit around some single, often simple concept, sometimes creating vague narrative threads, other times just exploring a theme in obsessive detail. Time Lapse seems to exist somewhere in between these two approaches, centering itself around the passage of time as its subject, making generous use of — you guessed it — time-lapse shots from various anime, or simply replicating the same idea using chronological jump cuts.

Editing-wise, Time Lapse is simply immaculate, alternating between fanatical external sync and fluid internal sync, combining the two into an undeniably dynamic experience — if the purpose of this video is to get you to ruminate on the endless march of time, it certainly achieves its goal, as it never settles down, never stops, never suggests that there is any direction to move but one. Every scene, or collection of cuts, propels the video forward to some inevitable conclusion. Of course, this isn’t some revelatory discovery — time only ever moves in one direction — but this video makes sure you don’t forget this simple axiom, whether it’s through showing the explicit movement of the sun across the sky, or its implied progression via shadows crawling across the ground, or the physical aging of a hand until it becomes bony and withered. It all results in something that practically forces a meditative state — eminently relatable, there’s no one on the planet who doesn’t feel the relentless tick of the clock on a deep, fundamental level. Watching this video forces the issue — its theme is as unavoidable within the video as it is in your real, actual life.

There’s a psychedelic passage smack dab in the middle of this video — one of the best from an editor who is known for his dips into surrealism — that seems to rub this in all the harder. We try to escape in all sorts of ways, drugs being one of them, attempting to forestall or simply ignore the inevitable. And yeah, maybe it’s fun, or whatever — but, much like this one is in this AMV, these escapes are temporal and subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. Eventually they end, and we’re sucked back into a reality that tirelessly moves us from one dimensionless point in time to the next. And, although your time is limited, I can assure you that watching this video is not a waste of it.

4. ailynerie – latent acedia

Anime: Kaguya-sama: Love Is War
Song: “Satellite” by Harry Styles

I have established preconceptions about what kind of AMVs to expect from this anime source, and latent acedia satisfies none of them — there is no bouncy fun, no playful humor, no Chika dance scenes. Instead, ailynerie presents us with a very straight-faced, sentimental take on the anime’s main romance, practically drowning it in grandiose drama. On paper, this shouldn’t work — this AMV contains a little bit of everything I hate to see in a video of this type: excessive color-correction, an abundance of hands-and-faces scene selection that doesn’t really advance the narrative but fills in dead air with intrinsically dramatic compositions, a tonal reinterpretation that clashes with the more lighthearted mood of the series as I know it (unless season three — which I haven’t watched yet — does like a complete 180 in comparison to the previous two). Usually I write this kind of stuff off, and am happy to do so.

But I can’t deny that latent acedia grabbed me almost immediately, in spite of all these things. Ailynerie’s handle on the editing here is sublime, the pacing addictingly smooth and smartly handled. I dare you to watch this and not get completely lost in the sauce — the cookie-cutter boxes, the quick zooms, the blurs, that character cutout thing that ailynerie does to the floaty synths in the chorus — an effect it would be easy to overdo, but is used more like a stylish accent here. It all works together in a bewitching harmony that gives this video a flavor all its own. Yeah, there are thousands of cute romantic drama videos out there, but none look quite like this one does.

I think, though, what I like most about this video, despite maybe suggesting otherwise only two paragraphs earlier, is the way it actually explores the more pensive, intimate side of this anime. Yes, Kaguya-sama is generally thought of and presented as a rom-com, especially when it comes to its AMVs, but the anime has its moments of reflective introspection and tenderness. Unlike something like this, latent acedia isn’t really taking its source out of context as much as you might think — rather, it explores the depths of feeling both of these characters have for one another, which is only ever really presented to the viewers via inner monologue in the series. Spotlighting this, and giving it the emotional weight that it so deserves, feels less like a bastardization of the series’ intent and more like one of the most thoughtful tributes to it that I think I’ve ever seen.

And, yeah, this video has those moments that simply light up the sky — its climax and pretty much everything that follows until the end of the video marks what is probably my favorite 60 seconds in any AMV I saw this year, and maybe last year too. It’s an immaculate passage, saturated in a euphoric release of tension that snaps all the melodrama and longing into place, and resolves every uncertain feeling into something definite. Yes, there are a few videos this year that meant more to me and that I liked better for other reasons, but I don’t know that any of them were quite as emotionally captivating as this one.

3. Moonpie AMV – Big Mood

Anime: Recovery of an MMO Junkie
Song: “Numb Little Bug” by Em Beihold

Stress is the driving theme of our culture. It often feels like no matter what I do, where I go, or who I’m with, there’s at the very least a vague anxiety pecking away at my brain. It’s never to the point where I think I need to be treated for some chemical imbalance, but it often feels like there’s this invisible, noxious fume in the air that contaminates every potentially enjoyable experience and discolors it slightly. I’m not an unhappy person — in fact, there’s quite a bit in my life to be happy about right now — so it’s frustrating to continually be haunted by this feeling that my feet are about to be kicked out from under me, without being able to pinpoint why, other than that society at large, and my generation in particular, has become subject to this omnipresent malaise. I could certainly wax eloquent about where I think this comes from, but that’s beside the point.

Whatever the reasons we tend to feel this way en masse, Big Mood channels these sentiments in an unexpectedly animated way — rather than approaching the subject with a dull gravitas to match the weight that all this stress invariably dumps on us, Big Mood is an energetic display of sarcasm, self-deprecation and reclusive wit that could almost be called “fun”, in the same way that getting so fed up with everything that you just have to laugh at it could be misinterpreted as you having “fun” by someone not in on the tension of the moment themselves. Yes, Moonpie’s dextrous editing does a lot for this video — there’s so much going on at every moment, whether it’s savvy lyric sync or nimble internal sync or just fantastic scene selection that lightens the mood (and more often than not, some combination of each of these), that the walls never quite close in like you might expect. The drama is kept at bay, if only just.

I wouldn’t call this a “happy” video, but its relatability can still put a grim smile on your face — awkward social interactions, falling into bed and gazing numbly at the ceiling while the room spins around you, staying up to ungodly hours of the morning staring at your computer screen…who among us hasn’t experienced one or more of these things in the last week, let alone the last month? And are these things reactions to stress, or causes of it? When you’re in the middle of it all, that line becomes a blurry smudge, a feedback loop of unhealthy habits and self-effacing turbulence. Big Mood is self-aware enough to be able to poke fun at all this, and maybe suggest that we stop taking ourselves so damn seriously, even as it acknowledges the overarching uneasiness that permeates every nook and cranny of our lives. Maybe this video isn’t the antidote to all this baggage, but it can certainly, if only temporarily, lighten the load.

2. TroubleClef — Laundry Day

Anime: Fruits Basket (2019)
Song: “Marjorie” by Taylor Swift

As I am writing these words, having just watched this video to help me figure them out, my son is napping in my and my wife’s bed. I have the baby monitor right by my computer screen, and I can see his little feet peeking around a huge pillow that’s blocking most of the camera’s view. He is the most precious thing in my life, save maybe my wife (and if not, well, it’s a tie), and he makes me so happy I could burst. Parenthood has radically changed a lot of the way I view the world, and I have spent more time than I care to admit thinking about what would happen if I or his mother were to suddenly die while he is still young — would he remember us? Who would he grow up to be if only one of us (or, God forbid, neither of us) was around to raise him?

These are haunting thoughts. His mother and I have taken so many pictures and videos of ourselves with him in his brief eight-month stay on this planet that there would be no shortage of images he could treasure once he got old enough to understand, but I can’t help but think there would always be some gap that he’d always have to live with — an absence that could never truly be filled in any meaningful sense. This is why I never miss an opportunity to tell him I love him, to hold him in my arms when he reaches for me, to let him study my face and touch it with his tiny hands and give me these goofy, sloppy open-mouthed kisses; this is why I don’t get annoyed when my wife sings the same five songs over and over to him when he’s being fussy, and why his usual preferences for her over me in certain situations don’t bug me. Maybe, just maybe all this interaction will imprint itself into him on a deep level, should the unthinkable ever happen.

God willing, it never will. But this brings me to Laundry Day, an AMV that explores this topic in painful depth. The trauma of Tohru losing her mother is the thrust of this AMV — and the unsurprising revelation that no, nothing can really replace the loss of a parent. I resonate with this on a level that maybe wasn’t fully intended; I’ve never lost a parent myself, so TroubleClef’s perusal of this theme kind of flips the script for me — instead of identifying with Tohru and her struggles to deal with this loss, I’m watching this video through her mother’s eyes, examining how Tohru acts and reacts without her there. None of this really changes the fact that this is a deeply sad video, one that, yeah, kind of makes me want to weep. I don’t ever want to say goodbye to my son.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re already familiar with this editor, then I’m sure I don’t really need to harp on too much about TroubleClef’s actual editing, which is probably more or less what you expect from a slower, sentimental drama video like this, and in any case exists to more or less conceal itself from the story and emotions that run the show. Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way — simple zooms and barely-there light leaks provide minimalist emphasis that draws hardly any attention to itself, and instead to the simmering emotions underneath. No, this isn’t an editing showcase, but then again, my favorite videos rarely are.

Well, it looks like my boy is waking up — and if you’ll excuse me, I want to be the first thing he sees when he does.

1. TRUTH CRAB – Burnout

Anime: TO-Y
Song: “Burnout” by 0171

I alluded to this in the introductory post, but in 2022 I experienced an AMV burnout the likes of which I never have before. It got to the point at multiple times throughout the year where I considered quitting all the AMV Discord servers I was in and maybe even giving up actually editing as well. The cause of this was a perfect storm of factors — a severe exhaustion and disinterest in AMVs I felt immediately after compiling last year’s Top AMVs list that lasted for months; a glut of experimentation on AMV-related discussion content on my YouTube channel that (for the most part) really wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped; a rush to get one more AMV edited and released before my son was born; an unusually sustained and focused push of working on AMV Tracker 2 for hours and hours a day leading up to his birth; a reduced amount of free time for just sitting and watching AMVs immediately following that; and a gravitation towards other interests that ate up what reduced free time I did have for most of the rest of the year. On top of all of this has been the slowly creeping realization that my tastes and interests within the AMV space are becoming more and more misaligned with the majority each passing day, making discourse between me and the community as a whole progressively more irrelevant as time goes on; and occasionally, when it comes to specific members within it, absolutely infuriating (don’t worry — if you’re reading this, it’s probably not you I’m referring to).

So what does all of this have to do with this AMV, besides its title? Earlier this year, I was honored enough to have the opportunity to interview this editor. Shortly before I posted this interview on my channel (but weeks after it was recorded), TRUTH CRAB released Burnout — and it appeared to be one of the “coded messages” he talked about in the interview, a way of letting the world in, if only slightly, on his personal life, or at least his emotional state. In previous years, TRUTH CRAB released (literally) hundreds of AMVs a year — this year he’s released two, and a handful of other (non-anime) music videos. It would appear that this insane rate of output finally caught up with him, and although not his final AMV, Burnout is quite possibly among the last we’ll see from him, at least for the foreseeable future (his YouTube channel description reads, mysteriously, “on hiatus, but will return”).

Unsurprisingly, I resonate with the story behind this video greatly, but the AMV itself does a wonderful job at communicating these feelings as well, albeit somewhat elliptically. On the surface, this appears to be mostly just a kind of dance video — the majority of the scenes are shots of a band playing, or a singer dancing around with a microphone. It tends to feel less like an AMV proper and more like a livestream of a concert. Nevertheless, the song lends every scene a tinge of pure mental and emotional exhaustion, as if maybe the reason this concert is being livestreamed in the first place is because it’s the last one — the final show on a farewell tour. All these band members are playing their hearts out, giving it their all, but only because they know they’ll never be on stage together again.

I think, for me, the definitive scene here, and the one that ties it all together, is the final one (which also happens to be the video’s thumbnail) — the singer falling backwards, eyes closed, with a look of serene happiness on his face as he collapses into the crowd…like he’s finally achieved a sense of total peace, knowing that he can move on to the next thing in his life. I don’t mean to insinuate that I’m done with the hobby — far from it, as in a separate AMV-related interview from this year, in which FalconOne interviewed me, I made a comment that I never plan to stop making AMVs. That hasn’t changed. But I also can’t deny that the burnout which I felt this year made a huge, unexpected impact on how I interact with this hobby, and the way I do so moving forward may not look the same as it has thus far. I learned what it is to experience sustained removal from the medium, as I went weeks and months without watching any AMVs. I don’t know what this means for the future, practically speaking. But hopefully TRUTH CRAB won’t mind if I borrow the language of this AMV to let you in on how I’ve been feeling and processing things this last year. And TRUTH CRAB, if you’re still out there and happen to be reading these words — I miss you man. Thank you for letting us get to know you, even if just a little, through these magnificent AMVs.

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…and so ends another year of AMVs. While this year’s list was shorter and more rushed compared to previous years’, I have to say that it was probably the most fun I’ve had and least stress I’ve felt while putting one of them together. If anything, it actually felt refreshing, and like I’m more ready to dive into AMVs than I think I’ve ever felt in a January since starting these posts eight years ago. As for the future of these lists, I will continue to make no promises — but if I find the time and motivation come December of 2023, you’ll certainly see something here.

As usual, thank you for checking this out, for reading through all these long-winded write-ups, and for sticking with me through the changed format. Hopefully you discovered at least one great video you didn’t know about before finding it here — if so, what was it? What did you think of this list? What were some of your favorites from 2022?

If you still haven’t had enough AMVs, you have a couple options — like I mentioned in the Honorable Mentions post, katranat is in the process of sharing her favorites of 2022 with us as well, so please check her blog if you enjoyed this one. Otherwise, please also take a look at this spreadsheet, which shows all the videos I took into consideration for my final rankings — even though several didn’t make it onto this list anywhere, they are all great videos worth viewing as well.

I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you have a great 2023!