Weird, I thought I'd have posted in this thread already.
ANYWAY, I read the thread and only one person mentioned Cowboy Bebop and that is shameful. I'm going to assume all of you others think Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo being Great Anime is obvious and doesn't need to be mentioned.
Apart from those two, has anyone here seen Planetes? There's a bunch of pretty annoyingly (in my opinion) presented personal relations stuff, but on the whole the series is solid as hell. I particularly appreciate the absolutely monstrous amount of effort they made to keep the science fiction as realistic as possible. I mean, shit, besides the obvious like having orbital mechanics, no noise in the vacuum of space, and the whole premise of the show (cleaning up the debris on Earth's orbit), the show has a lot of attention for the negative sides of staying in space: radiation poisoning, decompression sickness, and the like.
There's a viking anime called Vinland Saga by the same dude who made Planetes. Anyone have an opinion of it? I haven't yet watched it, but if the attention it pays to historical realism is anywhere in the same ballpark as his attention to hard science fiction in Planetes, I might enjoy it a lot.
Hm, what else... Death Note has been mentioned, FLCL is really cool and fun, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is really really dumb but also really fun, and I can't think of any other anime I'd like to mention right now.
