I, For One, Welcome The Return of 'Retro' Anime

Aftermath co-founder Luke Plunkett once penned an excellent blog (with a cameo from yours truly) about how they don’t make anime like they used to. And while that still tracks, something’s shifted. There’s a new wave of anime with an unmistakably retro feel that evokes the shows that once defined the medium.

Streaming has reshaped how TV is made globally. Everything now comes with prestige-gloss production value packed into fewer episodes, engineered not just to tell a story but to squeeze another month of big money subscription dollars out of you. It’s changed how television is made, and thus, how those shows feel to watch.

Anime hasn’t escaped that gravitational pull either. Gone are the 50+ episode shows where a story can drift off track on an adventure where nothing happens. Seasonal anime are given 12 episodes to “prove themselves.” Fans expect plot acceleration, constant spectacle, and no downtime during a three-episode trial period to decide whether it's worth their time. Likewise, the emergence of episodic reviews from legacy publications crank up the pressure, scrutinizing the propulsion of a show as if it were a crime scene—or a season finale. And every week becomes an online referendum over whether a show is peak or ragebaiting viewers on purpose if it doesn’t deliver the goods.

This tendency creates reactionary viewers. By god, if Surf Dracula dares spend less than half the runtime not hitting that shit with the prettiest sakuga you’ve ever seen, and instead focuses on some slow-burn filler flashback about how his Liberace-after-dark-looking-ass pearled his first wave, the showrunners are playing in your face. 

Ironically, that same pressure for a prestige product has carved out space for some anime to feel like it used to—even when it’s being created in the era of streaming—by restoring the pleasure of watching a story unfold at its own pace.

Despite being new anime, studio Sunrise’s Mao and Bones’ Daemons of the Shadow Realm stand out for evoking the cadence of shows from yesteryear. Of course, it helps that both studios are OG production houses that gave us Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, and they’re adapting the works of the matriarchs of manga, Rumiko Takahashi and Hiromu Arakawa. But what’s striking is how these shows put back into focus the qualities that make a so-called retro show feel good in the first place: their genre-meshing storytelling, patient pacing, and of course, their visual style.

Despite MyAnimeList tagging it as action, adventure, and fantasy, Daemons of the Shadow Realm refuses to fit neatly into one box. In the opening stretch of its 24-episode run, Bones delivers a shonen teeming with slice-of-life softness, bloody and dark-fantasy violence, and gag-manga humor, all to the rhythm of a supernatural detective drama. While the real hook is the fantastic first episode twist that I refuse to spoil, that twist is just one morsel of its intricate plotting.

Most importantly, it feels like the tonally elastic anime of old that’s willing to take time establishing its world and mood. As a consequence, the show moves at a slower pace that nonetheless gives you fascinating glimpses into the lives of its heroes and supposed villains in the span of five episodes that you wouldn’t mind stretching to fifty just to see what they get into whenever they aren’t running the dozens. 

And while I’m still waiting to see if there’s more to Mao besides it being Inuyasha again—swapping out its dog boy for a cat boy—I can’t fault mama for reheating her nachos. Takahashi is the Lady Gaga of manga; she can plagiarize herself to her heart's content because she perfected the era-hopping, romance-tinged, monster-of-the-week action formula isekai’s been aping for years.  Watching Mao turns me into the food critic from Ratatouille, whisking me back to hearing Inuyasha’s outro blaring from sleep-crusted eyes at 3 am. 

Daemons and Mao aren’t compelling simply because they feel old. They’re compelling because they’re reintroducing a new era of anime fans to what shows used to feel like when every episode didn’t live or die by eventized sakuga and Twitter posts. These are not shows that encourage discussion about how much ground an episode should cover from the source material to be must-watch and what episodes you could skip. They’re reminders that the older cadence of shows still resonates, and feel oddly new when dropped into the modern stream of anime. What’s got me even more geeked out is that they’re not alone in restoring that feeling. 

And in their wake are other throwback shows on the horizon. Including Science Saru’s The Ghost in the Shell, which looks poised not only to evoke the aesthetics of Masamune Shirow’s art style but to reintroduce whimsy to the philosophical cyberpunk world that its sea of adaptations has been lacking. Likewise, classics like the ‘90s magical girl isekai Magic Knight Rayearth are getting an anime remake, and shojo Red River, finally getting its own anime treatment a whopping 14 years after its manga series finale, is on the horizon. It comes alongside Studio Outline’s upcoming Netflix anime adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s ‘50s era shojo manga, The Ribbon Hero.

Arguably, my favorite byproduct of newer anime with a throwback old-school feel is the boys' love anime Go For It, Nakamura! On the one hand, its art style is giving peak Takahashi with its rounded character designs. The show also has the added flair of its ending themes featuring a revolving door of certified city pop bangers like Yasuha’s “Fly-day Chinatown.”

The real win here is the sense that studios are finally drifting back toward non‑shonen projects that aren’t trapped in the twelve‑episode obstacle course. While we’ll never see an era when they make anime the way they used to, as a fan, it’s been a joy to find shows that go beyond retro aesthetics and remind me how fun slower, weirder, more genre‑fluid anime can be. Yippee dopamine.

They Don’t Make Anime Like They Used To - Aftermath

And that’s OK

AftermathLuke Plunkett