Anime that will make you a better human being

There's interesting anime. There's thoughtful anime. There's deep anime.

And then there's anime that can change you as a person. That can literally turn your mind's eye to a new perspective.

Approaching this alphabetically:

Barefoot Gen
Barefoot Gen is an autobiographical story of a kid who lived in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb hit. Surprisingly, the film maintains a hopeful, upbeat tone. It's divided into three parts: the boy's life before the bomb drops, the hell of Hiroshima just after the bomb hits, and putting one's life back together afterward.

Barefoot Gen graphically and dramatically shows the effects of the bomb. If this were live-action, it would be unbearable to watch. It's still heart-wrenching. But the story is fundamentally a shonen tale of a boy pushing through, surviving, and even thriving. This makes it easier to watch and in some ways more powerful than Grave of the Fireflies.

Boogiepop Phantom
This is a low-budget anime series from about a decade ago, about teens who develop weird powers.

Don't let that fool you. Boogiepop Phantom is about the teenage years, and the philosophies that we develop to cope. We form some strange outlooks on life during this time, and Boogiepop Phantom holds each philosophy up to the light, turning it slowly so we can see it and think about it. Some are noble; some are twisted. And they're all very familiar and human.

Haibane Renmei
A thoughtful story inspired by a novel by Haruki Murakami, Haibane is set in a walled-off town, focusing on a group of people who mysteriously appear there. The haibane appear to be normal people who hatch out of large eggs, then sprout small wings and get halos. They lack all memory, but they know they came from somewhere else.

As becomes clear after the first few episodes (moderate spoiler alert): this is a sort of purgatory, a place for troubled souls to come, rest, and re-align themselves before moving on. There are all sorts of implications here, both religious and psychological, and the series explores them.

Haibane Renmei is a story of sin and redemption.

Princess Mononoke
If Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind was Hayao Miyazaki's first full environmental fable, Princess Mononoke is the matured version. As Miyazaki once said (I paraphrase), one cannot have a complete view of environmentalism without starting from the position that humans consume resources to survive.

Princess Mononoke rejects the false idea of "the balance of nature." Nature is mysterious and chaotic. The protagonist is thrust into the story when his village is attacked, unprovoked, by a raging forest spirit. (Yes, the spirit rages because of a bullet fired by humans. Nevertheless, Ashitaka is not attacked by a human, but by a creature with a weak mind.)

The film also refuses to establish its characters into simple moral categories; it almost revels in grey areas. The woman tearing down the forests and hunting the old gods rescues girls from brothels. The gentle apes attempting to re-plant the forest threaten to eat the protagonist to gain his strength. Even the ending (which I won't spoil here) remains profoundly ambiguous.

The film's strength lies in the issues it raises during the course of its story. This is a work attempting to present every side of an issue, and leaves us with a greater appreciation for its complexity and its importance.

Rurouni Kenshin OVA
The Kenshin OVA begins as a gory action story, and its first half left little impression on me other than deep respect for its dramatic pace and visuals.

It's the second half that reveals the depths that the story plumbs. The Rurouni Kenshin OVA is a meditation on personal violence, on the corruption that personal violence wreaks on the soul. That sounds poetic, but it's accurate: Kenshin finds that his violent behavior affects his personality, shutting him down. The longer he is away from killing, the more his humanity returns.

I've never seen this issue dealt with this directly and this powerfully. What appears to be little more than a bloody thriller very deliberately establishes its arguments through Kenshin's actions, and demonstrates the results thereof, dramatically and horrifically, in its second half.

serial experiments lain
lain begins with a simple premise: a shy girl receives an email from a classmate who committed suicide. This expands into a story that covers a breathtaking range of topics, including identity, responsibility, relationship to technology, the modern human condition, and human relationship.

It doesn't simply touch on these topics (and many more); its characters philosophize about them, and their behavior illustrates these ideas. Each topic is addressed in some depth.

Then the next-to-last episode comes along and tips the apple cart, reversing the philosophy built throughout the story and revealing deeper human truth.

I can't even do this series justice without writing a small paper on it; there are just too many themes within it.

lain completely changed my views on technology and human relationship.