S. Worthen | Weblog

I've been thinking about your request for a few days since it's not one anyone's ever asked of me before! Here's a list of things for you though, focusing on what I particularly like, and what I think you might be interested in. I've tried to stick to shorter things that are available in the US.

Read or Die OVAs. (Five episodes. Origami weapons. Detectives. The TV series could be fabulous, but I haven't seen it.)
Oh my Goddess OVAs. (Another five episodes. One of the nicer ones in the improbably-beautiful-girl-falls-in-love-with-awkward-geek-guy genre. Plus, in this case, it's a goddess, and I love her outfits.)
Rayearth, first series. (Full series, 24-26 episodes. It's a classic example of teenage-girls-plucked-from-everyday-life-to-become-superheros, in a slightly self-mocking D&D framework, and with the fantasy equivalent of giant robots.)
Trigun. (A full series - 24-26 episodes. A scifi wild west series which starts out as funny and superificial, but had some serious depth to it as it develops.)
Fruits Basket. (Full series. A teenage girl is taken in by a family of people possessed by the spirits of the Chinese zodiac. Incorporate-outside genre, plus people-transformed-by-hugs-from-opposite-gender subgenre. Lovely, sweet, loveable series, albeit with an abrupt ending since its source material hadn't finished when the anime needed to.)

I wish I could recommend to you a good everyday life anime movie, but the one I wanted to recommend doesn't seem to be available on release in the US, so I don't know how you could see it. I'll keep thinking about something like that for you, but since I mostly watch magical fantasy series to various degrees, I just don't know them as well. The important thing is that you know that anime is a medium more than a genre, and movies about everyday life with no magic in them whatsoever are made too.

Also, I don't have a good darker series to recommend to you - I've only seem samples of ones I've quite liked, so haven't seen enough to know if I should recommend the whole series or not. There's all sorts of anime that's far too disturbingly violent for me. I'm easily disturbed.