1. Gonzo goes bust!
2. Bakemonogatari crushes K-ON!
3. Evangelion gets yet another movie
4. Summer Wars a big hit
5. K-ON! marketing mania
6. Endless Eight repeated eight times, fans revolt
7. Toradora gets simultaneous novel/anime ending
8. Sora no Otoshimono pantsu take flight
9. Gegege no Kitaro suddenly canned
10. Seiyuu Yuu Kobayashi’s fantastic art broadcast on TV
A good number of these are kind of, "oh, okay", namely 8-10 (although Kobayashi Yuu's art was hilariously bad).
Then we've got Evangelion and Summer Wars. Well, we all kind of knew Eva was in the pipeline. And if you knew anything about Summer Wars, you were expecting it to be amazing.
Now the rest of the stories were pretty big. Gonzo actually going and dying was not something that I think most people expected, especially not with Saki doing so well. And yet, even that and Strike Witches couldn't save them. And if anyone thinks Strike Witches 2 is going to do it for them, think again: they were recently replaced by AIC as the main production studio.
K-ON! was a huge hit this year, as was to be expected from KyoAni. KyoAni is really good at what they do. But Bakemonogatari was only on the radar of people like me who really like Shaft productions. It brings me great joy that a show like Bakemonogatari, focused on and packed densely with dialogue, managed to crush K-ON! in sales.
That's not to say K-ON! was a disaster. It was amazing how any product that showed up within a metre of Mio was instantly bought in large quantities. Fender Japan sold out of Mio's specific bass. Maybe a lot of bassists needed basses? Well, that's a lot of left-handed bassists. Also popular were Mio's phone and Mio's headphones. I'll be Azusa was able to push some Stratocasters as well.
And Endless Eight. I'm sure we're all very familiar with Endless Eight by now. It was a lot more fun watching it while it was airing, because you could hop online and commiserate with everyone else who was watching it each week.
And finally, Toradora's ending was pretty interesting. Here, we had a studio dodge the classic adaptation problem of the anime catching up to the source material too quickly. Instead, the entire show was planned out so that the ending coincided with the release of the final novel. Of course, the anime and novel endings weren't exactly the same, but the gist of it was still there. I wish more studios would take this approach instead of creating their own terrible version of it, effectively killing any chance of the later material getting animated (FMA is a very, very unique exception).
