The anime community is still reeling from the arson-started fire at Kyoto Animation Studios. While you may have donated to a fund or bought some of the high quality digital images off their website, sometimes the best thing you can do to support a company is watch (legally) and buy their products. It is also a way of showing a company and their employees that you love them and are thinking about them despite never actually meeting any of them.

Kyoto Animation is pretty famous in the anime community for churning out shows with addictingly fluid animation and just stupidly cute characters. Furthermore, they made a pretty big impact in the industry itself by being one of the first companies to pay their employees a salary rather than a by the frame wage that results in overworked and underpaid animators. It makes their tragedy all the worse.

Beyond the Boundary

There’s a screen in the first episode in Your Lie in April (not a KyoAni series, but also good) where the whole world has this grey-ish tint to it and the main character sees this girl and suddenly everything comes alive with very vivid color. That is what Beyond the Boundary did for me and anime when I first watched it. The story of the series ends a little wantingly and I suspect that is either to direct you to the movies or the light novel, but the way it is animated makes it well worth the watch. Everything from the hair and glasses sliding down the nose to the spilled blood feels very alive as it follows the cutest demon hunter you ever will see.

Clannad

An example of KyoAni’s beautiful animation ability, this is not quite. The art style from the visual novel makes the the characters all eyes and legs, but it has its moments. What you watch Clannad for is to have a good long cry at any one of the many touching or relatable moments. These girls are all tragedy and much of the first season is the main character helping them through it. The second season is something different, but still has its sting. It perhaps one of the greatest romance and drama series you will ever see.

Free

Did you know that KyoAni was founded by the husband and wife team that still runs the studio today? As Yoko was an animator from another studio before founding it, she made sure the company hired more women and promoted them into prestigious roles that the industry often reserved for men. So it is no surprise that Free came out of KyoAni. It is a show about a male swim team. A male swim team with beautiful wet bodies in skin-tight speedos. More impressive is that it is not an outwardly boy love show either, which is usually what these things can turn into. It is fan service for women, and there isn’t anything wrong with producing a few shows like that considering there is a whole ecchi genre for men.

Nichijou

There are a few shows by KyoAni that specialize in what I like to call “normalized chaos,” where everything seems normal but is actually out of control. Nichijou is one of those shows. It is about three school girls living their life, but then there are things that go completely upside down like the principal suplexing a deer. Some of this chaos is also used to accent emotions like the tsundere busing out a bazooka to symbolize her explosive feelings. It mixed both the slice of life aspect that fits the pastel color palate and insanity that you can feel in normal life, but turned to the extremest of extremes.

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Like Nichijou above, this is a series that also likes to revel in chaos. In it, an office lady’s life is invaded by dragons when she saves the life of one while drunk and it decides to become her maid in repayment. Soon all her dragon friends start visiting and her and several other humans find their life thrown into the most wonderful and wholesome chaos by them. While slice of life shows don’t exactly need to bust out the vibrant animation, there are a few spots where you can see KyoAni flexing their muscles when the dragons do things like play fight in a field or play dodge ball. (It’s more badass that it sounds)

K-On

This series is probably the studio’s most famous series. It was super huge for a long time, and there are some that credit it for the shift towards more moe girls in anime, as KyoAni kind of specializes in moe. It is about a bunch of school girls that start a band. They often fail, but do so in a cute and endearing way. It is K-On’s powerful success that likely spawned other music shows by the studio like Hibike Euphonium.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Right there next to K-On is KyoAni’s other most popular series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Even after trolling their fans with eight of the same episode in a row, this series is still beloved for the way it melds mystery, comedy, and cute club shenanigans. It tells a surprisingly complex story that is all wrapped up in what looks like your standard school life series.

Love, Chunibyou, and Other Delusions

The large part of KyoAni’s charm is that – damn – they know how to create a cute character. Rikka is one of those characters that can really get stuck in your heart. Yeah, she is a little damaged and super cringe sometimes, but she is adorable and you just end up rooting for her before you know it. Everything about Chunibyou kind of ends up that way. When it comes to creating lovable characters, I see this as one of their greatest successes.

Violet Evergarden

Remember when this series came to Netflix and everyone was like “Oh god, my eyes! It’s too beautiful”? Pepperidge Farm remem- I mean, I remember. This series, though it can be a little…boring at moments in terms of the plot, it is never not just absolutely gorgeous as KyoAni showed just how far an anime studio can really go with the visuals.

I really could go on, but at a certain point, I would just list all the series. Like, I pretty much did anyway, but this studio truly does some of the best work in the industry and we can only hope they get back on their feet soon.