Mine’s Violet Evergarden in 2021. I’ve seen others before that, but I thought of them as “cartoons” or movies in the generic sense.
Elfen lied. Not exactly the deep end, but i did kinda skip the casual part.
Probably Voltron, though I didn’t know what anime was at that time. Probably saw some Sailor Moon. Nickelodeon used to show some random stuff.
As a teen my first deliberate move towards finding more anime to watch was after seeing Ninja Scroll and Neo-Tokyo on VHS. Both of those blew my mind and I knew then there were much better shows out there than what was being produced in the States.
I did not expect to be alone on this, but I scrolled through and didn’t see it:
Record of Lodoss War from 1990. I had an older cousin who had fansubs of the series on VHS in '92 or '93. We watched through the whole thing probably a dozen times.
That’s a great one to start on though; it had such an aesthetic!
This is a tough one… the first anime I saw was Space Battleship Yamato, imported into the US as Star Blazers, but outside of thinking that it was completely different from other cartoons I didn’t know anything else about it.
Eventually I caught some episodes of Harlock and saw that there was more than one show with this style, but didn’t realize they both came from an entirely different industry.
Through the next 5~6 years I came to recognize the “anime look” in various other media - many American cartoons farmed their intros out to TMS or Toei and it was obvious that there was something different going on - and Japan was constantly in the news as their economy (actually The Bubble) took off and big American businesses reacted to that “threat”.
Around this time I saw the Galaxy Express 999 movie on VHS, partly because it looked cool but mostly because I knew by then that Lieji Matsumoto was the artist behind Yamato and Harlock and wanted more of that.
So that might be the first anime I watched because I knew what it was. But “anime” wasn’t really in the vernacular then; it was still “Japanese cartoons”, or maybe “Japanimation”.
The first anime that I watched because I knew it was “anime” was probably Bubblegum Crisis: a friend’s brother got fansub tapes at the big local university and brought them back to share around over summer break.
He also brought Urotsukidoji, but that’s a story for another time…
I remember watching Captain Tsubasa, Dragon Ball and Pokemon on the TV when I was a child, but the first I watched because it was anime was A Place Further Than the Universe. I was looking how to get into anime and found a guide on reddit with this in the genre Cute Girls Doing Cute Things. I got curious about what CGDCT could be so decided to check it.
Probably Speed Racer as a kid. The first I really got into was Robotech TV series and the Macross movie. I really loved the world crafting and I was beside myself when Palladium dropped the Robotech RPG.
Until around 2021 I ignored anime because of the typical cliches. But one friend always tried to push me into it. One day he talked me into watching Evangelion. Probably one of the worst “first” anime you can watch xD It took me multiple months after that to try some more. But I need to admit Evangelion still turned into one of my favorite anime’s.
If Pokémon doesn’t count, then grave of the fireflies
Excluding cartoons like Maya the bee and Moomins then probably flip flappers in 2016. There were probably other anime series or ghibli films. But Flip Flappers were the first one that I remember waiting for next episode every week.
Digimon. Got disc from my cousin and since it was English dub, I thought it was just cartoon. Also I didn’t know what anime is back then.
Stayed up late to watch blue gender as a kid. I think it’s the reason I love mecha anime the most.
It’s one of those 3:
- Heidi, Girl of the Alps
- Maya the Bee
- Captain Future
I don’t remember which one of those was actually the first (most likely Heidi or Maya, just going by the kid-friendliness), but all three are in my earliest core childhood memories.
Bleach, probably? My friends in school dragged me into an anime club they were running back when the first season was airing.
I definitely saw other shows before that – Pokemon, of course, and bits and pieces of Ranma, Speed Racer, and other shows that occasionally made it to broadcast TV – but I didn’t distinguish them from other cartoons.
…space battleship yamato, circa 1979, on broadcast television no less: i tried to take pictures of the screen because we didn’t get our first VCR until a few months later…
Sailor Moon.
