Recurring feature time! In previous 12 days runs I’ve used day 6 to highlight a few of the most interesting short anime to air during the year, it’s a good tradition so lets keep it going.

Best Newcomer – Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-San

Honda-San is just all around great. Providing a snapshot into the life of a bookstore worker that manages to be super relatable to anyone who’s ever worked retail in general but still steeped in its own sector specific idiosyncrasies. The show manages to poke fun at the maddening life of a bookstore and those who work there without ever feeling like it’s punching down.

Best Sequel – Yama no Susume 3

This one probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Who could have seen it coming that I’d really like the sequel to one of my favourite series of all time? Yama no Susume 3 could have coasted along being more of the same and I’d inevitably have still enjoyed it a lot. Instead it managed to mess with the formula just enough to give the characters more time to grow while still retaining the core of what made it great in the first place, which marks it as a pretty top tier sequel in my books.

Best Spinoff Short – BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!☆PICO

Spinoff shorts occupy a weird space where they’re often purely intended for existing fans of the franchise. While this can make them a nice little bonus for people already invested it also makes it hard to enjoy or recommend them without that existing character knowledge. Girls Band Party!☆PICO manages to stand on its own fairly well however, doing a good job of actually establishing who each character is rather than just expecting the viewer to already know the punchlines.

Highest Wooser concentration – Hataraku Onii-san!

In the years since the end of his own show, Wooser has seemingly been on a quest to achieve more screen time via cameos in other series than in its entire run, popping up regularly in background shots in various places. Hataraku Onii-san! contributes to this ongoing campaign to a greater extent than any other show thus far by maintaining an unusually high Wooser cameo count. Leading the charge towards a future where all anime is caught in the clutches of whatever the heck Wooser is.

The Onyankopon Award for Most Existentially Terrifying Series – Micchiri Neko

Micchiri Neko is cute, fluffy and possibly going to consume your soul. While the majority of its short segments portray the titular mass of cats in the cute non threatening ways one would expect from its pastel tones it can slide sideways into disturbing territory at a moments notice. As it turns out an infinite mass of squishy cats is rather fertile ground for existential and body horror.

Teekyu Award For Most Teekyu Show To Teekyu This Year – Teekyu

The fact that neither Teekyu nor any of its spinoffs has had a new entry this year is apparently no impediment to its appearing on this list. It was already here when I started writing the post. Not even its own end can end Teekyu.