Since I've already talked about a similar slice-of-life series, K-On, at length, this will be a bit of a shorter one, but I've still got something to discuss.
The muscles.
Good lord the muscles.
As you can most likely tell, Free! (and its second series, Free! Eternal Summer) enjoys a mostly female fanbase. Like K-On, it is a series about five high-school-aged characters (Haruka, Makoto, Rei, Nagisa, and Rin) and revolves around their hobby (swimming) as well as other diversions, much like K-On (although Free! does concentrate a lot more on the actual activities of the club, and has a stronger plotline than K-On does).
Where the two diverge is that, while K-On's aesthetic is very moe, Free! relies on 'bishōnen' characteristics as well as full-on eye candy in the muscle department.
I mean, in the above pictures, the characters are sixteen, seventeen tops. While they are swimmers (and the art director intensely researched the body types of the main characters and designed them accurately according to what strokes they swim) this amount of muscle on a teenager is admittedly just a little unrealistic.
I'm not sure it was entirely necessary, but c'mon...
Madoka Magica is exceedingly popular, and I'm aware that a lot of people, especially thosewho frequent anime forums, will already have been spoilered by the internet at large, but Madoka Magica is seriously worth watching. Don't ruin its wonderfully twisty plot until you've seen it for yourself!
I should also mention that some of these gifs are a little gore-y.
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This anime is a surprise wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a ball of holy-crap-what-just-happened.
The 'Magical Girl' genre of anime ('mahou shoujo' in Japanese) is widely popular and has a whole slew of titles within it, including the anime that pretty much everyone has heard of, even if they live under a rock - Sailor Moon. The basic formula of a mahou shoujo anime is
On the surface, Madoka Magica is much the same - ordinary girls are approached by a squishy and adorable-looking feline creature and are allowed to make one wish. In return for their wish, the girls are given a Soul Gem (the source of their power) and must battle evil beings known as 'witches'.
So far, so normal for a magical girl anime.
The series' description on My Anime List (a fan-maintained database) is:
"She has a loving family and best friends, laughs and cries from time to time... Madoka Kaname, an eighth grader of Mitakihara middle school, is one of those who lives such a life. One day, she had a very magical encounter. She doesn't know if it happened by chance or by fate yet. This is a fateful encounter that can change her destiny—this is a beginning of the new story of the magical girls."
which describes precisely the impression of Madoka Magica everyone has before they watch it, and through the first two episodes. This was exactly the effect that it was intended to have - the viewer is lulled into a false sense of security and is completely drawn in by the series emotionally by what they expect is going to happen.
Then... it gets dark. Really quickly.
(To be honest I'm still not over what happens in episode three, which is where it all starts to rapidly plummet out of normal mahou-shoujo happy-happy land.)
The world of Madoka Magica is a bleak one, with magical girls turning on each other and all vying for the 'grief seeds' given by killing a witch after the witch has grown by spreading despair and luring people to their deaths. These grief seeds are the only thing that can keep the mahou shoujos' soul gems bright, and stop them from turning into witches themselves (a fact that has been hidden from them), describing a cycle of hope and despair that is engineered by Kyuubei, the creature that fulfills the initial wishes of the magical girls.
That's Kyuubei. He's... not as cute as you might think.
*shudder*
Madoka Magica is a complete standout from the magical girl genre as a whole, and plays with the tropes of the genre by being purposefully dark (until the end, which is a bittersweet one - I won't reveal anything further than that!)
Also:
Transformation sequences - where the main character activates their 'power talisman' of some sort and is magically changed into their mahou shoujo form - are a hallmark of magical girl anime, and most of the time, are very long and lavishly animated. Madoka Magica has pointedly quick sequences - the above character, Homura, is given the most elaborate transformation sequence in the series besides Madoka's in the opening, but this is still incredibly short for the genre, only taking a second or two.
The art style of Madoka Magica is a huge standout (and something that was expected from the anime's producers, SHAFT, who are famous for producing top-notch works). Apart from the regular animation, each separate 'world' (basically a pocket dimension) that each witch exists in is animated in a different, mind-bending style, radically different to the sketchy (yet relatively normal for anime) style used in the anime's 'real world'.
Some examples:
Witch Charlotte Witch Gertrud
Witch Elsa-Maria
The fact that Madoka Magica is so desolate, and yet still ends with a glimmer of hope as Madoka (the titular character) manages to escape the unbreakeable cycle of hope and despair, resonated extremely strongly with the audience at the time, helping rocket it into a must-watch series an average rating of 8.59/10 and a ranking of #72 (which is ridiculously high for a short series with what was, at first, only a small following).
I can't help but end with my favourite of the orchestral themes that recur throughout the series. It's absolutely haunting, and stays with you, much like Madoka Magica has stayed with me, and I think it will for a long time.
K-On! is, essentially, a slice-of-life music anime about a band of five girls who very, very occasionally play music.
I don't care that I have no idea what they're saying, this song is goddamn catchy.
(If you're curious, this is an entire song about rice... It's not even the only one about rice in the show!)
K-On begins with Yui Hirasawa, adorable klutz and complete airhead, on her first day of high school. The school's 'light music' (a broad Japanese term for light rock or pop-style music) club is under threats of disembandment, with only Ritsu Tanaka (drums), the tomboyish and energetic leader of the club, and Mio Akiyama (bass), introvert and Ritsu's unlikely best friend, as members. After they gain Tsumugi Kotobuki (goes by Mugi, keyboard), Yui eventually decides to join the club as their fourth member, thinking that it'll be easy... and despite the fact that she plays no instruments, Yui is persuaded to stay in the club so that they have enough members to continue, and spends most of the first series learning lead guitar to round out the band. Many antics ensue, and they form the band 'Ho-kago Tea Time' (After School Tea Time, or HTT).
L-R: Ritsu, Mugi, Asuza (who joins later in the series on rhythm guitar) Yui, and Mio.
A big part of K-On's selling point, and why it has exploded in popularity (especially overseas), is 'moe'. 'Moe' refers to an infatuation with, or taste for, extreme cuteness (or 'kawaii') things, especially in anime or other hobbies, and very common in refering to 'shojo' ('gir') anime that has a large male following. 'Moe' can also refer to the cute factor itself (you could describe a character or specific scene as 'moe', for example).
Critics of a slice-of-life or knowingly 'cute' anime will use 'moe' derisivelyto refer to anime that relies very heavily on the 'cute' factor to bring in its audience, sometimes as a main character trait.
It's true that a lot of anime that relies on gimmicky cuteness and character interaction can sometimes lack in plot and be less inviting to watch, and K-On is no exception to this rule in places.
Moe moe kyun!~
This is part of a running joke in episode 10 where they tease Mio about how 'moe' she is.
In any case, K-On is very aware of its nature as a moe anime (see above), and isn't afraid to play with it for effect.
Another very common criticism of K-On and other slice-of-life anime like it is that the plot is very slow, and could even be described as 'plotless' in some cases. Ho-kago Tea Time don't even properly play as a band together after the first episode until the 6th episode (halfway through the series), and the majority of the anime is made up mostly of other distractions - a 'training camp', exams, shopping for equipment, and general fun. But the fact that they aren't playing enough is always lampshaded, usually by Mio (and Asuza in later episodes), and the group do play as a band together most afternoons through all the tea and cakes, just offscreen.
Just a sidenote - because the actual playing of their instruments is animated using a different and more expensive technique (CGI), music anime as a genre tends to be plagued with shots that don't quite show the fingers - but when HTT do play onscreen, it's given full justice, which is refreshing.
K-On's comic & stylistic elements make sure the anime stays tongue-in-cheek about how plotless it is, and doesn't take itself too seriously. (See 'moe moe kyun~' above for an example of this, too).
It's a running joke both in the fandom and in the series itself that all HTT do is sit in their music room after school and have tea and cakes (the big hint there being that their name 'Ho-kago Tea Time' literally means 'After-School Tea Time'), but that's part of it's nature as a slice of life series. K-On itself originated as a 4-koma series (a four-panel genre of manga much like comics that appear in Western newspapers), and while the anime expands a lot on the obviously limited resources given to it, at its heart the plot is still just a simplistic device to show off the characters and the sense of humour that the original 4-koma was so good at establishing.
The episode where Yui is adorable - wait, that's all of them.
Anyway, my point is that slice-of-life genres, in anime and wider media alike, allows you to explore characters in a truly insulating way - not under life-threatening stresses or unrealistic horror/fantasy situations, but how they interact and evolve on a day-to-day basis, which I think is the whole appeal to slice-of-life. It's escapism at its finest, and despite the criticism that HTT doesn't play on-screen enough, ultimately, K-On is about emotion and exploring relationships between friends, not music.
The second series, especially (entitled K-On!! - the two exclamation marks denoting it as the second series) is a serious tug on the heartstrings with the recurring plotline of the first four members having to graduate at the end of the series and leave Asuza (who is a year below them). I'm not ashamed to say that I teared up.
K-On isn't meant to be a serious look at philosophy or psychology like more 'serious anime'. It's fun, and it's engaging, and it's emotional; its plotless overly moe elements are for tongue-in-cheek humour and because it's cute, not just for attention.
