When I was younger, I could easily watch hours of cartoons every week, thanks to after-school syndication, Saturday mornings and the magical pre-dawn hours where the weird shows aired. Granted, my childhood was the prime of ‘Toy-Commercial-As-Series’, with Hasbro making big bucks off the Optimus Primes and Snake-Eyeses we all enjoyed, while today’s cartoons are a much more artistically valid affair. Friends keep trying to sell me on the merits of ‘Gravity Falls’ and ‘The Amazing World Of Gumball’, but I’ve already fallen prey to ‘Phineas & Ferb,’ ‘Archer,’ and those wonderful Crystal Gems, leading to today’s cel-shaded query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) doesn’t watch nearly as much animation these days, but will always talk your ear off about the merits of ‘Steven Universe’, asking: Which animated series would you rank as the best recent cartoon series?
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One I’ve liked the most in last couple of years is probably Tonari No Seki-kun (My neighbour Seki). Its a short comedy animation about girl who sits in back row of school room beside a boy named Seki. Seki is doing everything else but paying attention to class and girl gets drawn into his very elaborate and clever ways of playing around and wasting time. Its really funny. Star Wars Rebels is also pretty good.
Star Wars: Rebels, Steven Universe and the current TMNT series are top of my list. There are plenty of other current animated series I enjoy, such as the various Marvel series on Disney XD, but those three are the only ones I go out of my way to make sure I watch instead of waiting to come across them or leaving the channel on after something else.
Also, though a mini-series of films rather than a proper TV series, I’m enjoying “Digimon Adventure Tri”, which is set in the same setting as the first two Digimon animated series.
Depending on how broadly we’re defining “recent” I would definitely say Avatar / Korra (last episode of Korra aired a year and a half ago, so I’d say it’s fair game :-P).
Of shows that are still on the air, the only cartoon I’m currently watching is Rebels, which is one of those shows where “when it’s good, it’s great” but isn’t quite up to later-season Clone Wars levels for me yet.
Honorable mention to Young Justice, which I was really impressed by when I discovered it on Netflix. I’ve been a big fan of Greg Weisman ever since Gargoyles (the only other cartoon I’d really put on the same level as Avatar) and YJ definitely reaffirmed that opinion.
seconded, on all counts.