Announcing the Hulu Award for "Best Anime Show"

And the Hulie goes to...

Death Note!

What a series! What art! What a story! Death Note impressed our panelists, many of whom were not anime fans, with its overall quality and depth. Death Note has been scrawled across a variety of platforms-- it has been produced as a manga, a paperback, a novel, a video game, a live-action movie, and this anime series, directed by Tetsuro Araki. It continues to pick up fans in all of its many incarnations.

The story revolves around a student who finds a notebook from the realm of the gods. Writing a person's name in the book will cause that person's death.

The theme has led to some real wishful thinking on the parts of students in China, Japan, and the US. There have been several instances of students making their own replica "death note" notebooks and writing the names of teachers and peers within them. Wikipedia notes that eight children in four different US states have been suspended or expelled for owning such notebooks, while the school district of the Shenyang province in China has explicitly banned Death Note in order to protect the minds of its students from material that "misleads innocent children and distorts their mind and spirit."

If you're thinking of contacting the gods of death and requesting your own Death Note notebook, keep this complete set of rules in mind.



After 20,000 audience votes, the audience favorite was "Mushi-Shi." You can read my tribute to this fantastic series here.


The other nominees were:
Astro Boy
Naruto
Speed Racer