I could name Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Digimon or Monster Rancher as influential to me, but I don't really consider them so...they're shows I grew up with; I didn't even know they were anime until several years after the fact. I still don't consciously think of them as anime, to be honest. So I am going to go with...



Princess Tutu! A show I decided to watch out of sheer boredom and ended up loving to pieces. I watched Tutu for its story, not for flashy action scenes or humour, which was all I had looked for in anime previously. But I genuinely cared about the characters, and that fantastic blend of the familiar (the fairytale characters and classical music pieces) with the unfamiliar (the twists in the plot) kept me hooked right to the end. I guess it was with this show that I started to see anime as more than just Japanese cartoons, I guess? An art form in its own right which can tell a captivating story just as well as a good book or video game can. There have been other anime that have had this effect on me since, but Tutu was the first, and I still consider it one of the best.