For various reasons I feel like looking back at the anime from the first decade or so of this century, year by year (partly because I by and large now have a certain amount of distance from it, since I saw most of it years ago). I can't possibly do my usual 'best N I watched in' style of entry for old years because I have no idea what I actually watched back then, so the best I can do is look at what (first) aired in those years and that I still think is memorable or notable. This is a personal version of memorable and as such will skip some famous works that I personally didn't watch or that didn't stick with me in any particular way.

(For example, InuYasha started in 2000 but I never really watched it. Love Hina is also a 2000 series, I saw all of the TV show, but I don't think it's memorable for me in the way I want to cover here.)

Note that memorable does not necessarily mean good and there's at least one series that's going to cause me to froth mightily when I get to its year. For the most part this will be anime that I've seen most or all of. I'm taking date information from Wikipedia (which turns out to be a bit incomplete) and Anime-Planet .

Standouts:

• FLCL : I have nothing to say about this that other people haven't said better, except that watching it cold was a very trippy experience that probably can't be duplicated today (by the time you see it you'll likely have heard at least something about it).

• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade : This is an amazing movie. I have nothing coherent to say about it and others have written lots about it anyways.

  (Wikipedia doesn't list it as a 2000 movie because it was released in France in 1999. It was released in Japan in 2000 so it counts for me.)

Ordinarily memorable:

• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust : This was epic in a good way with all sorts of nice action scenes and some reasonably affecting characters.

• Blood: The Last Vampire : This was an excellent little unpretentious movie for what it was. I still have fond memories of several scenes (including one genuinely funny stereotype-puncturing one). It spawned a whole series of other works that I am progressively less fond of.

• NieA_7 : This is a less well regarded Yoshitoshi ABe work but I enjoyed it a fair bit. It is slower and smaller in scope than his other works but no less charming.

• Escaflowne (the movie): Oh boy. The TV series was fine but the movie version of the story was kind of a trainwreck, with changes left and right. I once had a lot more opinions about this but they've faded with time.

Honorable mentions:

• Ah! My Goddess: The Movie : I was actually surprised to realize that I remember quite a lot from this film, including a quite nice race scene. It's well done and a quite good distillation of the essence of AMG.

• Initial D: Extra Stage : I get to count Initial D in this because Extra Stage aired in 2000. Extra Stage is a nice little side story focusing on some of my favorite secondary characters.

• Android Kikaider : This takes an old Japanese tokusatsu show and turns it into a surprisingly affecting psychological thriller that's lovingly drawn in an old-school style to boot.

Things I haven't seen:

• Banner of the Stars : I've seen Crest of the Stars and have always wanted to watch more, but Banner fell into the 00s gulf in my anime watching.

There are a number of other shows from 2000 that I have definite and often fond memories of but that I don't think are memorable enough for me to say anything about here. An incomplete list is Boys Be... , Yami no Matsuei , Gatekeepers , Gravitation , Hand Maid May , Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran , Love Hina , and Vandread .

(Some might be more memorable if I had seen all of the show instead of just parts.)

Sidebar: Me and incomplete or missed series from the 00s

The early 00s have a lot of incomplete series for me because I fell out of watching anime for a while. At the start of the 00s I was watching anime through various local anime clubs, but around here they steadily withered away as digital fansubs grew (which was kind of sad to see). For various reasons I didn't make the transition myself right away and only started watching anime on the computer rather later on. So there's a bunch of series that I saw some but not all of through an anime club before the anime club closed down, but I never went back to watch the rest of.

(And a certain amount of series that aired then, I missed at the time, and I've never gone back to watch since.)