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Joshikōsei Girl's High
They definitely do not make all girl high school anime like they used to.
Also, I think I found the twin for K-ON!’s Ritsu:
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I thought I was the only one that remembered this series.
I liked it, it's a fun series, it's "cute girls doing cute things" but racier (lots of underwear shots) and slightly more "realistic" than shows like that tend to be, the idea being this is more the "real" life of Japanese high school girls but it's definitely still very much an anime, it's simply more "realistic" when compared to something like say Lucky Star.
I was sad when I heard the studio behind it, ARMs, closed last year.
Fuck that shit, we need more anime about delinquents beating people up in the front of the local 7-11 like the greasy chavs that they are. Never seen a proper one ever since the days of Cromartie and GTO. Soundtrack preferably being a Japanese composer aping 70's King Crimson.
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Loved Cromartie, sad we never got anything quite like it again.
I've come to better appreciate Gonzo over the years the more of their shows I watch on my PTW/randomly come across. Gankutsuou is their most ambitious, I personally believe, like holy shit they should've won awards for that.
Like I said, they were inconsistent but always consistently interesting and you could almost always identify a Gonzo series just by looking at it once upon a time.
But from what I understand they went through some financial trouble and almost went kaput, the Last Exile sequel (which I haven't seen yet) is I believe the last "real" Gonzo anime and they've been an anonymous work for hire studio since.
Sunrise is still around because of existing IPs, but they're no longer the juggernaut they once were because the mecha genre is not capturing the hearts and imagination of anime fans anymore. I think they also lost their identity, in a way. Like you can look at an anime and just know or have an educated guess that it was made by a certain studio, and Sunrise was definitely one of them you could spot from a glance not just because of mecha designs, but because they had beautiful character designs, too. They just knew how to draw anatomy while showing touches of it clearly being Japanese-made. This lasted even well into the 2000s at a time I like to call the "tween years" where anime studios were transitioning to digital animation, which then makes you wonder why Studio Pierrot's quality has dropped when Sunrise and even freaking DEEN were able to work just fine with digitally animating their shows.
From what I understand the Sunrise that gave us shows like Cowboy Bebop split off into Bones and Manglobe (maybe?)
Then there's the Sunrise that gave us series like Mai Hime and Code Geass and didn't the director of Code Geass quit making anime? I don't know what Sunrise is up to now (to be frank, I've fallen way out of touch with anime since about 2017 or so)
Meanwhile Manglobe is gone and even Bones has suffered a loss of identity, their big thing today is MHA which could have been made by anybody, nothing about it screams "Bones" to me unlike FMA from back in the day.
Now that I think about it it seems like most anime studios these days lack any sort of house style compared to the past and that's definitely a shame.
Funnily enough, Studio Gallop I don't think looked much different comparing their traditionally-animated shows to digital like Yu-Gi-Oh. But now they're known as the Yu-Gi-Oh people. Sad.
Many such cases it seems. Sad.
I dunno, I think outside of Bones, Studio 4°C, and KyoAni, studios just aren't trying to look different from each other anymore. No little touches and styles that make them stand out to where you can identify the show as "an X production". It's honestly sad.
As I said I feel like Bones has suffered some loss of identity but maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but it does seem like most studios are becoming generic with no little touches and styles and that is honestly quite sad.
Anime as a whole seems to be suffering from genericness these days to me (over 9000 isekai series for example) but hopefully this is just a slump like the way things slumped a bit at the end of the 2000s and things will get more interesting again.
They haven't been as active lately, as far as I can see, but SHAFT/Shinbou very much had a signature style.
Oh boy, SHAFT is a GREAT example of what I'm talking about with recognizable house styles, but from what I understand SHAFT has just recently suffered a huge staff departure meaning they too will probably become generic or fold entirely.
I'd like to talk about the SHAFT series Maria Holic, that's one of my favorites, there's something about the contrast between it's flowery, shojo and yuri style and the bitchy, mean spirited sense of humor that I just find amusing to no end, but the irony is I'm not real familiar with what it's spoofing, it's like me being a fan of the movie Airplane but I've never seen any of the Airport movies, but the best spoofs don't need you to be familiar with what it's spoofing.
At any rate Maria Holic infamously triggered lesbian feminist yuri fan Erica Friedman which makes me love it even more, there's also another plot element which I don't want to spoil (though it's revealed early on) that makes it even funnier in a modern context.
Another studio I'd like to mention is J.C. Staff whose house style generally seems to be "shojo for boys" as all their animes seem to revolve around girls, but seem to lean towards a male audience, at least that was the case back in the day.
