10 Great Anime Films Of The 21st Century (That Aren't Studio Ghibli)

Ten years on from Redline's sugar-rush madness, television studio Trigger picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Madhouse and delivered their own exhilarating, bonkers riposte in the shape of a gung-ho, sci-fi mecha-mad adventure with Promare. Cut from the familiar cloth of the company's formula on the small screen - director Hiroyuki Imaishi previously directed Gurren Lagann for Gainax before splitting off to form his own organisation - it's a distillation of the genre, played with an unrepentant energy hard to resisit.

Following a global cataclysmic event known as the Great World Blaze, which saw half of all life undergo spontaneous combustion, it follows the exploits of Burning Rescue, an organisation dedicated to chasing the sect known as the Mad Burnish, a cell possessing pyrokinetic abilities who have their own reasons to fight to survive. As the two sides come together, they come to realise that there is more at play than initially feared - and that the world may be heading for a new catastrophe with its eyes wide open.

Arriving on European shores last autumn, it picked up broadly excellent notices, trading with a self-awareness to the genre signposted with a blaring brilliance of enjoyably OTT qualities. Its commitment to playing every trope in the book past the point of parody is part of its charm - it's less a deconstruction than a whole-hearted celebration of the genre, warts and all.