Bakemonogatari.
This thing is really something else. I'm not sure if it's really good or really bad. It's like in a quantum superposition of being aweful and awesome at the same time. I have never come across anything like this anime. There is nothing traditional about it. In fact, though I've never read manga, I feel like it's an animated manga. Like each panel has a short simple animation.
Continuity breaks every now and then when the view changes. Sometimes scenes are shown out of order. It's sometimes difficult to judge whether it's present time or if we're shown a flashback. Dialog is sometimes written on the screen instead of spoken. The episodes are contantly interrupted with short screens with a word or two to emphasize scene changes or something? I really have no idea, it's weird as hell. (They really love their god damn "black scene" card.) There are loads of screens with a bunch of text that go by too fast to read and it's a major pain in the ass to pause to read them. They have additional story bits, exposition, history, and stuff. There are photographs with things drawn on top sometimes. (E.g. a photo of a hand with a wristwatch drawn on top when the character checks the time.) Tiny bits of "live action" shots where successive photographs are shown to give it that choppy animation look. The backgrounds are often abstract, undetailed, usually just shapes and plain gradients. (The backgrounds however do get a bit more detailed later on in the series.)
I've actually had to stop the video a few to calmly say "what the forget" out loud and take a few seconds for my brains to process what I just witnessed.
I just watched episode 12. First the two main characters had lunch for 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Then they had awkward conversation in the back seat of a car for 12 minutes and 30 seconds and finally watched the stars for 5 minutes and 30 seconds. That was the entire episode. And it wasn't terrible. But forget it wasn't good either.
Edit: Only after bothering to write all that did I bother to check the Wikipedia article. It makes so much more sense now. I though the people working on this anime had a screw or dozen loose but it's intentional.
It's avant-garde. This anime really is the perfect embodiment of avant-garde. I didn't even know avant-garde anime was a thing.
Also Shaft.
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