One 24 episode season and a movie. I doubt even when fully finished it would be particularly long.
Is 19 the one with the fight scene I always see clipped all the time?
Escaflowne is predominantly fantasy, it's pretty much fantasy that just happens to have some fantastical mecha in it. Very entertaining and beautifully animated, well worth a watch. I watched the redub and it's a major improvement over the original dub.
The most important thing is to give that kid something he or she would want to read. I learned English because the shit I wanted to read wasn't being translated at all, and went from looking up every second word (in a paper dictionary!) to not needing the dictionary within the span of a single book, because the book was the only book that featured my then-waifu (that was before waifu was a word). I'm now trying to do the same with Japanese, again for the sake of a waifu (it's way harder, and of the stuff I can fluently read or write, I still can't remember how to pronounce about 90%. She's worth it tho.)
I think we were just looking to use Amazon since we want the present to arrive before Christmas. Anyway, I suggested Learn Japanese the Manga Way and the person who asked me in the first place (cough cough totally not my mother, okay, it was my mother) thought it was a good idea rather than trying to guess someone else's tastes.
Is Haibane Renmei similar to Kino's Journey and Girl's Last Tour? I always see that show being discussed in the same realm and I'll probably watch it after I finish Kino's Journey anyway.
Jormungand - Very similar to Black Lagoon with a fun cast to follow, though I've heard the ending is somewhat meh. Lots of fun gunfights backed by a nice ost.
Hard to determine what the "best" is since it's all down to personal opinion, but if I were to give you some recs similar to how sasazuka did given the same 2000-2004 limit:
Recommend Death Parade, but check out Death Billiards first so you can get a good feel what to expect. D-Frag was a fun way to poke fun of game clubs and that no actual game development goes on because they're run by a bunch of wackos who just needed an excuse to slack off.
Death Parade, and Konosuba is universally beloved (don't skip the EDs, they're fantastic).
I always get surprised at people that off-hand reject the idea of watching such shows with stupid comments like "those are for little girls" when a lot of great content is marketed at kids anyway. Gets kind of funny when they list off their favorite shows and it includes a bunch of Shonen titles. I do find though that I can only take such shows in short bursts. Especially Aikatsu I've been having difficulty with due to how the cgi looks in the first season, I've heard it gets better latter, still rough to watch.
There was another post on /a/ regarding this and any critique about Katrina or the translations quickly got deleted. The anime jannies gotta protect their weeb waifu.
