I'm so happy I get to review this title, this is easily in my top ten favorite cartoons of all time, it's Oban Star Racers!

Oban Star Racers is a French Pseudo Anime cartoon about a girl named Molly, who by a series of events in trying to reunite with her estranged father ends up joining an intergalactic race team owned by said father to compete for the "Ultimate Prize" in the Great Race of Oban (No not the Scottish town Oban)
No one knows what this prize is but every species in the universe wants it and will compete in this race very reminisce of Star Wars Pod Racer to do so, and by any means seeing as you can use weapons.
Not long into the first race, the Earth Team's Star Driver is mysteriously injured and Molly takes his place for the rest of the series with varying degrees of success barely scraping into the finals only for an incredible revelation to shake the foundations of the story and lead it to one of the best finales of any cartoon in the last ten years.
What I love about this cartoon is that it doesn't use any cliches at all, lets list some of things it does differently.
The main character is female. (Despite editors wanting the character to be male, the story goes that the creator rejected the recommendations from corporate editors and decided to make his own studio and finished the cartoon under his own command)
Lead character's cocky attitude is justified seeing as her father did abandon her for a long time.
She doesn't win every race (barely any at all) avoiding Miracle Rookie Syndrome.
It's Pseudo Anime and it doesn't suck.
It somehow manages to not rip off Star Wars.
The enemies don't seem to win much either.
In fact it's never made clear who the main enemy is.
Molly's motives have nothing to do with the plot in the first place.
The romance sub plot fails despite the lead being female.
There's no "rival" character.
The cartoon avoided censors with a lesbian couple.
and Earth's motives for the Ultimate Prize aren't much better than the Crogs motives, so much for Earth being Mr Benevolent.
With everything here, no wonder it won several awards, the only downside is that between this show and Code Lyoko, the French have never made another cartoon even close to the standards this one produced; granted not every idea that a cartoon maker gets full control over is going to be good, heck you only have to look at many of the small independent works to see how horrible things can get but when done correctly, you get a creation of genius like Oban Star Racers.