I've already had to do several rewrites of this topic but I think this will be the final version, this is not in any order, this is just an analysis of bad anime as a subject.
A while ago, I asked the Minamicon British Facebook group what their worst anime was and got quite a selection of obvious candidates as well as some new ones added to the cesspool, big thank you to everyone in the group who contributed, just hope this article does it justice.
1. Bad Dubbing
I'll get the obvious one out the way first, bad dubbing is fairly common and it's not exclusive to English speaking regions, ask Finland what it thinks of Digimon and Portugal what it thinks of Dragonballz. But it's relevant for a totally different reason rather than just incompetence from the dubbing group or poor censorship and that's exposing how bad the anime is to begin with. Everyone knows the Ghost Stories anime dub when the crew of ADV were told, just go crazy with it and the result was becoming the most infamous dub in recent memory when in Japan it barely made any yen. Another example is Angel Cop whose notoriety made it utterly hilarious as a dub as it could only be scripted in such a way that swearing is considered a second language, yet Japan are probably embarrassed that it got made in the first place.
2. Excess Baggage
Picture a localisation company welcoming it's newest product from Japan, to use an example say Evangelion; it comes off the plane it's welcomed with open arms but then you look behind it at the wide eyed hyperactive anime that doesn't understand personal space, you ask Eva who it is and they respond. "That's Debutante Detective Corps, my boss told me I had to bring it with me"
A common practice in early localisation was that Japan wasn't ready to surrender it's biggest titles without it's commercial failures coming along with it and we in the west had to deal with it, while the odd 10% were hidden gems, the majority were pretty dire.
3. Japan's Love Affair with Western Sci-fi and Action Movies
Alot of the influences that shaped early anime came from western pop culture, the obvious one being Star Wars, the less obvious but more significant one being Thunderbirds, a British puppet series about an International Organisation devoted to rescue, you can probably throw Disney and early Superheroes into that as well, European literature, Japan's own literature, it's own love affair with Kaiju, Sentai and Robots and so on, so alot to pick from, but for the relevance of this piece we go to the 80s.
Around the height of the 80s economy boom in Japan and the early rise of Otaku, Japan accepted imports of a lot of Western action films, not just Star Wars but Terminator, Robocop, Mad Max and Streets of Fire to name a few, Japan's own attempts not only to cater to the phenomenal success of Akira overseas but to see if their new found obsession with the 80s would turn more profit in the west but there was one problem, by the time it reached our shores, it was already several years out of date, MD Geist, Odin, Garzey's Wing, I could name quite alot but I'll spare you the pain. Sadly we didn't do ourselves any favours.
4. Anime revived the Adult Animation Genre
Anyone interested in the history of animation will have heard of Ralph Bakshi. His contribution to the medium came in the form of adult orientated animation from Stoner titles like Fritz the Cat, the genre laid low for a while in the 80s when the Reagan administration decided that you can turn cartoons into 20 minute toy ads.
A decade later and someone in New York decided that they really loved MD Geist and brought all it's friends along for the ride, over in Britain we saw this as an opportunity to sell to the ultra edgy crowd, "violence, sex and swearing, this is not your normal cartoon" they all said.
Early Minamicon panels have talked about this subject better than me, I was still quite young when the first anime wave happened so I have no knowledge of the early British backlash from the media, nor do I look back at the era fondly which leads to the next one.
5. Old Anime Hasn't Aged Well
It's inevitable with any medium that's gone on longer than a generation that old anime will not age well, ask anyone who's watched a Go Nagai anime if they can still watch it today without cringing or anyone who watched early ecchi and harem anime can still convince themselves it's still good; another sub category of this is next on our list.
6. Anime who out stay their Welcome
This is usually the argument aimed at longer anime who are still around after a good decade, the criticism usually aimed at seasonal rot usually revolving around running out of ideas but from a franchise perspective you won't get anyone saying their favourite season of Tenchi Muyo was GXP, War on Geminar or Ai Tenchi Muyo, nor do Gundam fans say that they enjoyed Gundam X or Gundam Reconguista in G, the former someone actually asked me what Gundam X was; sometimes a flash in the pan idea doesn't need expanding on, looking at you Death Note.
7. Being too Accepting of Mediocrity
This might be disputed but I believe the 00s to be the worst period of anime.
The anime boom in the era was massive but it came at a heavy cost when quite a few distributors went under in the west, this bolstered by the world economy nosediving as well and the fact most of the mega hits of the 90s had finished or were passed their best. If I listed every anime released in that decade, 20% were good, 60% were okay or never saw, the rest were terrible and to back it up Mars of Destruction, Skelter Heaven and Abunai Sisters were all made in this decade, three of the worst anime in recent history, the final straw was Haruhi Suzumiya thinking it's okay to release the same episode 8 times; we learned in the 2010s not to just accept crap with only occasional let downs from cheap fanservice shows like Kampfer but we are slipping into some bad habits in the 2020s with too many isekai and cheap ecchi series, hopefully that's just a covid thing and not a sign of things to come. Ex-Arm is a warning of history repeating itself.
8. Japan's Skeletons in the Closet
I wouldn't even know half the legendary terrible titles if not for curious anime Youtubers looking into the Skeleton closet. I usually watch Anime Abandon by former Channel Awesome reviwer Bennett the Sage but I have already seen or read about most of the stuff he covers, then there's Kenny Lauderdale who I discovered information about new legendary terrible anime like Twinkle Nora Rock Me and Chargeman Ken; anything else is usually lost media of dubs that were made for mail order anime or something we didn't even know got licensed at all.
9. The OVA bid to sell anything
Original Video Anime is best described as an extended pilot of an anime hoping to be green lit for a series or more often than not sold alongside a video game property that no one outside Japan cares for; I doubt anyone from Pro Gaming Fighter League Evo is wishing for Psychic Force to be added to the Game List nor is anyone on Twitch going to do a playthrough of Skelter Heaven on the PlayStation 2 but even popular video games don't look on their anime fondly, ask Tekken, Fire Emblem and Sonic the Hedgehog how that went for them.
10. Just because you can copy something, doesn't mean you should
It's inevitable that any trend in the anime spectrum is going to generate copy cats and while I already brushed on Isekai and Ultra Violence it's not as notoriously copied as Evangelion; the angsty teenage robot pilot genre generated tons of copy cats from the likes of Jinki Extend and De:Vadasy, the latter I consider the worst anime ever made, it got so bad that Gainax themselves had to rewrite the rules of the giant robot genre when they released Gurren Lagann.
So that's a look at the subject of bad anime, let me know what you think and if I should expand on anything on the subject.
