Anime is a hard industry to break into. Despite the best intentions and undeniable passion of the animators, directors, and writers, sometimes a project simply doesn’t go over. The result is that if one wants an anime that brings to mind, say, The Room, there are plenty of options.
This list isn’t meant to be mean-spirited. The lessons to be taken from the worst anime can be just as valuable as those from the best anime. Bad anime can provide a point of reference for what not to do, and they can ground one in assessing the quality of other anime—some anime are so bad that they put other projects in perspective. The following examples might have entertainment value for how bad they are, and they’re great if one is in the mood for an anime so bad it’s good, but each entry also represents a crucial lesson about anime as a creative endeavor.
Ghost Stories
Animated by Studio Pierrot, Based On The Novels By Touru Tsunemitsu
Ghost Stories
- Release Date
-
2000 – 2001
- Network
-
Fuji TV
Ghost Stories makes for a solid starting point. The series adapts a collection of ghost stories to be geared toward children, following Satsuki Miyanoshita after her family moves to the city her dead mother once called home. A cast of other children (and a cat) is slowly assembled around her, working together to investigate hauntings. The story isn’t particularly well-written, and its Western release presented a problem: few people would connect with a faithfully translated script, and the show would lack an audience.
Fortunately, Fuji TV, Ghost Stories‘ Western distributor, effectively gave ADV Films free rein in their own script (aside from a few minor, easily-met conditions). The result is that Ghost Stories‘ English dub has an ad-lib-heavy script chock-full of pop culture references and offensive jokes. The series deserves an immediate mention since, for many anime lovers, it’s the first to come to mind when asked for a trash anime. Ghost Stories is a hilarious watch that shows the road less travelled for overcoming localization difficulties: ramming right through them.
Ex-Arm
Animated by Visual Flight, Based On The Manga By HiRock And Shinya Komi
Ex-Arm
- Release Date
-
January 11, 2021
- Network
-
Tokyo MX
Cast
-
Soma Saito
Akira Natsume (voice)
-
Mikako Komatsu
Minami Uezono (voice)
-
-
Daisuke Namikawa
Soushi Shiga (voice)
Ex-Arm is somewhat tragic. Intended to be a sci-fi ecchi seinen, the story has an actually interesting premise, based around high-schooler Akira Natsume. His brain is saved after a lethal accident and used to power an AI superweapon called an Ex-Arm. Unfortunately, the promising foundation is squandered by its complete lack of quality. The anime was produced by Visual Flight—who had never made an anime before. It shows.
To make matters worse, the series was projected to set a new bar for sci-fi, and it had a solid amount of hype behind it. Upon release, Ex-Arm would end up becoming known as one of the worst-looking anime ever for its awful CGI. Its fight choreography and voice acting were also just bad. The adaptation would turn out to be such a massive disappointment that it led to the cancelation of its source material.
Chargeman Ken!
Original Anime Created By Knack Productions And Tama Production
Chargeman Ken!
- Release Date
-
April 1, 1974
- Network
-
JNN
Cast
-
Fuyuki Takahashi
Narrator
-
Kiiko Nozaki
Miss Nagisa (voice)
-
Kiyoshi Kawanishi
Hiroshi Izumi (voice)
-
Chargeman Ken! is a cult classic among bad anime. As far as the plot goes, there isn’t a lot to speak of: in 2074, fifth-grader protagonist Ken Izumi can become the immensely powerful Chargeman Ken after being exposed to light. This power comes in handy against the primary antagonistic force in the series, a race of aliens called Duralians who intend to conquer the Earth. There’s not much to look for beyond that, however. It would be graceful to say the series has even semi-coherent writing.
A set of vignettes spanning 65 episodes, Chargeman Ken! would fade into obscurity after going off-air. Until the late 2000s, that is, when it was rediscovered by chance on a compilation DVD and became a cult sensation on Japanese message boards thanks to its incoherent plot, extremely poor animation and voice acting, and its overall utterly bizarre feeling. Disjointed, awkward, and a bit too bold for what it is, Chargeman Ken! is a thoroughly entertaining watch with short episodes.
My Sister, My Writer
Animated By NAZ And Magia Doraglier, Based On The Light Novels By Seiji Ibisu
My Sister, My Writer is a trainwreck. The story and concept are whatever—to each their own. It’s a standard romantic comedy flirting with the siscon stuff: Suzuka Nagami is a high-school student who wins an award for her writing and gives the credit to her brother. Things happen, they fall in love, so on and so forth; it’s like Oreimo or Kiss x Sis, it’s all pretty boilerplate.
The tragedy comes down to the animation quality. The studios were fantastically overworked (a known problem in the anime industry) and the quality of the series suffered terribly as a result. My Sister, My Writer is a living manifestation of the crunch and overwork of animation in Japan. That’s not a stretch or a matter of interpretation either; the animators went so far as to put a coded cry for help in the credits by listing an animator named “Shoujiki Komata”, which translated to “honestly, I’m screwed.”
Mars of Destruction
Animated By WaoWorld, Based On The Visual Novel By Satoshi Tsuchiya
Mars of Destruction is roundly considered one of the worst anime ever by those who’ve seen it. Those same people also vehemently recommend watching it. The story is that monsters called “Ancients” start to appear in Tokyo after a Mars mission goes awry. It’s an alien invasion story centered around Takeru and three girls—Yamabuki, Tomoe, and Aoi—who try to fend off the Ancients and figure out what’s happening.
It’s awful, that’s all there is to it. The things it has going for it are that the character designs are cute. The animation is awkward, the voice acting is even worse, and the music is regrettable. To cap it all off, there’s practically no plot. Mars of Destruction is only one episode. An entire space catastrophe, alien invasion, and the revelation of the “surprising truth” behind it all play out in the space of 19 minutes. It’s disorientingly bad, but amidst all of that, it manages to find a charm.
Valvrave The Liberator
Original Anime Series Created By Sunrise
Valvrave the Liberator is a particularly interesting case because it starts off very bad, but then actually becomes very good. The plot is dense, sprawling, and sometimes hard to follow. It follows the war between three factions made up of 70% of humanity. More accurately, it follows the role high-schooler Haruto Tokishima plays when he pilots a mecha called Valvrave to protect his faction, JIOR, from Dorssia.
If it sounds Code Geass-ish, that’s the right intuition. Sunrise is the studio behind Code Geass, and one of Code Geass‘s creators, Ichiro Okouchi, wrote Valvrave. The key to enjoying Valvrave is to not take it all too seriously. As a serious watch, its characters are indistinct and frustrating and its plot makes no sense. However, if one leans into the unpredictability and embraces Valvrave as it is—a beautiful anime whose appeal is its ridiculousness—it becomes an actually good series, with most fans saying that it starts off so-bad-it’s-good before becoming legitimately great.
Hand Shakers
Original Anime Series Created By GoHands In Conjunction With Frontier Works And Kadokawa
Hand Shakers
- Release Date
-
2017 – 2016
- Network
-
Tokyo MX
Cast
-
Jun Fukuyama
Break (voice)
-
Saori Hayami
Shigure (voice)
-
Mikako Komatsu
Kodama (voice)
-
Sumire Morohoshi
Koyori (voice)
Hand Shakers is an unfortunate case altogether. The story is decent enough. Protagonist and high-schooler Tazuna Takatsuki is a talented mechanic who becomes a “Hand Shaker”: someone who is transported to Ziggurat, a world without time, after grasping the hand of a special partner—in Tazuna’s case, Koyori Akutagawa, who it turns out will die if Tazuna lets go of her hand. In Ziggurat, Hand Shakers and their partners must battle to meet God and be granted a wish; predictably, the main duo’s wish is to spare Koyori’s life.
It’s not amazing, but it is workable. One of the strange things about Hand Shakers is that clearly a lot of thought and heart went into the production, but it just winds up unwatchable. The animation is disorienting in a way that’s hard to describe. With perpetual motion, the action at its core becomes incomprehensible at best, nauseating and headache-inducing at worst. It’s a testament to how bad execution can ruin a decent idea, despite all the passion in the world.
Master of Martial Hearts
Animated By Studio Kikan Based On The Video Game By Shochiku
Master of Martial Hearts is laughably bad. The source material is an adult fighting game. Essentially, the OVA serves as a loose adaptation using mostly the same characters: high-school girls who face off against one another in order to get their hands on the Platonic Heart, a jewel that grants wishes.
There is no story to speak of here. Master of Martial Hearts starts off bad and only gets worse as it goes on, and its ending is notoriously awful. It’s short enough, at only 5 episodes, that one can push through it and have an okay time if one is in the mood for fan-service and a lot of nudity. Really, though, the reason to watch Master of Martial Hearts is that it’s a cynical accident one can’t look away from, and that’s really all there is to it.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (OVA)
Animated by A.P.P.P, Based On The Manga By Hirohiko Araki
Countless JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure came to know the series through the expertly adapted anime by David Production. However, decades before David Production ever picked up the anime, there was already an adaptation of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure‘s most impactful part. Stardust Crusaders once received a two-part OVA adaptation, following Jotaro Kujo and the beloved JoJo pal squad that forms around him as they race toward Egypt to confront DIO, a vampire who took over Jotaro’s great-grandfather’s body after a battle to the death.
The problem is the dub. The OVAs of Stardust Crusaders have one of the most laughable efforts at a dub in history. The casting decisions are deeply questionable—DIO sounds like he could pass away at any moment, for example. Beyond that, despite their best efforts, the dialogue and its delivery are jilted and awkward. If one wants to appreciate Stardust Crusaders, then David Production’s adaptation is the way to go. But if one wants to see how not to handle a legendary franchise, its OVA is an entertaining watch built around the kitschy charm of ’90s animation.
Garzey’s Wing
Animated By J.C. Staff, Based On The Novels By Yoshiyuki Tomino
Garzey’s Wing is an OVA that aspired to adapt a set of novels by Yoshiyuki Tomino, better known as the creator of Gundam. Protagonist Chris’s soul is sent to a world called Byston Well while his body stays behind in the real world. His soul apparently has a power called Garzey’s Wing—convenient, in light of the fact that he’s in the middle of a major slave rebellion. There’s an interesting interplay between Chris’s physical and spiritual body as the story plays out, and they communicate with one another.
Here’s the thing about Garzey‘s Wing: it doesn’t make any sense. The story was already middling, and the adaptation worsened that by shoving dozens of episodes’ worth of material into 90 minutes. The pacing is abhorrent, the characters are unconvincing, the animation is terrible, and—above all—the English voice acting is incredibly funny. Garzey’s Wing has earned its reputation as one of the worst anime ever, and it’s a cult classic if there ever were one.
/images.terra.com/2025/03/11/pm-na-ditadura-qhsvntm9dvlc.png)