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A part of me wonders if Rick and Morty The Anime is intentionally supposed to be bad. Takashi Sano may not have a lot of directorial credits, but he isn’t incompetent. He’s worked on plenty of shows over the years and his record suggests he understands structure and what makes a good show. Yet, every passing week that Rick and Morty The Anime airs, the same question pops into my head, one which I’ve complained enough about in past reviews: “who is this for?” Honestly, I’m annoyed at this point because the show itself just isn’t made for anyone. Rick and Morty The Anime is an inept, convoluted mess that can only exist with the egotistical clout that a massive franchise like Rick and Morty can have and a crew that can’t keep creatives in check.
A couple of weeks ago, I checked out an article from Polygon detailing Toonami’s history with creating original anime for the block. It’s a decent read, albeit one that feels like a promotional ad for Adult Swim’s shows opposed to a full critique and breakdown of the creation of these shows. However, one thing stood out to me as part of that article. During the production process for The Big O’s second season, Jason Demarco (current SVP of Action animation and Anime at Warner Brothers Discovery) and Adult Swim did not interfere with the production of the show. While they did give a couple notes for feedback, for the most part, they let the creatives do whatever they wanted, which to me is both a good and bad thing. It’s good in the sense that suits at these massive corporations aren’t coming in on the Japanese side and micromanaging the production staff, watering down their art for a western audience. But this is a double-edged sword with not wanting to interfere while still giving small bits of feedback. So it turns out bad, in the sense that, as can be seen with Rick and Morty The Anime, there’s a reason why one would want to wrangle in creatives and why having tight productions are needed. Because otherwise, without that oversight, you are left with crap like this. A complete mess of a series that has no distinguishable plot hooks or interesting characters and instead, we’re left with a show of random ideas all fighting for the same amount of attention.
One of the most common criticisms of anime, especially with regard to mainstream perception, to the point that it’s become a meme on the internet, is just how convoluted anime plots can be. I’ve watched anime for years and while I believe it’s not that complicated, and others tend to blow it out of proportion, there are definitely some anime where the plot tends to be more difficult to explain than your average domestically-produced show because of the complexity of the story. Rick and Morty The Anime is one of those anime. It’s an overly-complicated mess that doesn’t do enough to explain itself to the viewer. This episode flat out sucks in a way that annoys me. It has no structure, which results in an awful presentation. Structure is, by its very name, the basic building block of storytelling. A beginning, middle, and end are in every tale since the beginning of time. While they can be told out of order, even shows and movies that tell stories out of order don’t just randomly bounce around, they have a methodology to the jumbled structure, and even in these instances, they need to have some type of rewarding payoff by the end. This week’s episode, the whole thing sees itself jumping around from Jerry being a superhero fighting the Yakuza, to something about a sword, to… well, I honestly don’t even know what else they tried to cram into this twenty-two-minute episode, and to me, honestly, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard for me to care at this point. It’s sad that after last week’s episode, which I found to be not good or great but “fine,” enough to where I could see the vision, a week later, we get to this episode and it goes back to being the same kind of disappointing product as the first three episodes. To me, it’s just bad. As far as I am concerned, Rick and Morty The Anime is awful, and at this point, I’m only continuing to watch it to see if there is any kind of payoff by the end. Unfortunately, even if there is a payoff, I have no reason to believe it will be rewarding. This show is a disaster in every single way, and as much as I understand the shorts that were produced were popular and got attention, it baffles me that the full series got the greenlight to begin with. Going by the final product we’re getting; this isn’t what a Rick and Morty anime should have been. Instead, it is a collection of ideas for more shorts stretched into full-length episodes that attempt to form a series, but the execution simply isn’t there and thus it fails miserably.
4/10
