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The Worst Anime of Spring 2024

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If anything, Western audiences will likely be more receptive to CG productions.

Dunno. I get the feeling more than half of the EN-speaking anime fans on the internet still don't like 3DCG anime, saying "They are ugly" or "Don't try to imitate the hand-drawn animation by reducing in-between frames. It's simply not working".

Somehow people blaming Toei, but I'm not surprised licensors know 3DCG anime won't appeal to casual anime fans, even if it's considered good anime, thus didn't license it.

And I am surprised that the article didn't mention The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases.

Quote:

If anything, Western audiences will likely be more receptive to CG productions.

Dunno. I get the feeling more than half of the EN-speaking anime fans on the internet still don't like 3DCG anime, saying "They are ugly" or "Don't try to imitate the hand-drawn animation by reducing in-between frames. It's simply not working".

Somehow people blaming Toei, but I'm not surprised licensors know 3DCG anime won't appeal to casual anime fans, even if it's considered good anime, thus didn't license it.

The_Daytona_500 wrote:

Imagine having anything but Yuru Camp last in a season that contains Yuru Camp. Though Yaiba gave it a serious run for it's money

This one baffles me. I can understand how some may not get into YuruCamp, but it is its own thing and is as delightful as ever at doing what it does.

I get the Girls Band Cry joke, but, eh, this column shouldn't be the place for that outside of a drop mention in passing, or mention it in the best category. But with Sound Euphonium doing stellar work, which I'm sure is better than GBC in every department, means the best meritocratic girls band still won.

Yuru Camp has 2 problems. Other than Rin and to a lesser degree Nadeshiko, this show's entire main cast is as insufferable as Zenitsu is in Yaiba. I could tolerate the first season when Rin and Nadeshiko had almost the entire screentime, but from S2 it's been painful. The other problem is this show is about camping, the most boring thing in existence. To make a show with this topic even remotely interesting, you need a very strong cast, so lacking that, the show is a recipe for disaster.

Ah, Toei. I can’t prove it’s them who dropped the ball on Girls Band Cry, but I will say that given their track record, it’s most likely them. I wonder if it was a case of arbitrary super draconian rules the major streaming platforms weren’t able/willing to abide by (and yes I’m still salty about forcing everyone to use their questionable “official” English subtitles for Sailor Moon Crystal.)

Having watched HIGHSPEED Étoile straight to the finish line, I'm delighted Steve Jones (and others) gave a shoutout to that impressively vacuous anime. Outside of the races, at select points -- i.e., when they would be called "most hype" -- it was just a vacuum of nothingness in terms of humor, character, literal basic plotting. Episode 2 was esssentially a rehash of episode 1, and it doesn't truly get an ostensible plot until episode 3; that's not even touching the characters for whom "barebones" is either a charitable or the most accurate description, truly shovelware marketable anime girls (and two guys) who are somehow getting a mobile game and a VN because this media mix train isn't stopping. Every character can be boiled down to a simplistic description with 1-2 character traits, and that's who they are for the entire show. The sassy, self-indulgently confident AI of ami-chan is literally more of a character than our main heroine. To say nothing of such baffling choices as dedicating entire episodes to the "King" and "Queen" and going no further than "He is ostensibly a nerd" and "She is a playfully competitive," as though that latter wasn't already palpable, or a sad backstory for another character that speedruns multiple episode's worth of character beats. Badly. There is just so little there it's almost hard to talk about, except also not really because everything it does is the most trite characterization imaginable. I ended up laughing my ass off when, upon beating the aforementioned, Rin does a title drop for her special moniker. Just an incredibly nothing, nonsense show, and I will almost miss it. Anyway, please watch Overtake!, it's a charmingly heartfelt, grounded, original sports drama that blends the various requirements needed to be a successful pro driver with some truly human character animation. It felt compulsively watchable in the best way, to say nothing of how it handles feeling like you are not, or cannot be, your best, and the weight of expectations and assumptions from people all around you. I actually got teary-eyed, with how delicately it touched on some things I did not expect from it. Everybody at TROYCA did a splendid job and I'm likewise glad to see it still mentioned.

Unnamed Memory gets by, despite all that it does wrong, by virtue of having things known as "characters," and "a plot," and "tension" and whatnot. Of course, those characters are only wafer-thin instead of paper-thin, the plot is speedran to hell and back, the editing is insubstantial or actively interering with coherency or plain uninteresting or all of those all at once, and the theoretical tension is pretty well sidelined by virtue of "Tinasha is the bestest witch to ever witch" or "Oscar is the coolest cool king-to-be- to ever be" or "This is a romantic drama" but I can squint and read between the lines! Also, sure, the finale pretty much undoes all of the events leading up to that point, which is one of the most anticlimactic things to do. I still didn't see it coming, given how incomprehensible or things just sort of happening the show is, though it's still nominally present. I can still see the story getting warped, and it's evidently a busy LN to some degree with all of the moving parts and characters whose individual plots get wrapped up within the span of actual minutes. The car was chugging along, as opposed to barely out of the prototyping stage, however battered it is.

Re:Monster is one I'd count if I watched it, I suppose, though given I don't always consider grossness on the same level as flouting basic storytelling principles, it's just kind of whatever to me. Not like I enjoyed the several chapters I read before dropping, or considered any of it good, or liked anything that I saw, or found it interesting to dissect from any view I could think of. But hey! It was technically doing something (that I would sooner forget about). All the same, this, like the above, is one I can get being chosen instead, simply because of how blatant and encapsulating its own issues are.

In terms of others I didn't finish and thus necessarily can't really count unlike the first two, Gods' Game We Play had a supremely forgettable first episode, Vampire Dormitory was simply uninterestingly bland and not wild enough in any particular direction, Tonbo and Rinkai! felt painfully boilerplate from their first episodes. Rounding out the "Not Really's," Mysterious Disappearances is not really worth a place here, but my word, has the adaptation been such a letdown for something I've been anticipating quite a bit. The spirit is there, strangled by a spirit crossed with multiple other interpretations of the same folkloric beast... or something. There's functional, and workmanlike, and simply bad, and it's been all of those at various points. It gets by on my appreciation for being ultimately a pretty softhearted story with interestingly fun folklore and myth considerately baked into the MOTW format, and nothing else really. A real bummer.

Also, great bait there with Girls Band Cry, even knowing the staff I saw watching it wouldn't actually put it here. I like that. Part of me would sooner see a different entry for this; another part of me only feels raw vindication.

MiniMarps wrote:

I just don't get how they figured there wouldn't be any demand for Girls Band Cry, after the latest entry into the veeery similar Bang Dream franchise won some publications' Anime of the Year last year.

If Toei had no plans to distribute it in the West, why license it to France?

And why would their USA YouTube account upload an English sub trailer? Why bother promoting a show that wasn't going to be licensed for English speakers?

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Toei, to me, seems like a company that is cripplingly behind on the times, thinking it's still 2006 and the only anime that sell are shonen action series.

Or maybe the American companies (especially those focused solely on anime) don't want to license the non-Shonen content?

The_Daytona_500 wrote:

Yuru Camp has 2 problems. Other than Rin and to a lesser degree Nadeshiko, this show's entire main cast is as insufferable as Zenitsu is in Yaiba. I could tolerate the first season when Rin and Nadeshiko had almost the entire screentime, but from S2 it's been painful. The other problem is this show is about camping, the most boring thing in existence. To make a show with this topic even remotely interesting, you need a very strong cast, so lacking that, the show is a recipe for disaster.

I disagree completely about the cast being as bad as Zenitsu. For one they don't constantly whine and complain about stuff or run away in fear like he does, and they put in the time & effort to get the stuff needed for their trips & how to use them. They do have their annoying moments sure but they're nowhere near as bad as his are. Granted I haven't watched Demon Slayer past S1 so maybe he's improved since then but still.

As for camping I'm not a big fan of it myself (which is why it took me so long to watch it) but I do like how the show handles it & find its characters a big part in making it entertaining to watch.

I'm surprised at people hating on Demon Slayer, I found character introductions and their interactions very fun and interesting. It's a change of style, but not for the worse.