The Worst Anime of Fall 2024

They can't all be winners, anime fans, but this season has a clear "worst" winner from ANN's critics: Uzumaki. The four-episode series catastrophically imploded after multiple delays and a PR campaign that conveniently focused on its premiere episode; the only one truly helmed by director Hiroshi Nagahama.

ANN's critic choices are based on loose criteria for "worst;" below are series our writers found wholly disappointing despite initial first impressions, marred by production collapse, tearfully boring, or containing noxious story elements that left them cold.

The opinions below may contain spoilers.

The worst anime of the Fall 2024 season is Uzumaki. What are we even doing here if people can't agree that Uzumaki is the season's biggest flop!??

Originally announced in 2019, Uzumaki was set to be the best attempt yet at adapting the prolific horror mangaka Junji Ito's work. Previous adaptations were largely maligned because they couldn't capture what made Ito's work so affecting. His work isn't scary simply because it's filled with novel horror iconography; it's scary because of the painstaking detail Ito puts into making those reality-shattering creatures and events look as wrong as possible. The greatest strength of Ito's manga makes his work uniquely unsuited to adaptation as fidelity has to be reduced for the sake of movement and other qualities unique to the animation medium. 

With its immaculate trailer featuring an unnerving score, black and white color palette, and lavish details in both the design and animation. Uzumaki seemed like it would finally break the Junji Ito anime curse. Then, by episode two, it mostly became a vehicle to deliver a bunch of cursed imagery to viewers. 

The animation in the back three episodes of Uzumaki is historically bad and speaks to what was now a troubled production cycle. While we may never know how exactly things broke on this project, segments of the result are amateurish and feel more like a YouTube fan animation of the manga than a professional production. The running animation in the second episode is downright cartoonish; what appear to be stock animations for fire and tornadoes appear in the third and fourth episodes, and in the fourth episode, there's an unintentionally hilarious moment where characters are dragged across the scene without any of the animation techniques that help simulate movement.

The one compliment I can give Uzumaki is that it will motivate folks to check out Junji Ito's body of work. After all, Viz put more effort into promoting Ito's manga while Uzumaki aired than Warner Brothers did in getting the word out about the anime. I don't regret watching Uzumaki or even making it my top “Most Anticipated” pick for this season, but the most enjoyment I got from this anime was speculating on how it could go this disastrously wrong and that easily makes it worthy of the “Worst Of” title. 

Going into this season, I was sure that Tower of God Season 2: Workshop Battle would be the worst thing I watched. After all, the first part of season 2 failed spectacularly in both storytelling and animation quality. However, this cour saw a marked improvement in both areas. It's still not “good” on any objective scale, but it is certainly “better,” which left me with the realization that I had seen something worse this season: Demon Lord, Retry! R.

Demon Lord, Retry! R is one of those anime I can enjoy, and I admit that it's not a very good show. The plot is basically that of Overlord (with a man waking up in the body of his villainous demon lord game character but in a real fantasy world), but the tone is largely different. While it has more than a few lighthearted beats, Overlord likes to revel in its grimdark events and twisted psychological character beats. Demon Lord, Retry! R is much more going down the path of a comedy and blatant power fantasy.

While dark and dangerous things do happen, they are the exception rather than the rule, and you always know that Hakuto (or one of his minions) will appear and easily handle the situation. This means there are very few stakes in this show, not to mention that it's insanely predictable. Meanwhile, the comedy is, while not annoying, nothing that will make you keel over laughing, either.

The other thing that stands out is simply that it doesn't look very good. It's watchable in its best moments. At its worst, it's a collection of still frames in the place of animation or a static character drawing being moved across the frame like in a 2000s flash animation. Moreover, the faces are often wonky, and neither the placements of the characters' features nor their proportions are consistent.

However, I want to make it clear that I didn't hate this show. Sometimes, you want to kick back and watch the baddies get curb-stomped by a likable cast of characters while assaulted by a never-ending stream of puns and double-entendres. Is it a show with below-average quality? Definitely. But that doesn't mean it won't be enjoyable for the right kind of person.

While I was tempted to write about the unfortunate production disaster that was Junji Ito's Uzumaki here (my pick for most anticipated of the Fall 2024 season, unfortunately), in the end, I still enjoyed it for what it was, despite its many faults. At least the staff for Uzumaki tried but were overcome by organizational issues outside their control. My pick for the most offensively awful anime of the season goes to Trillion Game, and no amount of money or production time could polish this golden, gemstone-studded turd into something palatable or beautiful.

I'll admit I enjoyed the first Trillion Game manga volume I reviewed for the manga guide a while back, finding its absurdity almost endearing. While the first few episodes are a decent enough adaptation of that volume, I soon found myself souring on the entire premise. Sleazy, long-haired grifter Haru is one of a pair of protagonists whose sole aim is to climb the greasy pole of financial success to one day become a trillionaire. Not in yen, but in U.S. dollars. His justification for this dream is that he's the most selfish person in the world and, therefore, somehow deserves to accumulate such obscene wealth.

With the original manga written by Dr. Stone's Riichirō Inagaki and illustrated by Crying Freeman's Ryōichi Ikegami, I held out some hope that this would turn out to be a satirical look at the emptiness of excess, poking fun at the prisoners of avarice: businessmen who are pathetic slaves to “hustle culture.” But no, Trillion Game plays its story entirely straight, and each successive episode makes me want to punch slimy, creepy Haru in the face even harder as he keeps scamming his way upward. The very existence of billionaires in the real world is a moral stain on the collective soul of humanity, and any media that glamorizes these wage-thieving, worker-exploiting, world-devouring assholes deserves to languish in a bottomless pit of negative equity.

There are shows from this season that told worse stories and featured a worse cast of characters, and there were undoubtedly those that wasted more of their viewers' time, especially since they all had more than a measly four episodes to work with. Out of every show that aired this fall, though, none ended up being such a betrayal to their audience and their own potential as Uzumaki.

I won't belabor the point by rehashing the behind-the-scenes drama and production failures that led to Uzumaki turning out the way it did; feel free to check out Lynzee Loveridge's excellent breakdown of each episode if you want more of those juicy details. The point is, Uzumaki got everyone's hopes up by debuting with a stupefyingly gorgeous premiere that, despite whatever pacing issues it suffered from by cramming so much material into one episode, still managed to capture a lot of what makes Junji Ito's art so iconic and horrifying. It was an artistic and technical triumph that seemed to finally break that longstanding curse that afflicted any attempt to bring Ito's work to life in a medium other than the original manga…and then Episode 2 came out, and all of that goodwill went up like so much eerily spiraling smoke.

The remaining episodes of Uzumaki weren't just a downgrade from Episode 1; they were so obviously fraught with sloppy shortcuts and amateurish errors that were embarrassing to watch unfold. The manga's legendary visuals were mangled into unwieldy CGI models and cheap-looking animation cycles, and the epic story of Kurouzu-cho village's spiral apocalypse was left in incoherent tatters. It is not an exaggeration to say that, when all is said and done, it likely would have made for a scarier and more faithful adaptation if the whole show had simply been footage of one guy reading the Wikipedia recaps of the manga's original chapters. Just thinking about the experience of watching this show bums me the hell out, man. What a waste.

I don't think I've had an easier time picking my least favorite anime of the season than now. The Uzumaki anime wasn't just bad on its own; it consistently outdid itself by hitting multiple layers of disappointment. I don't like judging a book by its cover, but sometimes, you can get a sense of what a show's quality is relatively early on. This can allow you to adjust your expectations and judge the show on the merits that it wants to go out on. The problem with Uzumaki is that it teases you with so much potential only to make every single wrong decision that it can. This doesn't just fail as an adaptation to arguably one of my favorite works by Junji Ito; it fails as a standalone piece.

Many might think I'm strictly talking about the animation quality, and yes, there are some incredibly egregious lows here. Considering the hype and that it is only four episodes long, there aren't a lot of excuses for why things turned out the way they did. Granted, the overall animation quality isn't as bad as social media made it out to be. There are still some moments here that are leagues above other Junji Ito anime adaptations. Granted, it was far from consistent, but if this was strictly an issue of animation quality, then I could chalk it up to misplaced ambition.

But no, my biggest problem with his adaptation is there isn't enough real estate here to truly capture the atmosphere and unsettling nature of the Uzumaki manga. There are moments here and there, but the uncanny and almost progressively cult-like nature of the town in which the series takes place isn't as impactful. The anime adapts Uzumaki in one of the worst ways, focusing on specific moments and imagery without any proper buildup or sense of lasting impact. It's like constantly firing a gun with blanks. Sure, the sound is loud, and it might startle you for a second, but no impression is left with you. We barely get any insight or internal monologue from our main character, which makes many situations lack relatability and claustrophobia from the original manga. The whole thing feels empty. I don't know what metric I'm supposed to judge this on, and no matter how much I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, the series found a new way to let me down.

Sports anime aren't exactly strangers to getting shortchanged or screwed over. Farewell, My Dear Cramer came in to do its best to depict girls' soccer with only a few loose dollars and a dream. And my poor, beloved Stars Align got cut off at the knees so mercilessly that the director is still looking for an alternative way to finish the story. However, Blue Lock is hardly a niche, yet it still serves as this season's highly visible disappointment, seemingly out of sheer hubris. These sexy striker bois sell themselves, so why should the production's management allocate time or resources to the animators or even pay them fairly?

The result follows the fancy footwork of the first Blue Lock with a papered-over pale imitation. Characters' play is portrayed with slides and pans of near-static frames, as CGI gifs of soccer balls are shamelessly slapped over them. Everyone constantly appears to be hovering just over the turf in slow motion. I've seen more sports sakuga in the lacrosse scenes of the original Muv-Luv visual novel! The anime attempts to distract from this flat approach by layering a heaping helping of composited-over digital effects. I know these work for some viewers, but to me, they're just too obvious as a bandaid trying to cover up the utter lack of true animation. When it's not throwing Winamp visualizers at you, Blue Lock is cutting to obvious CGI stand-ins of the boys' feet in an attempt to find some way to show more fluid ball handling. CGI in anime has come a long way and can interplay with 2D animation quite well in the right hands, but in these uncanny feet, it just stands out as the shortcut it is for what they couldn't do otherwise.

Look, the base story of Blue Lock is, by and large, still fine at this point, but that story is only half the reason fans are here. If you want the story told as a series of static images, well, the manga is already right there. And what was done to Blue Lock on the animation front needs to be called out. The results of this production are so emblematic of everything wrong with the anime production pipeline at this moment in time that it deserves to be singled out. This show didn't self-destruct; it was starved to death—by leadership with short-sighted egos and no respect for the acts of art or adaptation.

Let's be perfectly clear about something: I had remarkably low expectations for this show, even going in. The first season—which I reviewed here—placed the bar firmly on the floor. And the first episode of season 2? A mess. And yet somehow, against all odds, this show that was already so awful, by whatever improbable means, found a way to become even worse. And the worst part of it all is that it didn't even get so much worse that it's funny now—it's still nowhere near EX-ARM's level. Rather, it's just thoroughly convoluted and unenjoyable.

So what makes it so, you're almost certainly wondering? After all, I'm going to go on a limb and guess that odds are, you didn't watch this show (trust me: you didn't miss out). Both this and the first season have flown under the radar—and rightfully so. Anecdotally, most of what few people I've seen watching this are Yokō Tarō super fans (oh yeah, did I mention that Yokō Tarō—as in, yes, that Yokō Tarō, of Nier fame—is credited for KamiErabi's original concept? Well, surprise!) who probably just want to watch anything his name is attached to. In any case, to be honest, a lot of KamiErabi season 2's biggest issues are continuations of things that made the first season disastrous as well: exceptionally poor writing, rigid animation, and characters that make no sense. Although it feels like markedly less effort was put into this season, as these already-glaring issues have become even more apparent. The animation quality, I think, has suffered the worst of this. I've included a gif with this so you can hopefully get a taste of what I mean.

In Trillion Game, the protagonist creates a fraudulent business. He tricks people into believing they're speaking to an AI assistant who will help them with their shopping when actually it's an employee manually doing the work behind the scenes. His reason for doing so? He is the self-professed “world's most selfish man,” and he wants to become a trillionaire for funsies. Yes, this is the person that this anime wants you to root for. I'd forgive you for assuming Trillion Game, with its droopy-eyed retro character designs and unpleasant greed, is an adaptation of an old IP from, perhaps, the 1980s. Wrong; this preposterous premise dates back to a manga first published in the very recent year of 2020. In our modern age of disgusting income inequality, when many people struggle just to purchase necessities, this story about a guy who wants to get rich for the heck of it is not only out of touch, it's morally unconscionable. I said as much in my review of the manga's first volume, which covers the same ground as the show's first three episodes.

Still, I could not have guessed how much worse it would get after the first arc. When the protagonists built the aforementioned fake AI business, it was beyond parody—after all, this is a real thing that happens a lot. Even more concerning, the AI scam business's model relies on the recurring labor of a specific person: their sole female employee. It's just one example of the upsetting treatment of female characters. More prominent is Kirihime, the show's not-so-aspirational girl boss bank heiress who can't help herself but compare business transactions with sexual innuendo. She's far too excited about the prospect of selling herself to the protagonists like a cheap escort to feel like a real 20-something. It's hard to believe she'd opt for an awkward back-and-forth with Haru, the show's alleged hot guy with an overly bulbous nose and dated hairstyle. It's just an overall gross show that's completely in opposition to most of its intended audience's sensibilities, not to mention their class consciousness.

Poor Seirei Gensouki - Spirit Chronicles. It shows such moments of promise, like the way it utilizes at least two forms of the isekai genre or the hero Rio's internal conflict between his past life as Haruto Amakawa and his present one as Rio or the way that those two come crashing together when his reborn-in-another-world gets smashed with hero-summoning. But like its first season, this second one is crumbling under its own weight. The drive to adapt the novels faithfully seems to be behind some of this; once again, the season appears set to end before the next major interesting thing happens. It has so many characters with their own storylines that it loses sight of the fact that the most interesting one, how Haruto/Rio reacts to suddenly being brought face-to-face with his first love, Miharu, gets lost. The preponderance of women falling at his feet just isn't as compelling as him trying to sort through his feelings, and Miharu is beginning to realize that there's a reason Rio's alias is “Haruto.” Heck, the political situation is even given a backseat to ugly CG monster fights, and that's the whole reason Miharu and the others have been summoned in the first place! I'll still watch a third season if it shows up because, well, it's a very watchable show. But it's also the most frustrating thing on my watchlist, and I wish the adaptation had streamlined the books.

This show grabbed some attention early on for its visual style, a beautiful pastel world with watercolor-textured backgrounds and character designs by esteemed shōjo artist Lily Hoshino. I'd be lying if I said I didn't watch most of it because I wanted to believe the story could hold up to the animation. It wasn't going to win any awards for innovation in the majokko genre, mixing concepts from countless magical high school shows without introducing any of its own. But hey, things don't have to be original to be good, right?

Eventually, I had to admit it: the writing just wasn't up to snuff. There was just too much going on, and none of it gelled together. There's the plot with Minami-sensei's kidnapping, Kurumi's evolving relationship with magic, the privilege the magic class students have over the regular students, some sort of conspiracy in the background… it's the sort of thing that may have worked spaced out over a much longer run time like its predecessor Little Witch Academia, but didn't have enough space to breathe when crammed into a single cour.

I hated the characters. Kurumi and Yuzu are cut-rate Akko and Diana, and the secondary characters make me want to slam their heads into a wall. Their future goals are their entire personalities. You want to be a singer? That means you have no other interests or qualities! Their choice to include the twins Kyo and Asuka really emphasized that, since the regular-class one talked incessantly about fashion while his brother acted something like a person.

Lily Hoshino is a talented artist, but I hope the next project her name is attached to is a better one.

I suspect I'm beating a dead horse here, so I'll keep this brief. I love Hiroshi Nagahama. He directed some of my favorite anime. He has a strong design and animation CV. If you see him at a convention, he's an engaging panel host and incredibly gracious in person. He's a singular voice in the industry, and you can see and hear it clearly in the first episode of Uzumaki. Those twenty minutes are the closest anybody has gotten to translating Junji Ito's weird vibes into an animated form. In many ways, that episode looks and feels like a culmination of Nagahama's style and experiments, from the rotoscoped surrealism of The Flowers of Evil to the meticulously composed natural world of Mushi-Shi. He understood the assignment. He had the vision. I don't know what kind of managerial snafu happened behind the scenes to compromise that vision, but we all saw the results. It wasn't a spiral into horror. It was a tragedy.

Well, okay, at least it was better than the first season of Demon Lord, Retry!. But it's like saying that Metallica's ReLoad is better than Load. Just because it's a hundred times better than the thing preceding it doesn't make it any less boring. And even then, ReLoad at least has the saving grace of having “Fuel” on it. Meanwhile, this season of Demon Lord, Retry! barely has enough gas to keep itself going. It all feels like a giant slog.

Certainly, the art has improved, yet all of the hang-ups and flaws of the last season still make their way on screen here. It's to the point where, style-wise, it feels like a rehash of what we already saw—considering how the bulk of the first episode and a half is a loose retelling of what happened last season. The show continues in a direction with the plot constantly landing flat on its face, from being burdened by awkward pivots to comic relief, fight sequences with static and janky animation, and characters who are, above all else, flat and uninteresting.

There is an attempt at being gripping with the enslaved falcon-girl Eagle's backstory, and even then, I felt that was kind of trite. Hey guys, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance called; they want their bird-person slave subplot back. I'm not even kidding; the guy who enslaves Eagle even looks like Path of Radiance's Oliver. The show is so bereft of imagination that at one point, a character tells another character that they better carry the weight, which makes me wish I was watching Cowboy Bebop instead. Indeed, Demon Lord, Retry! R steals more ideas than Carlos Mencia and (even worse) seems to revel in it.

In episode five, our main character, Akira, summons a new servant to support him. The summoned servant sees another character freaking out about a supposed Dark Salamander sealed and hidden underneath their skin, saying that their main character syndrome is “so bad, it's good.” I wish this show was. Too bad it's just...bad.