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I've finally done it. After years of searching, I have reached the pinnacle of anime.

I can't believe that this even exists in reality. That's how absolutely horrible this is. The art is literally done in Flash. The animation is even worse. The characters are so one-dimensional that I'm surprised the design team didn't just revert to stick figures. The sound design is so bad that it would have been an improvement to just phone it in on a landline from Pyongyang. The voice acting might as well have been done by random people dragged off the streets and threatened by force to read the script. ... The plot made no sense from the jump to the final episode. There is no rhyme nor reason, nor anything resembling a coherent thought to be found in the entire production.

It is truly the worst anime I have ever seen. I hate this more than Cosprayers. I hate this more than Ex-Arm. I hate this more than Gibiate.

Combined.

I have truly outdone myself.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go remove my eyeballs with azidoazide azide.

Score: 0.1/10
Recommendation level: Do not try this at home.

I have finally made it through EX-ARM. And I am not best pleased with the results. By now, you've all heard the basics, so I won't bore you with the plot summary. Part of that is because it is so bloody stupid as to defy logic, decency, common sense, and the causality of the universe. And part of it is because my brain cells are currently voting to unionize so that they have a stronger voice when the rest of me gets the stupid idea to watch shitty anime.

I'll go ahead and get the elephant in the room out of the way: the visuals. In ... 2021, there is no excuse for CGI to look this bad. Seriously. I know that this is a new studio with a rookie staff, but that is no excuse for this level of incompetence. The character models themselves weren't always hideous, but the way they moved definitely was. Games were released on the Sega Genesis that had better art and animation than this. Some might think that I am exaggerating for comedic effect here, but I am being completely serious. And if the production staff thinks that rolling back the clock 30 years is a good thing, then the least they could have done was manage it competently.

And if the visuals were bad, I daresay that the audio was slightly worse. The music barely registered outside of the opening and ending songs. The opening sounded like a garage band from Sapporo covering Blink-182 and the ending sounded like a 12 year old girl singing along in the shower to early No Doubt, but those were at least not fucking atrocious so I'll give them a pass. The voice acting was all over the place, with some of it being almost passable while the rest of it sounded like the sound producer was on vacation in Petropavlovsk during recording and heard everything through a Soviet-era landline connection. The sound effects seemed to be raw stock files from a scam website just hurriedly thrown in at the last minute. The inconsistency of the sound, at times even within the same scene, actually succeeded in making the visuals seem even worse.

And the writing... Oh gods, the script for this thing... It felt like a primary school play written in class as students just randomly shouted things as the teacher frantically tried to write them all down. I am surprised that the original mangaka hasn't come out to apologize publicly for this disaster, but there's probably a clause in the licensing contract that would cause a financial penalty if they tried. Gods know nobody is going to be rushing to the store to buy up the backvolumes after this lurid attempt at an advertisement, so they need all the yen they can get. The storyboarding was a mess. The dialogue was trash. The fight choreography got shoved off a bridge. The whole concept of continuity was run over by a train. Plot points were just left hanging in mid-air. It was such a hot mess that it made the sound seem even worse.

This was a failure in every single aspect. And we are all poorer because of it. Even people who never watched this show have suffered from it simply because of the fact that it exists. So we come now to the burning question. What was worse: EX-ARM or Gibiate? It is definite that both are dreck tier anime that barely deserve to be called anime. In my estimation, both are below even the worst put out by the infamously horrid Idea Factory productions. But as to the bottom of the list, I still have to give the lowest mark to Gibiate. For all its incompetence, EX-ARM at least tried to have something interesting for a few episodes before it all went to hell. Gibiate, on the other hand, couldn't even manage that. So the production staff of EX-ARM can at least take comfort in the fact that they have avoided being the absolute worst TV anime that I have ever seen. But they are in a very close second place.

Score: 1/10
Recommendation level: Concussing yourself with a black hole would be safer.

Yoiko is exactly what it says on the tin. A fifth grader who looks like a college freshman and her wacky adventures after she transfers schools. Lots of lascivious suggestions, some downright lewd scenes, and plenty of grownups we are supposed to feel disgusted about due to staring at someone who we know is supposed to be 10, all wrapped around what would otherwise be a fairly basic grade-school comedy show.

The writing is the main stumbling block here. The comedy is poorly timed, the jokes are flat, the characters are bland, and just about everything is in tonal whiplash mode in order to wrap ... itself around the initial concept. It can go from full Golden Boy ecchi to a bargain basement Azumanga ripoff in seconds. Even under the best of circumstances, that would be a difficult task to pull off. With this show, it is far from what I would call a good job.

Art and animation are another category that seems to be a miss. 1998 had some excellent series with work that can hold up to the test of time. Yoiko is not one of them. The art is basic as a whole, without the style or panache needed to pull something like this off. The animation is merely competent, with no flair or sign that the animators were enjoying their work. Unfortunately for them, this is the kind of show that really needed a stand-up job from the art department. Studio Peirrot was not up to the task. At all.

Even for a normal series, I could not recommend this in good conscience. Add on the subject matter, as well as starting off each episode with a lengthy nude scene featuring someone that the show doesn't let us forget is only ten years old, and you have a title that makes me want to suggest that it be actively avoided.

There really is no plot to this except to watch people try to survive as long as they can. Sometimes that can work under the hands of a master of the arts, such as a George Romero zombie movie. As Masahiko Kamino's debut in the director's chair, it was so pathetically managed as to make me actively root for a full party wipe as of the second episode. Nothing worked. At all. This is an example of everything not to do in order to put out an anime, and the complete lack of coherent direction from Kamino is Exhibit A as to why it failed.

The ... failure begins at the script level. Character development is reserved for people about to be messily killed, as a cheap way to attempt to bring some last-minute attachment to the characters. Attitudes are barely one-dimensional at best, the dialogue is stilted and jarring, there are no reasons to like the characters as human beings, and no sign that they were ever supposed to be anything more than mere outlines. The sole bright spot here is that the characters are at least not straight off of a cheatsheet of tropes, yet that is far from significant enough to pull any of my views away from the bottom of the pile.

The problems continue through the production values. The voice acting is horrible. The individual spoken lines vary so much in quality as to be incoherent, and the way they fail to flow into a conversation makes me question whether the producer was even in the same solar system as the recording session. The music is absolutely garbage, with no sense as to theme, mood, or timing, and has made me want to rip my eardrums out of my head on multiple occasions. The sound effects are so unimaginative that I would place a bet on whether they were simply pulled from a stock database and used with no other consideration. Add those factors to the rampant issues regarding timing, and you have nothing but a disaster on your hands.

And finally, we come to the art and animation. The 2D work was bad enough to earn poor reviews all by itself. From the overreliance on still frames to represent action, movement that has no weight or anything resembling natural motion, and disgustingly substandard fight scenes, this is the most telling failure. There were times when I thought they simply colorized the storyboard frames and considered it done. An anime of this genre could survive a lot of other failures and still be considered mildly entertaining as schlock, but only if the animation was of sufficient quality. This was not. And it is only compounded by the addition of 3D animation, which is about as badly done as I have ever seen. This may have been acceptable work in 2002 when the technology was being brought into the medium in full force. It is not acceptable now.

We have a failure to launch from start to finish. I can't just point at one person and say that they failed the most, as it was clearly a team effort to be this atrociously horrible. I can easily place this at the very bottom of my rankings for TV anime, as it is the worst example of the medium. And it deserves to be mentioned alongside Skelter Heaven and Twinkle Nora Rock Me as one of the absolutely worst anime of all time.

Score: 1/10
Recommendation level: Run away.

This was something I had grabbed because I wanted to watch another mecha show. (And it was recommended from the Bokurano page, so yet another downvote for MAL recommendation givers.) I really should have grabbed almost anything else.

The characters are about as unlikable as possible, and the stilted and awkward dialog does nothing to help with that. I was actively rooting for the big bad to kill all of the kids off, but only after the grownups had been piled up and burned alive so at least some of the screaming would actually have a purpose behind it. The plot is inane technobabble stirred ... into misunderstandings and flavored with characters repeating things already mentioned over and over again.

And the art and animation was just... Ugh. I understand that things will be poorly lit when a major part of the action takes place inside an area called the Lightless Realm, but a predominantly black color scheme doesn't help at all when you are trying to see what is going on with the action. The character design is generic and bland, the animation has more issues than the New York Post, and the CGI is about as believable as the anime as a whole. Which is to say not at all.

This is not an enjoyable anime. Period. It failed at any aspect of storytelling, fight choreography, and giving a reason to care about the characters. For a psychological mecha drama with major action pieces, that is a death blow. I would recommend that this be placed on the pile of titles that should be forgotten about. Not the pile of titles to be avoided at all costs, as that only encourages masochists like me to pick it up, but just forgotten about. Hopefully that will keep people from ever finding it again.

Recommendation level: Not even worth a hatewatch.

Tucked into an inconveniently located corner of the Shibuya district lies The Village Of Marchen. It's not an actual village, but instead an stop-motion animation studio crossed with a Flash-based animation studio that is further crossed with a music recording studio. Offering classes in the various stop-motion skills to anyone who wishes to learn such a relatively obscure skill, as well as classes in Flash animation for those who for some obscure reason desperately want to learn how to become big on the internet's ancient dinosaur of a platform, The Village Of Marchen sits quietly and dreams of the day that it might once again ... become relevant to the rest of the world. The studio has put out some rather impressive animation pieces such as Worku that strive to, if not push beyond, then at least try to find the boundaries of the medium in a way that artists like Nagao Takena never will.

Without the little (for lack of a better word to describe it) plot synopsis on the MAL page, this would be confusing as all hell. The Wash Bird flies around looking for laundry to do, then brings it back to The Wash Island for it to be cleaned. Unfortunately there is no actual indication as to what is being done for the first third of the piece, leaving the audience confused as to what that bird is doing flying up to a seemingly random... thing... beast... contraption... boat... whatever. After receiving a shirt from something that was inside the whatever, the bird flies back to the island. And that's when they turn the absurdity dial up to eleven and break off the knob.

With no dialogue and only an attempt at basic sound effects (which is even more odd given that they have a recording studio on site), you have to rely more and more on the animation to carry the story. That problem becomes worse when the animation flies about as well as a lump of clay pushed off the edge of a table. Between poorly-designed models, horrifyingly basic stop-motion, and hacked-together footage, it is just horrendous all the way around. And that problem becomes even more worse when you realize that the story that all of the above was meant to convey had less impact and than watching someone mow a lawn. Which is saying something, as I've seen animation about lawn mowing that made it look absolutely fascinating in comparison to the real thing.

And when you put all of those failures into the whole of the piece, it becomes worse than a failure. It becomes a mistake.

If it wasn't for IMDb, we wouldn't know very much about this tile. The version we have access to is there-release of the 1983 re-release by Joseph Lai's Adda Audio Visual Ltd. The original opening credits aren't present. Instead, a series of still images that are completely unrelated to the rest of the movi lists the people that worked on the dub. For example, IMDb lists Yeong-man Heo as the original creator while the credits cite Rick Ashley as being the creator/scriptwriter. (No. Not Rick Astley. Otherwise, these jokes would write themselves.) Therefore the rest of the credits, especially the list of animators, should be ... dismissed as unreliable.

The other mystery behind the version we have access to is the distributor Dunellen, New Jersey-based Digiview Entertainment. (Dudes. The website is on Tripod of all places... Sheeesh.) Specializing in $1 bargain-bin titles found at Wal-Mart and Dollar General stores, this company brought B-movies, blaxploitation flicks, animation ranging from this to a horribly sliced-up (and probably bootlegged) version of Kimba The White Lion, and obscure public domain titles to the general public for a decade before reportedly switching over to budget-priced content that the unwary might actually think was interesting. Such as, for example, the 1991 Ron Marchini vehicle known as Karate Cop.

I did say they might think it was interesting, not that they actually would.

Why did I spend this much time typing about the background companies? To avoid typing about the title itself. Unlike normal for these posts, I won't be putting in Streamable links or GIFVs to illustrate the points. This is partly because this would be difficult to manage without subtitles to give them some kind of context. Yet it is also partly because I'd end up having to just copy the entire movie, and that would take too much effort.

First, let me bring up the positives.

...

Now that those are out of the way...

Actually, I kid. The art was fairly decent for something from 1979. It wasn't up to the standards of various A-List studios, but it was far from the most egregious example I've ever run across. Yes, the main character is basically a carbon-copy of Char and the robot/real boy looked like a cross between Boy Atom and Pinocchio, so the character design isn't exactly an Oscar-winning performance. (Then again, Suicide Squad... No, I'm not going to go there. That way chaos lies.) For the era, however, I'm willing to give the art a pass for being at least closer to competent than any other part of this production.

Everything else is a clear and overriding negative.

The music was mostly a non-factor, though the main theme was so ear-grating that I would rather listen to Yoko Ono on cocaine than one more rendition of whatever the hell that was. Sound effects seemed like they were ripped bodily out of various Hollywood titles or made by a tone-deaf Foley artist. The animation varied between bland and uninspired, with not even a single moment of competence for the era. The character design was either atrocious or a blatant ripoff. The backgrounds made absolutely no sense whatsoever, with characters going from hovering in space one minute and walking on a planet the next.

Yet for as bad as those were, the plot was even worse.

In the future, a cruel queen captures and enslaves humans in order to restore a world ruined by nuclear disaster only to be thwarted by Captain Leo and the Cosmos Warriors. Just the brief outline seems bad enough, but the execution was far far worse. Space centaurs hurling spears that can bring down a flying spaceship. Space wizards that can break windows of a spaceship without letting all the air out. Fight scenes consisting of characters bouncing around a room and saying "This person is strong." Ill-thought gladiator battles that would make the Gorn versus Kirk bout look like it belonged at Wrestlemania. A climactic battle fought at the edge of a lava lake that somehow made its way into the bowels of a space station. And finally, the lava lake aforementioned self-destructing. And those were the high points. The scene-by-scene drudgery was even worse and not worth even mentioning in passing.

And yet... That still wasn't the worst part of this movie. That dishonor goes to the horrible overdubbing. Poorly edited, horribly cast, inanely written, and with dialogue that makes Trump's Twitter feed look reasonable, I would not be hesitant to call this the worst dub I have ever encountered. It is skull-smashingly horrid in all aspects, and capped off by whoever it was that played Captain Leo sounding like John Lennon on Quaaludes. If I have to listen to one more Liverpudlian accent with a deadpan performance, I better be unconscious for the duration lest it bring out flashbacks from this movie.

Between a script that sounded like it was written by someone fired by Ed Wood for incompetence and a plot that had less logic than a film project made by a group of 3rd-year boys, this is the epitome of dreck. Whether or not Captain of Cosmos is the worst title I have ever seen is still a matter of debate, but it is definitely somewhere close to the podium. It certainly takes the crown of Worst Animated Movie I Have Ever Seen away from the religious propaganda vehicle known as UFO Gakuen no Himitsu.