The Plaid Pladd

The first guest post of the year is written by my BFF, James!! He is an expert on bad anime and gifs, so he is more than qualified to give you a run down on this subject. Exciting!!!-PLADD

I’m gonna level with you guys: I love making fun of bad animes. So much so that for January’s guest spot (BROUGHT TO YOU WITH HOURS TO SPARE), I’m going to give you a short (Disclaimer: Not actually all that short) list of some of the stupider ones I’ve seen. I’ll even put them into arbitrary groups so you can pretend this is some kind of Post-Apocalyptic YA novel wherein Sekirei is tragically miscategorized and has to JOIN THE REVOLUTION against the plutocratic Bad Anime Oligarchs with the help of broody and mysterious resident bad-boy (and possible love interest???) Darkside Blues. But can their battlefield love survive when Darkside’s incredibly poorly explained backstory COMES BACK TO HAUNT HIM? Or will Sekirei instead find herself drawn into the not-even-remotely-interested-in-her-advances arms of the rebellion’s other resident bad-boy and most dangerous soldier, MD Geist?????

Animes Where an ORDINARY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT Discovers They’re the FATED MESSIAH OF ANOTHER FANTASTICAL WORLD

1.) Garzey’s Wing

Garzey’s Wing is a twist on the classic narrative formula where the main character gets whisked away from their mediocre modern existence to a vaguely medieval fantasy realm where they must overcome their fish-out-of-water status and use their relatively advanced knowledge about roller skates and/or hamburgers to fulfill their role as the Fated Warrior destined to defeat the Evil Empire.

The twist here is that Garzey’s Wing is fucking terrible.

Garzey’s Wing is like Escaflowne meets The Room. Inconsistent animation quality, a story that doesn’t even TRY to make sense, a translation that reads like Google Translate gave up and DIED halfway through it, and an English dub so stilted that has to be HEARD to be believed all combine into a kind of bad anime PERFECT STORM. Much like the Matrix, it’s difficult to simply TELL you what Garzey’s Wing is, so I wholeheartedly suggest you experience it for yourself.

For those of you who need help processing what you just witnessed, or just can’t bring yourselves to actually, you know, WATCH Garzey’s Wing (understandable), allow me to provide some context with a transcript of the opening of the OVA:

 

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EXT. SOME CITY – SUNSET

FADE IN to a SLOW DOWNWARD PAN along a tree, passing a buzzing cicada. Our hero, CHRIS, is sitting on his motorcycle and is putting on his helmet. His friend RUMIKO stands nearby, berating him with the awkward intonation of someone who learned spoken English from a god damned Speak’N’Spell.

Rumiko: AREN’T YOU HOT IN SUCH HEAVY CLOTHES WHY DO YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO YOUR HOMETOWN NOW YOU FAILED THE COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAM TWICE NOW

Chris (Equally stilted delivery): IT DOESN’T MATTER I WILL COME BACK AFTER I ATTEND THE CLASS REUNION POOL PARTY TOMORROWRUMIKO [sic]

There’s an AWKWARD PAUSE coinciding with a JANKY ZOOM IN while they both look off camera at

CUT TO: A Cicada, flipped over on ground, struggling to turn itself over and take wing. Could this insect’s convoluted situation in fact be a metaphor for Chris’ own life? SO SYMBOLIC

CUT BACK TO: Chris and Rumiko

Chris: *Drives away blankly*

Rumiko: YOU ARE SO EASY GOING

ROLL OPENING CREDITS while Chris drives through various locations as intensely as he is able. 80’s acoustic rock plays in the background. It is now NIGHTTIME. Suddenly, apropos of nothing:

Chris: MY NECKLACE IS RATTLING I WONDER COULD IT BE THE SHIRATORI SHRINE

DRAMATIC PAN to THE SHRINE (helpfully subtitled in huge block letters), which he is apparently driving by AT THAT VERY MOMENT

Chris: SHIRATORI? THIS MUST BE THE PLACE WHERE YAMATO TAKERU NO MIKOTO CAME DOWN FROM THE SKY

Chris’ INCREDIBLY NATURAL EXPOSITION about Yamato Takeru no Mikoto (whose involvement in the plot is never further expounded upon) is interrupted when his ENIGMATIC NECKLACE suddenly rattles and shimmers with a mild RAINBOW OVERLAY.

Chris (No change from any previous delivery): WHOA WHAT THE HECK IS THIS NOW? UAHH

Chris’ final grunt of “surprise” is in response to the appearance of a GIANT SPECTRAL RAINBOW DUCK dive bombing him OUT OF NOWHERE, separating him into NAKED CHRIS and CLOTHED CHRIS. Both Chrises are still wearing the enigmatic necklace. The movie’s score kicks back in as Naked Chris is sucked into the spectral duck and dragged away as it flies off, leaving Clothed Chris behind, driving his motorcycle down the highway, COMPLETELY NONPLUSSED.

Naked Chris (To Clothed Chris): UAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH CHRIS WHAT’S GOING ON CHRIIISSSSS

FREEZE FRAME. Letters on the screen say FROM THE BYSTON WELL STORY

UNFREEZE. The river below suddenly explodes with BLUE ENERGY DRAGONS which shoot into the sky and converge on Naked Chris and his duck captor, exploding into a PINK ENERGY WAVE that envelops the screen. Naked Chris falls toward the camera.

FREEZE FRAME on Naked Chris in super awkward mid-fall with the title card over him. The words GARZEY’S WING appear in small block letters under an enormous untranslated banner title that the viewers can only assume must be Japanese for ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

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Additional clips in the linked video include Naked Chris’ graceful descent into the world of Byston Well involving a voice who may or may not be A DAMN GHOST (never explained; possibly Yamato Takeru no Mikoto?), a pair of random giant women just chillin out reading in the vortex between dimensions (also never explained and possibly Yamato Takeru no Mikoto(s)), an annoying fairy sidekick (probably not Yamato Takeru no Mikoto (OR IS SHE)), a dinosaur said fairy insists is a DURAGUROL, and Garzey’s eponymous Wing (OOH IT’S SHINEY).

And that’s all just in the OPENING; imagine 90 solid minutes of this. Characters are named and then instantly forgotten, the voice actors continue to trip over their own impossibly stilted lines, the script continues to just straight up leave random Japanese words untranslated, and Chris’ high school reunion pool party (Rumiko) continues to be a plot point. Keep in mind this is all on top of the generally INSANE plot that just casually throws out non sequiturs like Chris suddenly realizing, unprompted, that THEY SPEAK ANOTHER LANGUAGE IN THIS WORLD BUT I CAN UNDERSTAND THEM VIA TELEPATHY

HIGHLIGHT: When the two Chrises form an interdimensional braintrust and MUST SOMEHOW MAKE SENSE OF THEIR CONVOLUTED SITUATION

2.) Armageddon

 

No, not that one.

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

So, Armageddon is a Korean animated movie about (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a normal high school student who is suddenly thrust into a fantastic world he never knew existed and learns that he is said world’s fated magical messiah who must save the universe from the Evil Lizard People from Space/the Future and Their Malevolent God-Computer Overlord from Another Dimension as the Delta Boy, the genealogical descendent/avatar of the GOOD God-Computer whose powers he gains access to after being shot by a technicolor Terminator trying to Sarah Connor him, but only manages to cause him to be REBORN as Psychic He-Man.

As you might have been able to guess, this movie KIND of goes off the rails somewhere around its FIRST MINUTE. Watching Armageddon is kind of like watching a train wreck that lasts an hour and a half, and yet somehow never slows down or stops crashing into things. Some bullet points:

• Movie opens with an exposition dump about an unnamed society in the Andromeda galaxy’s search for intelligent life forms elsewhere in space and how, that failing, they just went FUCK IT and started screwing with evolution on other planets to create sentient life for them to discover because apparently that’s CLOSE ENOUGH. Their reasons for doing any of this? NEVER EXPLAINED.
• The above happens during a montage of RIDICULOUS 90’s CG, with imagery that somehow manages to be the visual equivalent of a STUPID SEX METAPHOR
  

  So, space is like, an unfertilized egg, right, and the aliens are fertilizing it with the… intergalactic sperm of intelligent life? Also a dinosaur was there

• The female lead’s entire relationship with the hero is played out via montage. And I don’t mean like, halfway through the movie, they realize they’re in love, and then there’s a montage, I mean like, they meet, and then there’s IMMEDIATELY A RELATIONSHIP MONTAGE, with no further lead-in. She’s had like five seconds on camera with him prior to this. Also they spend so little time together outside of the montage that later when the main character has a flashback to all the good times they shared, his flashback montage consists of what happened literally JUST BEFORE the flashback, proceded by the initial relationship montage, in its entirety. That’s right, this movie features RECURSIVE MONTAGES.
• The art direction for this movie is really weird. Like every male character has a weird hexagonal butt-chin and literally every other thought that went through my head while watching this thing was OH MY GOD HIS FACE LOL
• Despite its penchant for montages and giant exposition dumps, the movie also never slows down to explain anything. Like at one point the characters are trying to escape the enemy, and say something like, WHAT’S HAPPENING ARE WE IN A TIME WARP then say WELL WE’LL JUST HAVE TO BREAK THROUGH and then they’ve broken through the time warp. How? Why? NO TIME TO EXPLAIN WE HAVE TO FIGHT THE DEATH STAR NOW
• Did I already mention the opening?
  

  Because it’s still amazing

3.) Superdimensional Romanesque Samy

This is basically the same movie as Armageddon, except instead of He-Manchild Heisung flying a space ship through a comet in order to travel to another dimension and SAVE THE FUTURE from wrap-around sunglasses-wearing COMMANDER KASEROS and his master, Space Skynet, you have Ordinary High School Girl (TM) Samy ascending to Buddhism-fueled Goddesshood in order to save the multiverse from the clutches of the Biblical Noah’s Demonic Twin Brother (and amateur Captain Harlock impersonator) Noa, and his master, the DEMON EMPEROR. Of course, in grand tradition, Samy’s story also features an almost insulting lack of agency on the part of the female protagonist. Like seriously, she spends the entire movie doing literally nothing but being protected by other people until, as mentioned, she awakens to the POWER OF THE UNIVERSE and ULTIMATE ENLIGHTENMENT and decides (in a worryingly (to her God-sent allies) autonomous fashion) that she isn’t really super interested in taking sides in the war between heaven and hell that has apparently been going on since the beginning of the universe. A transcript of me and my brother’s reaction to the VERY NEXT THING she does with her newfound omnipotence:

My Brother
no more violence
that’s what I want

Me
destroys ship

My Brother
LEVELS SHIP

Me
lolol
all beings are equal in my eyes
except you fucking demons
VAPORIZES SHIP

Also at some point the movie suddenly stops being Alice in Wonderland and starts being Saint Seiya, complete with a correspondingly sudden revamp of Samy’s appearance, all over the course of her falling into the water and coming up for air.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all you need to know about this weird Wizard of Oz/Bible Fanfic hybrid.

 

Animes Whose Anachronistic (and Stupid) Gunkata is the LEAST of Their Problems

1.) Musashi Gundoh

What if I told you that the guy who created Lupin the Third ALSO created an anime series about an alternate history dual-pistol-toting Miyamoto Musashi who uses the ancient art of GUNDOH to battle the demonic forces of an alternate timeline Tokugawa Ieyasu bent on returning history to its TRUE COURSE (aka the one where he’s the shogun, natch) with the mercurial help/hindrance of mechanical genius/Tokugawa’s drinking buddy, Leonardo da Vinci?

And what if I told you that said series is so bad it’s memetic in Japan?

Well, he did.

And it is.

I don’t know what the plot of this show is. I’ll probably never know. There is no official English translation of Musashi Gundoh. There’s not even a (non-joke) fansub of it.

Let that sink in for a minute. This is the internet. There are people out there who translate shit like Ikki Tousen, on their own time, FOR FREE, and even they have better things to do than translate Musashi Gundoh.

Not that it really needs dialogue when the main draw is the show’s infamously poor animation during basically any given action sequence. Entire sword fights consisting of seven or eight frames, looped repeatedly. Any scene involving running or horseback riding looks like they just kind of pasted a choppy gif over an uncropped photograph. Literally ANY ATTEMPT at dynamic changes of perspective results in characters faces becoming even more off-model than usual. Almost every in-battle movement is accomplished by JUMPING, because having a character shittily leap off-screen and then having just BE wherever you need them in the next shot is apparently all this studio could fucking handle.

Basically, this show is amazing.

However, while I would HIGHLY recommend checking out some of the compilations, digests, and highlight reels people have put together for this show, I wouldn’t suggest watching the show unabridged, unless you have a method of making the long swathes of untranslated dialogue (talking is easy to animate lol) more entertaining. If you really must watch this anime in its entirety (and if so, what happened, did you lose a bet?), I’d suggest turning on Youtube’s automated closed caption translations for a whole extra layer of failure.

2.) Grenadier

Because sometimes you just have to make an anime about a ridiculously busty gunslinger who reloads using her tits.

Basically, Grenadier is an anime about a woman named Rushuna Tendō who was trained in Equilibrium-style gunkata as a member of her majesty’s secret service going on a journey across a Vaguely Feudal Fantasyland in order to spread peace by SHOOTING THE EVIL OUT OF ALL THE BAD GUYS.

If that sounds suspiciously like the premise for a good anime, though, don’t let the awesome spin I put on it fool you. The show also features a gratuitous number of clothing optional hot springs and Rushuana sadly has basically no personality beyond optimistically believing that if she hugs enough people (also clothing optional) it’ll eventually add up to world peace. Also, as previously mentioned, she keeps her ammo in her cleavage and reloads one-handed by somehow bouncing a bunch of bullets into the air and whipping her revolver through them.

 

Animes Where Oda “The 6th Demon King” Nobunaga SELLS HIS SOUL in Exchange for UNTOLD POWER

1.) Wrath of the Ninja – The Yotoden Movie

If it’s the Sengoku Period and an evil army of demons is laying waste to all the ninja clans in sight, you’d best believe Oda Nobunaga is behind that shit. This movie comes with a fairly stupid English dub that goes hand in hand with some hilariously awkward writing. The soundtrack is also sometimes hilariously ill-fitting, with one track in particular making several scenes impossible to take seriously. But even if everything else about this movie had been perfectly executed, I’d STILL have included it on this list simply because the ending of the movie has Nobunaga transforming into DEMON GODZILLA.

2.) Spirit Warrior – Castle of Illusion

What if you took Castlevania and replaced Dracula with Nobunaga, complete with super hammy voice acting? You’d basically have Spirit Warrior – Castle of Illusion, is what. The second in a series of five relatively self-contained Spirit Warrior OVAs, this anime features a satanic cult using a demonic version of the Book of Revelation to bring Nobunaga back from Hell so he can awaken the soul of the woman who is the reincarnation of his vassal Ranmaru in order to help kidnap a girl who has the POWER OF ASHURA which they need before they can raise the eponymous Castle of Illusion from the sea and summon the monstrous Cherubim inside it that will bring about the APOCALYPSE. And if that seems at all convoluted to you, trust me, it makes even less sense while you’re watching it. Also Nobunaga comes back to life STILL RIDING HIS HORSE and stays on it for almost the ENTIRE MOVIE, even inside, because Dracunaga is nothing if not a totally committed equestrian.

3.) Black Lion

Black Lion is an edge case for this category, since Nobunaga‘s Faustian Bargain in this one is more figurative than literal. Then again, he does make a deal with a group of evil time-traveling aliens from the future so he can get access to their hyper advanced technology and ressurrect the fallen samurai Jinnai, whose family was killed by ninjas before his eyes, as an UNSTOPPABLE FORCE OF NATURE WITH A PERSONAL VENDETTA AGAINST EVERY NINJA IN EXISTENCE.

Like most of Go Nagai’s stuff, this movie is NOT for the faint of heart. People are decapitated and eviscerated left and right, heads are blown up, impaled, and squashed like overripe tomatoes, robot samurai turn a dude into swiss cheese with cyber gatling guns, ninjas poison a dude and then stab him like seventeen times JUST TO BE SAFE, families are massacred, nuclear cores are detonated, marijuana is weaponized, and over it all runs an English dub so laughable it actually manages to make all this outrageous over-the-top bullshit Go Nagai is blasting onto your screen EVEN MORE IMPOSSIBLE TO TAKE SERIOUSLY THAN USUAL.

 

Animes Whose Clarity of Message is Second Only to Their Cultural Sensitivity

1.) Darkside Blues

At first I thought that maybe Darkside Blues was suffering from a textbook case of Bad Adaptation Syndrome, but after reading some reviews of its source material, it would appear that the manga version of this unfinished piece of crap is just as poorly realized as its animated counterpart. Darkside Blues starts with a no-splash high-dive directly off the deep end, and it doesn’t resurface. EVER.

A lot of movies would have to CHOOSE between telling a gritty story about a distopian future where 99.9% of the Earth is owned by a closely held (and thus obviously evil) mega-corporation OR making a psychological art film filled with vague and ethereal non sequiturs, and they’d STILL have a fairly decent chance of totally screwing up either way. Darkside Blues tries to do both at the same time, WITHOUT CONTEXT. Like, the story opens with a clock striking 13, followed by a spider covering the entire room with red webbing, followed by a woman being tortured via being turned into gold, followed by Darkside entering the movie by suddenly phasing through the wall while driving A FLYING HORSE DRAWN CARRIAGE. He rides through a wall, into space, over a city, and then out of a hole in the ground, saves an emaciated child from said hole, asks if there’s a hotel around here and then this happens,

followed by Darkside just DRIVING AWAY and the more straightforward portion of the story just continuing as though NONE OF THIS ALL JUST HAPPENED. This is the basic template for ALL of Darkside’s appearances and they only get sillier as the movie continues. Like a little later on, when an assassin from PERSONA CENTURY (your friendly neighborhood world dominating super-conglomerate) shows up to FINGERLASER an anti-Persona rebel to death, he opens the door and is instead greeted with Darkside standing alone in an unlit room, brooding, because that’s one of his powers. Naturally he fingerlasers the SHIT out of him, as any rational person would.

Needless to say this goes about as well for our friend Laserfingers as can really be expected of a no-name mook trying to assassinate a god damn title character. Immediately after this the rebel Darkside just saved comes out, sees the assassin’s still smoldering body, and, honest to god, this exact exchange takes place:

Rebel Guy: So tell me, who are you?

Darkside: An incomplete concept……… is passed on………………. but that inheritor must receive a renewal

Darkside: *leaves*

The movie is FULL of stupid moments like this, even when Darkside isn’t around and the anime’s ostensibly more mundane plotline kicks back in. Darkside Blues is basically an unintentional parody of an obtuse artsy anime, and if you’re watching it for anything other than the comedy factor, you have my legitimate sympathy. The movie ends without actually resolving any of its stupid plotlines or even really explaining basically anything, and is capped off by a shot of some recurring but ultimately pointless character basically making a trollface at the audience as the movie fades out. Darkside Blues: Classy to the end.

2.) Kenya Boy

Kenya Boy is an anime about an Ordinary Japanese Boy (natch) who is touring Africa with his father when World War II breaks out and they suddenly have to go on the run from the British colonial authorities. He gets separated from his dad and both of them get lost in the African wilds. At this point the acid the movie dropped during the opening credits kicks in and we spend the next 80-some-odd minutes watching the anime equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt snorting Allan Quatermain’s ENTIRE STASH of taduki and having an INCREDIBLY bad trip.

The art direction for this movie seems to be trying to play off laziness as a stylistic decision, and when it’s not just TRIPPING BALLS the plot is made up of several subplots that are only tied together by the fact that they make INCREASINGLY LESS SENSE, the biggest example of all of this being when the film ends with an environmental message that comes so hard out of left field that it literally knocks what’s left of the film clear off the rails. BASICALLY, the first ten minutes of this movie are just there to lull you into a false sense of security; once this film gets rolling it makes almost every other anime on this list seem downright coherent.

3.) G Gundam

I have a confession to make: I unironically love G Gundam.

It’s kind of like Big Trouble in Little China to me, in that it’s is just so earnest in its STUPIDITY that I can’t help but enjoy every over the top minute of it. I mean come on, the show has a friggin WINDMILL GUNDAM from Holland. The Mexican Gundam is called THE TEQUILA GUNDAM and it is WEARING A GUNDAM SOMBRERO.

It has a martial arts mentor figure named MASTER ASIA, THE UNDEFEATED OF THE EAST, who takes down giant robots ON FOOT USING ONLY A RIBBON. The United States Gundam is wearing a football helmet, its giant shoulder pads transform into BOXING GLOVES, and it’s shield turns into a ROCKET SURF BOARD it rides around on while blasting America’s enemies with its Gundam-sized SIX SHOOTER.

It features NORMAL UNARMED HUMANS martial artsing a collapsed skyscraper so hard that both they AND it fly straight up into the air, AS A MINOR PLOT POINT, IN A SHOW ABOUT A GIANT ROBOT MARTIAL ARTS TOURNAMENT TO DETERMINE THE NEXT RULER OF SPACE.

It has Master Asia piloting his giant robotic humanoid Gundam into battle riding on a GIANT ROBOTIC HORSE GUNDAM, WHICH IS ITSELF BEING PILOTED BY AN ACTUAL HORSE

G Gundam is the best.

 

Animes Which Are Adaptations of Fighting Games

1.) All of Them

There are literally so many bad animes in this category that it could really warrant an entire post of its own. Gowcaizer is just a prime example because it not only features the bad anime holy trinity (Ridiculously bad art, hilariously bad dub, and stupidly bad plot), it also has Misami Obari on character design, which is basically fighting game anime shorthand for weird melty faces, hilariously shitty anatomy, and ridiculous attempts to titilate the audience that look like they were drawn by alien life forms who have only really kind of HEARD THIRD HAND about human sexuality but are PRETTY SURE THEY’VE GOT THIS *pics up ink-filled nitrosac in favored tentacles, cracks arthrospine, starts drawing ATTRACTIVE HUMAN MAIN CHARACTERS*

 

And that’s it

I mean, not literally, since unlike Street Fighter II’s strategic elephant reserves, incredibly shitty media is ostensibly an infinitely renewable resource; it’s not like I’m going to RUN OUT if I decide to, say, write another six million words about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull: The Anime. But nobody wants “Died of overexposure to BAD ANIMES” on their tombstone, so let’s just call this installment a wrap before I accidentally kill us all by posting about Crimson Wolf.