Rick and Morty: The Anime is pure unadulterated crap.
In last month’s AJnet Anime Club article about Suicide Squad Isekai, I said that it’s generally a bad idea to adapt American animation to anime. Sure, it can be good when it’s done right (I used Avengers Confidential as an example of this), but most of the time it turns out poorly.
Just because you can make something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, and Rick and Morty: The Anime is a shining example of why turning American animation into anime doesn’t work. This series is just straight up terrible.
In fact, Rick and Morty: The Anime is so terrible that I’m not even reviewing it under the AJnet Anime Club umbrella. I’m only putting AJnet Anime Club as a secondary category because technically it’s considered an anime, in the same sense that mumble rap is technically considered music.
Rick and Morty: The Anime originally started as a few short bits that randomly aired on Toonami. The shorts themselves weren’t terrible, and the idea of a Rick and Morty anime series made for a kind of funny one-off joke that fit in with Adult Swim’s brand of humor. Unfortunately, someone decided that this idea was worthy of an entire series, and thus the show was greenlit and began airing in August of 2024.
I really don’t know where to begin here, the whole series is just so fucking awful. I guess we can start with the animation.
The animation sucks. It’s basically the original Rick and Morty animation but in watercolor:
Granted, the original series isn’t known for its top-tier highly-detailed animation, but it doesn’t need to be. You don’t watch Rick and Morty for the animation, you watch it for the humor (which you have to have a really high IQ to understand, as everybody knows). The animation is a flimsy vehicle used to convey the jokes, and it doesn’t need to be great as long as it’s even mildly funny.
This defense doesn’t work with Rick and Morty: The Anime though, because the main draw is supposed to be the animation. It’s right there in the title, “The Anime”. This isn’t just plain old Rick and Morty, this is Rick and Morty: THE ANIME. It’s supposed to be a re-imagined take on the popular American cartoon, but there really isn’t much difference in the animation style. The one strong point that Suicide Squad Isekai had was the animation, and that’s because they completely deviated from the traditional American comic book art style and went fully anime. The art style in Rick and Morty: The Anime looks like it’s trying to be some weird trippy hybrid style, and I’m not even sure what to call it. I called it watercolor a couple of paragraphs back, but the more I look at it the more I realize that’s probably not the best way to describe it. I honestly have no idea what this art style is supposed to be. It’s definitely not anime though.
I’m also not sure why they opted to give the series a serious plot. Rick and Morty is a comedy first and foremost, with an overarching story that sits in the back and waits to be called on when needed. The anime is the exact opposite of this, having a serious story with very subdued comedic undertones. The story itself isn’t even good, it’s a disjointed barely coherent mess involving a girl who can see the past, present, and future all at once a la Dr. Manhattan, an entropy device, dark matter, and the Galactic Federation. Also, Birdperson and Tammy get thrown into the mix at some point. The story is so scattered and convoluted that I could just barely make heads or tails of it. Couple this with the lack of humor that the characters are known for, and it makes for a boring and pointless show. You’re supposed to be a comedy, so make with the funny.
The highest point of the show is the opening song, “Love is Entropy”, and even that’s mid at best. I admit, I have a huge bias towards anime opening music, and it doesn’t take much to impress me in that regard. No, really, it feels like every time I watch a new series I’m usually finding the opening song on Spotify and adding it to my rotation. But “Love is Entropy” just didn’t take me in all that much. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just… basic. It was the show’s high point only by a technicality.
Rick and Morty: The Anime could have possibly worked if each episode was a parody of a popular anime. By going this route, you could easily execute the cynical humor that made the original show so popular. Exaggerate stereotypes, make fun of tropes, call out plot holes, poke fun at bad decisions. The Simpsons did this with Death Note in 2022’s Tree House of Horror XXXIII and it actually turned out pretty good. Given what The Simpsons has become in modern times, there’s no reason to assume that Rick and Morty couldn’t pull it off.
Ultimately, Rick and Morty: The Anime fails because it ignores its comedic roots, taking itself seriously with the scattered mess that it attempts to pass off as a plot. The animation is weak and lacks any actual anime aesthetic. The only thing even remotely close to a redeeming quality is the intro, and even that’s nothing special.
I give Rick and Morty: The Anime a 2/10. This is a series that simply shouldn’t have been made.