Having a "best of" awards for a tiny blog like this might sound ridiculous, but as much the intention is to reflect back on the past, as much for myself to consider what I find the qualities of anime I appreciate in various forms for future reference, the titles that'll stand out for me over five years. It took too long to get to a hundred reviews, but a lot still lingers.
The Worst Anime
The "Worst" is in ways subjective, in that there are titles here that are worth seeing and that, reflecting this list, the highest ranking are those which are the blandest rather than the most offensive or egregious. If anything the point of this particular segment is to see the extremes of the list. A further irony is to be found that even these, the blandest, might not necessarily qualify for that term as, honestly, the anime which never got high or low praise from me and never made this list could be seen as the true "worst" of the last hundred reviews. Make of that what you will.
Speaking of offensive, I'd wondered about Violence Jack (1986-1990) (reviews HERE, HERE and HERE), although to be honest, for all its crap moments offensiveness too memorable to qualify. In terms of the offensiveness, the only episode of real issue was Evil Town (1988), which brings about another issue in terms of reviewing it in that I only covered the censored English language release which drastically cut a lot of the three OVAs. Violence Jack is notorious for its censorship for good reason, and the reason I didn't track down the Japanese uncensored cut (even if Discotek unleased it in the United States finally in the 2010s) is entirely because of Evil Town. Upon research of what was censored, the decisions to how to depict lurid depictions of rape and sexual violence crossed even my boundaries on transgressive art. The gore, the grossness, the necrophiliac cannibalism, the misogyny and all feel like nothing compared to what Ichirō Itano in some idiotic creative decision did in this area from the descriptions I read of what was removed, taking a ridiculous Go Nagai project and making Evil Town, which is infamous in itself when it was only available uncensored in bootleg or from an Italian DVD release.
The other two episodes, however, are lurid and dump trash that I found compelling upon return even if they are utterly un-defendable. The future might sway me, when my old UK DVD release which even has versions visibly transferred from VHS, to have to bite the bullet and suffer through the uncensored versions, but the other two episodes are time capsules that should be watched, if you have the stomach, for just how the bottom of the barrel was scraped by the eighties OVA boom. And I admit, alongside a gnarly synth rock soundtrack, the English dub was hilarious at points, immediately disqualifying the OVA from the list.
So instead...
#5. Galerians: Rion (2002) [REVIEW]
It's unfair to include this feature length tie-in to an obscurer Playstation One game, as I did find it interesting and as an obsessive of anime horror I'll return to it, but honestly in my dabbling in early anime which was entirely animated in CGI, Rion is pretty generic. Even in terms of those titles I covered which didn't get picked for any of this retrospective, its still going to have to make up numbers for the bottom five just for how conventional it turned out.
It's the most watchable work on this particular list as a result, but its very much a disposable creation. A large issue of the early age of this type of animation, before a title later on in this list killed them off, is that many were struggling with their animation let alone coming up with a unique premise. For one title like Malice @ Doll (2000), an underrated and strange one-off I'll cover one day, you have Rion, which was very late in the game and not rising out of its style even with nu-metal added to the English dub version.
#4 Blue Seagull (1994) [REVIEW]
Entering this list as the trash fire among them, the worst in every sense, this is not an anime, but a bonus work I covered in looking at the South Korean animation industry. Between this and another title I covered, Armageddon (1996), the industry has had to shake off a legacy of notorious work, and seeing Blue Seagull you see what they have had to do this right into the Millennium when titles started to get some worldwide attention and praise.
Blue Seagull is poorly animated and laughable, an attempt to make an erotic thriller that starts with a female character who we never get the head off being brought to orgasm by a revved up motorbike seat, beginning the madness on a perfect inappropriate note. It's for a large portion of the film gleeful trash...then a major turning point comes a gross, distasteful moment which brings it all down. [Major Spoiler Warning] A major female character is raped off screen and dispatched soon after, and the entire work shuffles into even less competent content and an abrupt downbeat ending with no pace to it, as this terrible plot decision sapped away all the good nature I had for the production. [Spoilers End] The result is absolutely awful, and whilst I have never forgotten Blue Seagull since watching it, its to be approached with caution.
Adding to the experience is that the end credits are behind-the-scenes footage of the animators and creators on this production. Knowing their (visibly) hard work turned into Blue Seagull really develops a dark hindsight to this film, adding the experience by accident.
#3. Kekko Kamen (1991-2) [REVIEW]
Speaking of poor taste, and also Go Nagai, one day he created a parody of one of the earliest Japanese superheros, Gekko Kamen, as a female hero who wears only a mask and shoes as a joke only for the publisher to ask him to create a manga series from it. It has had, to the current day, eleven live action films and this OVA, which is a distasteful, sluggish and unfunny farce where a sole female student at the Spartan Institute is molested by deranged new teachers until Kamen beats them up with the Spread Eagle technique. (Yes, its as crude as that implies.) Good taste and the lack of it is one thing, but the absorlutely dullness is another matter entirely too, an oddity that managed to get a DVD release in the States and UK through the late ADV Films, but really doesn't deserve anything but bafflement or yawns.
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#2. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) [REVIEW]
As mentioned earlier, there was a period of very primitive, early CGI animation which has long been forgotten. I covered A.LI.CE (1999) very early in the blog, the first and a curiosity that is for a niche viewer, something which suffers from its generic plot and the limitations of its production, but was fascinating as a forgotten trailblazer. One to consider in the future is Blue Remains (2001), but this entire era was decimated by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which made them all look like like Playstation One cut-scenes as entire films. Said project, glossy and big as it is, killed an entire animation company off for a good reason. Its fascinating, but Square Enix, the creators of the legendary RPG franchise, and their decision to enter the blockbuster industry was immediately misguided as their intention here was to make a bland Hollywood sci-fi in animated form, one which one matter how many recognizable actors you could include and then-state of the art animation was never going to be more than generic and expensive.
The experience is weirder as I grew up with both the hype and the aftermath. That once people were viewing this, from the trailers and promotional art, as a huge production. Square Enix's ambitions were to even turn its lead character, the character design not actress Ming-Na Wen who voiced her, into a star who appeared in multiple films, leading to virtual actors. Hell, Maxim magazine, despite attempts to not eroticised a CGI character model, even had a bikini image of this figure in their magazine as they called her one of the sexiest women of 2001, thus prefiguring the 2010s when amateur SFM porn animation used video game characters like from Overwatch.
That it all collapsed in box office failure and Square Enix just returning to video games is the natural irony to expect from all this. Trying to emulate Hollywood, they made a film like many from there where there's initial hype followed by incredible disappointment.
#1. Abunai Sisters: Koko & Mika (2009) [REVIEW]
Arguably Blue Seagull is the worst in technical quality and taste, Final Fantasy in terms of hype crashing down and its notoriety, and Kekko Kamen just in taste, but if any title deserves this spot its Abunai Sisters, whose history is ominous in itself. The project of half sisters Kyoko and Miko Kano, Japanese celebrities famous for their celebrity like Western equivalents before they're recently started becoming celebrity cosplayers, they made an announcement of a series at the 2008 version of US anime convention Otakon, a ten episode micro-series which was originally meant to be broadcast on Japanese channel AT-X only for the first two episodes only to be shown. Long thought lost even in Japan, a version of all the episodes had been made available online, and its not a surprise why its not highly regarded. Feeling like a mercenary job by the legendary production studio Production I.G, its a gauche and poor looking CGI animated comedy which isn't funny and feels like a bad American Saturday morning cartoon in the simplicity of its premise, only that the villains are after a "booby stone" and our heroines' alter-egos play up their history of plastic surgery in their breasts vibrating with "Spider-Sense" of danger and having helium high English speaking voices. It manages to both be memorable but also utterly forgettable at the same time.
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