Novasylum’s Arbitrary Anime Awards of 2014, Part II: Condemnations

(Part I can be found here)

And now it’s time for the somewhat-less-requisite and far seedier side of year-end recollections: the bad stuff. The worst of the worst. The cream of the crap.

Something you have to understand about me is that I have a certain morbid fascination with failed works that almost rivals my affection for successful ones. One can learn just as much from analyzing how something doesn’t work as much as they can from determining how something *does*, in the right circumstances. And boy was 2014 a good year for that, because in some contrast to my selections for positive mentions in Part I, there was a lot of competition to be one of the ten unlucky winners of these dishonorable awards. It was the year of crushed dreams, of proving that big name creators and creative premises do not always a great anime make. And these are the ones that annoyed, offended, or just plain baffled me most of all.

Again, as with Part I, all forms of anime (television show, OVA, film, etc.) are up in the running, and again, only shows that had finished airing in 2014 are eligible (as much as I’d like to give, say, Sailor Moon Crystal or Cross Ange their much overdue comeuppance).

Oh, but before we get to the specific show-by-show awards, I do have one honorable mention I’d like to offer to a studio, if you wouldn’t mind. And that studio is Kyoto Animation, earning a honorary lifetime achievement award for having produced three shows this year and earning my utter disappointment and scorn with every single one of them. Congratulations, KyoAni! If you aren’t mentioned in my 2015 condemnations, it will have only been because I will have stopped watching your programming altogether!

Anyway, moving on:

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Most Squandered Potential: Kill la Kill

There were technically many worse shows throughout 2014, but I don’t think any of them embody the year’s recurring theme of squandered potential quite like Studio Trigger’s television debut, Kill la Kill.

It started off more than promising in several regards, with bold aesthetics and direction ekeing the most out of a limited budget, and a set of powerful tools in the form of the clothing motif to help build an effective story around. But the longer it ran, the more and more it dawned on me that Kill la Kill, damningly, does not care about story. At all. Character arcs were perfunctory and repetitive, symbolism ranging from baffling to disgusting was thrown about with anarchic rampancy, and whatever meager set of themes may remain were crushed under the weight of an emphasis on action and humor that only grew more redundant and sophomoric with age.

The result is a show built around the prospect of “fun” that simply isn’t fun at all. Rather, it’s tiresome, juvenile, and virtually unnecessary when its spiritual predecessor in the form of Gurren Lagann did everything Kill la Kill ever attempted better.

In short: it lost it’s way. And now I can’t be called out for having skimped on that obligatory joke.

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Mari Okada Award for the Most Presence of Mari Okada: Selector Spread WIXOSS

During the airing of Selector Spread WIXOSS, a friend and I took it in turns to create mock Magic the Gathering cards making fun of the show’s various failings. Had it not been for that, I’m not sure I would have taken much from the experience at all.

Selector Infected WIXOSS was already a troubled program, steeped in successive plot twists without relative meaning. But every problem the show exhibited in its first season the second demonstrated in triplicate. Lacking a concrete purpose for twelve more episodes worth of frivolous card battles, all Spread WIXOSS could hope to do was bait the viewer’s potential latent desire for shock value and sexual innuendo. Popular consensus in certain Internet spheres seemed to be that this modus operandi elevated it to the level of “beautiful trash”, but frankly I don’t think it’s even that; too much of it remains flat and hollow that it can’t even hope to be “funny-bad” on the whole. All it ever really achieved for me personally was strengthening the bonds between writer Mari Okada’s name and a reputation for disposal melodrama, so if *that* was your wish, Spread WIXOSS…well, considered it granted.

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Most Baffling: Captain Earth

It would take centuries of around-the-clock research and analysis to even come close to determining what the hell happened with Captain Earth. A Bones-animated mecha show directed by Takuya Igarashi and written by Youji Enokido should have been an unqualified slam dunk, given that this was the exact same combination of players that gave rise to the lovable and endearing Star Driver. And yet somehow Captain Earth had a solid take-off only mere episodes before spiraling out of control and crash landing somewhere in the deadzone of ten-year-behind-schedule Evangelion knock-offs, leaving whoever didn’t bail on the journey beforehand stranded in the wreckage, scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Beyond simply refusing to make sense or be accessible to the viewer (past meeting its requisite fan-service quota, of course) at any point during its chaotic flights of fancy, its characters simply did not develop meaningfully, making it a crisis when character development turned out to be demanded for its long overdue climax. What the typically reliable Igarashi/Enokido pairing was hoping to achieve with this one, I frankly do not know…and I’m not confident that I ever will, for I have no intention to revisit it.

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Most Pathetic Performance Relative To Creator Clout: Magica Wars

A weekly series of shorts about fan-designed magical girls based on the various prefectures shouldn’t be something difficult to pull off. For one of the most influential and well-known anime studios in history, the label once associated with having revolutionized the entire industry not once but twice, it especially shouldn’t be. And yet, with seemingly nothing else on their plate at the time aside from continued vague whispers of that still-distant Wings of Honneamise sequel, Gainax managed to phone in a meandering, humorless, characterless side-project that did little but waste the time of everyone involved, especially the viewer, at four minutes a piece. Its dullness and laziness alone suggest a slot on this list, but what it represents in the form of Gainax’s fall from public praise and attention earns it one. At this rate, I’m not even certain they can handle the magical girl/Subaru partnership they have lined up for spring, let alone the fabled Uru in Blue!

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Neils Bohr Award For Most Boring Boredom in the Boring Field of Boring Boringness: Golden Time

The only thing more lost than Golden Time’s amnesiac protagonist is the show itself: a rom-com of the most tediously protracted and bafflingly ambagious sort. It’s a shame, too, because the seed of a touching story is somewhere in here. The blank-slate main character as a metaphor for the fresh start and countless opportunities presented when encountering college, one romantic temptation representing his stable past and another representing an uncertain but exciting future…it all very easily could have worked! Instead, we got cul-de-sac plot turns, vapid characterization detours and ghosts who can control the weather. Also: brainless comedy. And abysmal production values. And one of the worst OPs of the year.

If there’s a recurring pattern one should be noticing from this list, it is in shows that set out to fill their episode count without a streamlined *plan* of how to fill in the space between start and finish. Golden Time may perhaps be the height of that particular flaw as represented by this list; it isn’t a charming romance, it’s an exercise in tire-spinning.

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Fred Phelps Memorial Award for Messages We Probably Shouldn’t Take to Heart: Zankyou no Terror

It pains me – pains me, I say – to have to put a show directed by the great Shinichirou Watanabe and scored by the lovely Yoko Kanno here. Given how gorgeous the show is aesthetically, on both an audio and visual level, listing it next to the likes of such rough-edged mutants as Golden Time almost seems like a joke. But fundamentally, no amount of external beauty can mask an ugliness that lies beneath. And that’s what Zankyou no Terror ultimately is: an ugly, ugly show.

To be a little more direct here, this is the anime I will always remember, first and foremost in my mind, as the one that gave the karmic thumbs-up to nation-spanning terrorism. The amount of insultingly simplified foreign politics, startlingly misplaced allusions to real-life tragedies and unsettlingly misguided moral compasses it needs to prop up to get there is bad enough, but rest assured: this story finds an excuse for its twin leads to inflict psychological warfare upon entire cities and then attempts to circle back in finding ways to rationalize it with so-called “hope”, ignoring the traumatic ramifications of their actions every step of the way. And I refuse to follow along. It’s short-sighted, it’s unknowingly hateful, it’s downright offensive to anyone who has experienced the real consequences of terrorist acts or political duress. And beyond that, it isn’t even a good strong thriller underneath, featuring underdeveloped characters and a catastrophically misguided “Hollywood blockbuster” approach to action and plot that clashes with its more lofty (and given the execution, pretentious) thematic ambitions.

This could very well be the most controversial entry upon this list, I am aware. But come hell or high water, I have virtually nothing kind to say about the underlying messages of Zankyou no Terror. When someone directs two shows in a year and the one featuring the talking space cat and booty fetish is the smarter and more tasteful of the two, you know something is horribly wrong.

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Highlander II: The Quickening Award For Worst Sequel: Psycho-Pass 2

The original Psycho-Pass was hardly without flaw – especially when compared to the written fiction and philosophy it frequently name-dropped – but it was, crucially, a story about ideas, spearheaded by a writer with a very thought-provoking, methodical and multi-faceted approach to them. So what happens when that writer departs and you replace him with the same team of bone-heads who carved out a hollow hole where the heart of the Ghost in the Shell franchise once was with the Arise films? You get Psycho-Pass 2: not a dystopic sci-fi examination of the social contract, not even a tightly-woven and executed crime thriller, but a performance in how much of a pre-existing world’s setting and ideals can be retroactively degraded before the clock runs out. All it ever does, episode after episode, is stew in the stagnant waters of the preceding show’s intellect while only occasionally dropping something new, idiotic and abhorrent into the mix, with some of its attempts at sci-fi world-building being among the most laughably dumb I have seen in ages. That, and gratuitous, meaningless violence. Even moreso than the first season, it loves its gratuitous, meaningless violence.

The only self-awareness it demonstrates in how bad it is may be in the fact that nothing of lasting consequence ever happens in its plot, to the point where the upcoming Psycho-Pass movie could easily ignore that the season ever happened at all. And you know what? I hope it does.

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Tommy Wiseau Award For Best Unintentional Comedy: Gokukoku no Brynhildr

The only saving grace to this latest adaptation of a Lynn Okamoto disasterpiece is how fascinatingly broken it is. It’s awe-inspiring how absolutely every component of Brynhildr outright refuses to work properly, and in tandem they all form this loud (and hilarious) concerto of repeated failure. I mean, just so we’re clear here, this is a show that expects to be taken seriously…while at the same time introducing a character whose mind control power demands flashing her panties at her target. And that’s just scratching the surface of its contrivedly sexualized cast and never-parody-level harem antics! It would all be so gross and offensive if it wasn’t so easily dismissable as a show seemingly alien in its detachment from anything resembling human emotion or rationality.

Assuming you, too, are capable of treating Brynhildr less like an earnest reflection of people’s beliefs expressed through art and more like a punchline, then flee not, but gather your popcorn or your favored drinking game booze of choice and sit down to watch the greatest unintentional anime comedy of 2014.

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Award For I Hate You: Black Bullet

Black Bullet features an episode where the teenage main character in showered in the subtextually-romantic affections of a room full of little girls moments before it kills all of them with a bomb.

I believe that is sufficient to illustrate the source of my disdain for Black Bullet.

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Worst Anime of the Year: Pupa

I’m hardly claiming points to originality on this one, but seriously, how does one ignore the sheer unadulterated wretchedness of Pupa?

It’s not just that the story is an indecipherable tangle of unclear chronology. It’s not just the near-memetic level of ribbing it received for its bizarre and omnipresent censorship concerns. It’s not even just the expected baggage that comes with being a series ostensibly about incestuous cannibalism.

No, Pupa earns the top (read: bottom) spot in this contest between the offensive, idiotic and lazy on account of taking all of that and more to the next level: the level of complete pointlessness. It isn’t compelling or coherent storytelling, it isn’t visual eyecandy, it isn’t good porn (for most sane people, I hope), and it isn’t even a particularly funny joke, if that was the case. So what, pray tell, is it? Why was it made? Why did I watch it? What did I gain from the experience? What is the soul of Pupa?

I haven’t the slightest clue at all. And there can be no greater insult to a work of art than that.