From its very first lineup, Adult Swim was always a strange fusion of animated sitcoms, absurdist reinterpretations of classic cartoons, and anime. From these core Adult Swim elements comes a fusion of many aspects of Adult Swim: Rick and Morty the Anime. This bizarre series takes the wildly popular Rick and Morty sci-fi comedy animated series, and reinterprets it as a Toonami action anime, with some aspects of Adult Swim Action’s more philosophical anime. While the series seems straightforward, with Rick and Morty fighting evil space bugs, the plot is confusing from the start. The first episode presents us with a series of random events told out of sequence, and things don’t get any clearer even by the final episode, which confusingly ends with a scene set much earlier in the series.
New characters like Frank pop in and out throughout the series, without ever really explaining who they are or what they want. The most notable new character is Morty’s girlfriend Elle, who replaced Jessica from the original series as Morty’s new crush. Unfortunately, she has little in the way of personality. Her power to reset reality is so overblown that it takes away any tension from the show. With her powers over life and death, this character comes across as too perfect and too powerful.
Rick and Morty has always used the multiverse, and the Anime is no exception. Alternate universe versions of Rick and Jerry appear in the Anime. Rick has already received plenty of alternate versions appear before, and nothing special is done with his different variants here. The most significant variant is known as Mullet Rick due to sporting a different hairstyle. Both this Rick and the main Rick are difficult to distinguish in conversation, due to the monotone voice performances of the English dub by Sentai Filmworks. None of the original cast are present for the English dub, and the Sentai impressionists are not nearly up to the level of Rick and Morty’s replacements in the latest season of the original show. This is especially distracting in scenes that require emotional range like Morty crying.
Jerry receives the focus in one episode, where he hangs out with a version of himself with a sword. While superhero Jerry brings a different twist to the usually pitiful character, this episode does little to advance the overall plot of the show. The episode also suffered from poor animation quality. Before the series released, Adult Swim released a clip showing a fight scene from this episode, which bordered on slideshow rather than animation. This questionable choice led to many negative comments on social media.
Watch the preview for Rick and Morty the Anime:
The series quickly became infamous upon airing. It has one of the lowest IMDb scores of any anime, a 2.9. This has given it the dubious honor of the lowest rated Adult Swim original anime, surpassing even FLCL Grunge’s 4.6 score. Rick and Morty and anime have both been such a large part of Adult Swim’s history that it might seem surprising things went so wrong. Part of the problem is often media don’t translate well across cultural boundaries. Most of the humor of the original Rick and Morty seems to have been lost in translation. The Anime is often filled with characters discussing the meaning of destiny and life itself. These repetitive and ponderous conversations are meant to be thought provoking, but often are more dull.
There were also issues translating the designs to anime style. The characters still have clearly western derived designs, with the beady Simpsons style eyes from the original Rick and Morty carrying over. The strange jagged teeth of Rick and Morty characters also end up looking even worse in anime style. Since the audience of anime fans on Adult Swim are mainly looking for beautifully animated battle sequences of Toonami hits like Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan, having ugly characters fighting in an ultra low frame rate failed to live up to the hype.
It remains to be seen whether Adult Swim will continue producing anime based on their comedy shows, but Rick and Morty the Anime has left many hoping Adult Swim leaves their comedy and anime offerings separate. Only time will tell if other Adult Swim comedies like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Squidbillies receive their own anime.