So Bad It's Horrible/Asian Animation

• Main
• Haiku
• Laconic
• Playing With
• Quotes
• All Subpages
  • Anime
  • Asian Animation
  • Let's Play
  • Voice Acting
  • WWE
• Create New

When we think about Asian animation, we usually think about Anime and the like. But there's an awful lot of the rest of Asia, with an awful lot of animated series... and Sturgeon's Law applies to them as much as anything.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

• Ali Baba and the Gold Raiders, from the same Indonesian animation studio that brought us Beauty and Warrior and Space Thunder Kids. The animation's laughably amateurish, being no more than hand-drawn characters incongruously imposed over a 3-D background ("Popeye Meets Ali Baba" did that better with 1937 technology!). Despite being set in the Prince Ali Baba mythos, a guy wearing a Batman t-shirt and a fat dude wearing sunglasses and sneakers are seen, telling us just how seriously the filmmakers are treating the source material. The plot's ridiculous, most of the characters are idiots and it has one of the stupidest endings ever: the leader of the gold raiders (the main villain) is tied up and yelled at to get out (despite the fact he's tied up)...and then the words "Ali Baba and the Gold Raiders" appear on the screen and the credits roll. If you don't want to watch the thing, or want more than just Bile Fascination, check out Marz Gurl's review.
• Beauty and Warrior, "The Worst Anime Ever," is what happens when you let a financial company make a movie that's not just a commercial. Deplorable dubbing, abysmal animation, and painfully obvious overused Stock Footage. The plot is boring, incomprehensible, and almost nonexistent. Its most glaring flaw, however, is that it only has two or three character designs. The only difference between the two brothers, for instance, is eye color. The movie's one "saving grace" is that it's only about 50 minutes long. For an in-depth analysis, check out MarzGurl's review.
  • The camera has a seizure every time a plot twist happens. There's a lot of random zooming on people's shocked, slack-jawed faces, and those shots are held for a while. It hurts the eyes. Allegedly, random zooming at plot twists is a very common visual trope in Indonesian media, but still!
• The King of Tibetan Antelope is a 2010 animated series by Shenzen Films. The plot is about a young Tibetan antelope who wonders off to the "Way of the Antelope's Home" with friends after losing his mother. Basically, it's very reminiscient to two greater Disney features, only substituting Bambi's deer with an antelope, and directly lifting the "Circle of Life" sequence, the Pride Rock pose, the orphan plot element, and so forth fro The Lion King. Characters are Cel Shaded, but the environments are Conspicuous CG. Here is a video of the first episode with English subtitles.
• It's DA. NUTSHACK! The Nutshack is the first TV show aimed directly at Filipino-Americans. Horrendous characters, embarrassingly-awful animation, terrible voice acting, and a childish approach to...well, everything. It would be horrendous for something on Newgrounds, let alone television. And if the intro wasn't enough to scare you away... Made worse by the fact that it's a wholesale rip-off of Friday: The Animated Series.
• Shen Shou Jing Gang (also known as Celestial Warriors) is clearly a rip-off of a certain popular show. The main hero is the yellow ranger (though, to be fair, since the show uses The Four Gods, it's obvious that he is meant to be the Yellow Dragon, which is kind of the king of those beasties). He got headache for some bizarre reason. The fat guy is a blue ranger. For some odd reason, he loses quite a lot of weight when he transform into a ranger. The red ranger is a girl with a very annoying Catch Phrase. Two recurring robot antagonist who called monsters by the kids. It has many voice acting errors such as Lin Chong telling the dog to go away from that little girl by saying "them" even though there's only one dog in the scene and the subtitles say "it"! Have we mentioned the Conspicuous CG yet? And why haven't its licensing agent notice what it rips-off? More info.
• Space Thunder Kids, an animated movie straight from Korea about the Dark Empire trying to conquer the universe and three children that try to stop them with their Humongous Mechas. Of course, the movie follows the plot very loosely as it Jump Cuts often, leaving the story with a lot of unanswered questions. Off-Model plagues this movie as characters are constantly drawn differently and have very strange facial expressions. Worst of all, it blatantly rips off Captain Harlock, Getter Robo, Mobile Suit Gundam, Transformers, Tron, and many more. See Bennet the Sage tackling this disaster.
  • Wonder why the characters or robots are never drawn the same, or why the plot makes so little sense? Because the movie was made by copypasting eight different movies, all of them horrible.
  • Arguably the only redeeming factor about this movie are the occasional bits of weirdness such as funny faces, random plot points thrown in and out and the infamous tank scene.
• Tales in Mushroom Village is a 2010 CG animated series by Anhui Lister 3D Animation from China. It's filled with humanoid animals who looked too scary in anyway (the yellow one has a strange resemblance to a Pikachu). The faces are dull and too detailed, as well as sloppy animation, unrealistic effects (one scene shown even has some gameplay footage of a King of Fighters game for some odd reason), scary movements, and one scene, an unidentified object tossed above the village. The show's licensing agent says that it was a sci-fi series, but existing footage (only one video so far) didn't show any sense of it. The Chinese name (蘑菇村的故事) conflicts with a more popular series starring anthropomorphic mushrooms, who they're way better than the CG show, and even The Smurfs. Have a look on the worst, and the description, and cover. Don't forget to translate the comments.
• Your eyes will burn from watching any movie from Xu You Ji, a company that Chinese families can supposedly pay $275 to feature their child in a movie. The example linked here not only does completely rips off the mecha from Gundam Seed and bizarrely use the cast from Monsters Versus Aliens as the villains, it also features horrible CG-rendered kid protagonists in plugsuits. Moreover, it uses music from Code Geass and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 in fairly inappropriate times (the music that plays during Shirley's death scene in Code Geass, for example, is used as the opening song). All in all, the unnerving combination of Uncanny Valley children and countless copyright violations has attracted much hate across the entire internet and led to demands to shut down the company. Gag subbed here.
  • Another notorious work from Xu You Ji features a Chinese girl saving her castle by the sea and a unicorn. The villain arrived to the scene to bring evil, but the girl transformed herself into a mermaid to go underwater to find a fairy. About EVERYTHING underwater (and the song Under the Sea) is stolen with original content like characters, considering that the backgrounds were from Finding Nemo if you notice the anemone and fish. Why did our poorly-rendered heroine go underwater before stopping the witch? By getting an ultra-realistic fairy and tour across the Great Barrier Reef?
• Micro-Commando Diatron-5 (aka, Space Transformers) is another South Korean attempt at a mecha anime from The Eighties. While So Bad It's Good on a good day, the whole package is just atrocious to sit through. The animation is Off-Model all the way, with unlikable characters and a completely disjointed Random Events Plot that doesn't really know what it's trying to be. The voice acting and sound quality meanwhile are plain horrendous, be it a protagonist whose age seems to change with each scene or the ending "theme song" that sounds more like a grating garage band's failed mixtape. It doesn't help either that this movie also had the ignoble privilege of being incorporated into the mess that's Space Thunder Kids. Take Bennett the Sage's word for it.