The Best Anime of 2021

The Worst Anime of 2021 & Mega Poll Results

...look, what the hell do you all want from me? Were the dozen or so increasingly unhinged episode reviews not enough? What more is even left to say about 2021's most pitiful punching bag that we all had to pretend was a TV anime? Because there's certainly not much to say about the actual show, which in any other timeline would have been a totally forgettable sci-fi series that nobody would have remembered by summer.

Usually to get the “Worst of” label a show has to be both incompetent and insulting in its writing, but EX-ARM couldn't even do that. It was just a supremely boring, uninspired narrative that had the bad luck of being assembled by a production committee where every single person was drunk. It was tossed to people with no experience creating animation, outsourced to countless other subcontractors to the point where multiple episodes credit their storyboards to an IT company, and the only reason we even know about it is because Crunchyroll prematurely picked it up as an “Original” before finding out they'd been pranked by the god of CG animation.

The reason this show is the worst is obvious to anyone with functioning eyeballs, and trying to explain beyond that is almost not worth the effort. EX-ARM is an anime the same way a rusted-out wheelbarrow rolling downhill is a motorcycle, and if we're all lucky we can all just stop talking about it the moment this article is published.

While there were no doubt worse anime than The Honor Student at Magic High School this year, it is the worst anime that I watched to completion—namely because I was reviewing it weekly. At the time, I didn't feel like it would earn a spot on this list, but as I looked back on it in retrospect, I realized something: The Honor Student at Magic High School is way more fun to review than it is to watch.

The Honor Student at Magic High School is a sidequel retelling the events of the first two arcs of the first season of The Irregular at Magic High School from the point of view of the main heroine, Miyuki. Each week, I had a ton of fun watching the corresponding episodes from both series back to back, just to find out what was new and what had been completely changed.

But here's the sad fact: The Honor Student at Magic High School can't really stand on its own. While there are new characters and new elements—especially in the second half—it doesn't go far enough to forge its own identity. Without the context provided from having previously watched The Irregular at Magic High School, it's a mess of concepts and plot points that seemingly come out of nowhere. If you're already a fan of The Irregular at Magic High School, it's borderline worth a watch. If not, definitely don't bother.

I really do try to go into most series with some optimism. That goes double for those I'm in charge of reviewing weekly – I truly want to like shows I'm working on. But sometimes a series just makes that really, really hard – if not impossible – and poor Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon is definitely one of them. It's not the lackluster animation or monster designs (although those don't help) or even the messiness of the explanations offered; hell, it's not even the fact that we don't always GET explanations until we're way past the point of caring. It's a terrible combination of all of those things, not to mention how it functions like a highly caffeinated rodent as it bounces from plotline to plotline, never giving its narrative the dignity of staying with a single story element for more than an episode (if it even gets that long) and consistently depriving its heroines – all of whom have great potential – of any meaningful development or action. It's an ongoing disaster, a dog constantly eating your homework before your eyes, and while every so often it gives me reason to hope that it might get better…it hasn't yet. That I keep hoping is clearly my mistake.

I saw plenty of bad anime this year. I witnessed Wonder Egg Priority implode in real-time. I got to see the genesis of a potential new 'Worst Ever' in EX-ARM. I had to watch and review Battle Game in 5 Seconds, Peach Boy Riverside, and The Detective Is Already Dead all during the same season! And yet, the one that still sticks out in my mind is the god-danged second season of The Promised Neverland. Not simply because it was bad, or because it was a disappointing sequel to a series that had been one of my top shows of its own year. No, I can't stop thinking about this show because I am desperately curious to find out how in the hell it happened. How did a continuation of an adaptation of one of the most popular and celebrated Shonen Jump series get relegated to a mere eleven episodes? How did they bring in original author Kaiu Shirai to help with crafting an appropriate abbreviated end for the story, only to wind up devolving into a mere Cliffs Notes version of the manga plot, going so far off the rails that Shirai had his name taken out of the credits by the end of the thing? For that matter, how did things get so bad that nobody was taking credit for the scripts by the last few episodes? It's genuinely a shame that the juicy details of anime production can be so secretive, because if there's one thing I'm tantalizingly certain of, it's that the story behind the making of The Promised Neverland Season 2 would be more interesting and entertaining than the actual show that The Promised Neverland Season 2 was.

Let me get this out of the way: Wonder Egg Priority as a whole is not remotely close to the worst anime (hi, EX-ARM) or anime-related (hi, live-action Cowboy Bebop) series I watched this year. I still love WEP. I will still go to bat for most of it too, despite the cracks between and amidst its writing and production, which formed deeper and deeper fissures as its second half limped towards the ultimately delayed finale. The finale itself, however, was the most heartbreaking thing I watched all year. An utter collapse of both the narrative and production values, Wonder Egg Priority's 13th episode is an unmitigated disaster that retroactively throws the rest of the series into mortal thematic peril. There were plenty of prior warning signs, but the story's conclusion lays its fundamental flaws bare, engorging the problematic tendrils that snake back all the way to the premiere. Yet I also can't deny how often the show managed to rise above those flaws, thanks to the artistry of the people who worked on it. That's why I still carry a lot of affection for it—tempered affection, but affection all the same.

Beyond its uniquely volatile circumstances, however, Wonder Egg Priority also can't help but serve as a cautionary tale about the price of ambition in an industry being throttled to increasingly visible breaking points. Reviewing WEP weekly forced me to confront the plain reality that having a bold and compelling vision isn't enough to sustain an anime. I left the series more cynical than I began it, and that was the worst anime experience I had this year. Lest I end on too dour a note, though, the left-field successes of ODDTAXI and Sonny Boy went on to prove to me that unique voices can still count for something. So I'm hopeful that the people who injected wonder into Wonder Egg Priority will move onto better things.

It actually kind of hurts to deem The Promised Neverland Season 2 my worst of the year because this is a series near and dear to my heart that was so mangled by a rushed second season that I'm still kind of speechless. It had a strong start – the first three episodes carry the same momentum as season 1 – and it's not until episode 4 that the warning signs appear and viewers start to realize that things are going downhill very, very fast. And it really is a shame because The Promised Neverland's first season was the perfect first arc. In turn, season 2 is largely a slog, eliding some of the most powerful parts of Neverland's narrative to streamline a hundred plus chapters into one final, “definitive” season that feels lacking whether or not you've read the manga. By the finale, it's racing through plot beats, including meeting “God”, the children's escape, and a whole heck of a lot of plot that just gets passed over because there are not enough seconds in twenty-four minutes to resolve it all. It's enough to make you just want the show to end, and once it does, all you'll be left with is a hollow feeling, and if you're lucky, the scantest desire to read the manga and get some closure.

Alas, poor WEGG, you could've been the one. We could've had it all! Loathe am I to place you here, but now it's up to me to put my feelings on Wonder Egg Priority to bed. First off, there are many wonderful things about WEGG, I fell in love with the strange Alice in Wonderland magical girl aesthetic and the promise of handing deep, emotional, and psychological themes with a group of complex young female characters as they explore the fun of adolescence loomed over by the insidious nature of death and adulthood. And I still got, well, some of that. I do love some of the characters, specific episodes, and the concepts presented in the setting. But by the end, WEGG never seemed to quite get its priorities straight. After a slew of production issues in the later episodes, the penultimate episode got delayed by 3 months and delivered one of the FLOPPIEST endings for a show that I've ever seen. For a show like WEGG that tries to pose so many BIG questions and then tries to hold onto to the answers until the very last second, the fact that it's not actually interested in talking about ANY OF THAT was a huge let down. Some may wonder if all the time, effort, and trauma was worth it when the show's writing just decides to spit in the audience's face like that.

Part of me wasn't surprised. WEGG, which opens with the supposed suicide of Ai's one and only friend Koito, was always walking on eggshells. Death and trauma are not light topics. It isn't a game to win against, like Ai and her friends strive to do. And yet if there's nothing rewarding to be gained from such futile attempts, why should we, the audience, root for Ai, as she does it again?

Having saved Koito and gotten an insulting unsatisfactory answer about her death, Ai goes back again to try and rescue Neiru. WEGG goes through a lot of effort to show that the world is unsatisfying, and that toxic adults who harm children face zero culpability for their actions and are even upheld by society. These adults become monsters that are defeated in the dream world but the monstrous adults Ai and friends encounter in the real world get off scott-free as things simply return to the status quo. WEGG does nothing to shake-up the problems that it presents and may even worsen them by presenting them in such a way.

However, that's not to say I don't feel fondly about some of the smaller stories and moments of Wonder Egg Priority, or that I regret watching it, or that it's bad to try and deal with serious subject matters in the first place. WEGG, while it lasted, has many cathartic, beautiful things to say even if it flopped on many of the other things, and I can tell the people working to animate it really cared to bring something unique and beautiful into the world, and I hope they bring many more!

I tried to tell you. We all did. From the very first bit of Preview Guide coverage, my fellow critics and I made it very clear how awful The Fruit of Evolution would be, and yet a whole bunch of you chuckleheads went and voted it in for Weekly Streaming Reviews anyways. I hope you're proud, you sick monsters.

Look, I already wrote a novella's worth of pages about every stupefying, ugly, unfunny, rotten, spiteful thing that The Fruit of Evolution put me through. If thousands of words worth of fugue-state fanfiction and apocalyptic prophesy didn't convince you, then I'll just leave you with this: I got COVID this year. Luckily, I'm relatively young, and I got my vaccines as soon as I could, so it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Still, it put me fully out of commission for over a week, and it's far and away the sickest I've been in the whole two years since this damned pandemic started. All of this is to say—and I am being 100% serious here, no hyperbole or foolin' around—I had a worse time watching The Fruit of Evolution than I did when I was sick with COVID. There. That's my official pull quote for the Blu-Ray: “Worse than a contracting a mild case of COVID!” Congratulations, Fruit of Evolution. You earned it.

Because I try not to waste my precious few hours of free time a day watching anime that outright anger me from episode one, my choice is probably not the actual worst anime of the year. In fact, my choice failed to inspire any emotion in me other than boredom and occasionally mockery. WAVE!! -Let's go surfing!! is a completely soulless cash grab originating as a mixed media project, devoid of any kind of redeeming qualities and not even interesting enough to inspire a kind of righteous fury. Its stiffly-animated characters have little personality other than being pleasantly bland, and make nonsensical choices like going surfing despite never having learned how to swim. It's like some execs figured they could dangle some pretty boys in wetsuits in front of a female audience and we would automatically bite. It is the antithesis of art.

The funniest part? It's so abjectly mediocre that it completely failed in its main purpose as a moneymaking endeavor. The home video release only sold 150 or so copies, and the mobile game was so poorly-made it was cancelled after two months and unplayable for even most of that. I can't imagine the truckloads of character goods, created on the assumption of the series' success, did much better.

There are a lot of different criteria that can go into a "worst" anime pick. It can be an unmitigated production disaster, painfully boring, actively offensive, or fail to deliver on a promising premise. Wonder Egg Priority checks three out of four of the boxes, but it's the narrative choices in its last quarter that were a bridge too far for me. The production woes are something I can write off given the state of things in this industry. It's disappointing, but not unusual, and often times something that could only be corrected by structural overhaul of the entire industry. There's also plenty of anime that start out strong only to meander or squander good ideas when the team can't figure out how to tie all of its loose ends together. However, it's less often that it ends up not only floundering, but also pissing on my goodwill.

Wonder Egg Priority set out to tackle common traumas of female adolescence via magical confrontations. Initially the show had a frank depiction of these issues in a way that is uncommon in anime. It shined a light on misogyny in many forms, including bullying, sexual assault, eating disorders, and mental illness, while looking at how adults perpetuated these traumas on children. When there appeared to be an initial misstep regarding the two men overseeing the girls' trials, the staff explained that the characters' attempt to reinforce gender roles was meant to be seen negatively. I still think viewers should keep in mind that Acca and Ura-Acca's point of view is unreliable throughout the story, but it doesn't change what the series culminated into: a series about cruel, girlish AI somehow manipulating other girls to kill themselves. It tried to infuse an emotional series with magical elements with technobabble that absolved the abusive adults, trivialized the emotional trauma of their victims, and seemed satisfied with gaslighting the central character that her suspicions of a teacher grooming a student were all in her head.

I have to ask: who was this story for, exactly?

Well, you guys weighed in and the results were heard loud and clear! The anime communities top 10 series and films from 2021 are:

1. ODDTAXI
2. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
3. 86
4. Ranking of Kings
5. Fruits Basket the Final
6. Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- (TV 3)
7. Vivy -Fluorite Eye's Song-
8. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time (movie)
9. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S
10. To Your Eternity
11. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Entertainment District Arc
12. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean
13. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Mugen Train Arc
14. Megalobox 2: Nomad
15. The Heike Story
16. Horimiya
17. Laid-Back Camp (TV 2)
18. SSSS.Dynazenon
19. Komi Can't Communicate
20. Sk8 the Infinity