Book Review: The Horrors of Anime by Mark McPherson
As an anime fan myself, I can assure you that there is truly awesome Japanese animation out there that I would wholeheartedly recommend to nearly everyone. There are also good anime, okay anime, mediocre anime (quite a large chunk of the field if I’m being honest), and bad anime. And then there are the things I and other fans of the medium have regretted watching, the worst of the worst. And that’s what this book is about.
The author of this book has become something of an expert on the bottom layer of anime, having seen quite a bit of it and run convention panels on the topic. He has decided to skip “so bad it’s good” material to have this be more of a “I’ll describe this so you never have to see it” selection.
The book is arranged alphabetically by English title, from Apocalypse Zero to Virgin Fleet. All of these, by the way, are items that have been commercially available in the United States at some point, though many have mercifully gone out of print. Also, some of them are not technically Japanese animation, but imitations of same from other countries that got put on the same shelves back when there were physical video stores.
So, what kind of thing is covered? Sleaze that isn’t titillating, action that crawls, animation that makes amateur productions on Youtube look like genius, and nonsensical plotlines and characterization that aren’t insane enough to claw their way back into fascination. There’s a mix of straight to video shorts, full length movies, and even actual series involved. (One of the latter is Elfen Lied, which I enjoyed more than Mr. McPherson did; see my earlier review.)
This was a self-published book and has no illustrations, but most of these terrors can be looked up on the internet if you’re morbidly curious. It could have used another editorial pass–no actual typos that I saw, but there are some sentences with missing words and some clumsy phrasing.
Since this book came out in 2016, there’s been eight more years for new worst anime to have come out, but this is a good overview of the field. Consider this as a gift for the beginning anime fan who always wondered what those other tapes in the back of your collection were.
