5 Bad Anime That Almost Ruined Their Studio’s Entire Reputation

Sometimes, a fantastic anime will boost the studio’s reputation, such as studio UFOtable becoming a superstar thanks to Demon Slayer, or studio Science Saru making a name for itself with Dandadan. Unfortunately, examples of the opposite might also happen, with a train wreck of an anime doing serious damage to the studio’s image.

It’s one thing for a studio to make an underwhelming or forgettable anime and fail to impress fans, but blunders can be much worse than that. The good news is, this isn’t terribly common, since “meh” or weak anime are usually the worst case scenario with the major studios. In five particular cases, these anime studios gave themselves black eyes with a serious misstep, and fans won’t soon forget that.

The 2016 Berserk Was the Last Thing Dark Fantasy Fans Needed

It is widely agreed that author Kentaro Miura’s original Berserk manga is a dark fantasy masterpiece that will never be surpassed by any particular anime adaptation. Mr. Miura’s artwork is peerless, immersing fans in Guts’ world with unmatched detail and shading to make the adventure come to life. Speaking more broadly, this is true for many manga titles, since an author’s hard work can’t easily be captured in colorful animation. This goes double for Berserk, which is why fans merely accept the 1997 anime adaptation while criticizing the 2016 version as an abomination. Even if no anime can equal what Mr. Miura drew, the end results with Studio Millepensee and GEMBA in 2016’s Berserk are unacceptable.

The 2016 Berserk anime is a failed reboot or remake of all earlier Berserk projects, doing everything wrong and giving a bad impression of both the material and the producers. The story is rushed, the visuals are ugly and uncanny, and the animation is difficult to follow due to iffy movements and camera work. While the original 1997 Berserk anime might have been just a token effort to bring Guts’ adventure to the small screen, it’s the 2016 Berserk anime that convinced fans that “good Berserk anime” is an oxymoron in this industry. It may also discourage fans from watching anything else that Studio Millepensee and GEMBA produce in the future.

The Seven Deadly Sins’ Production Value Fell Off a Cliff

Plenty of shonen action and fantasy anime end up with solid or even amazing anime on their hands to boost the popularity of the original manga. Such adaptations can turn a competitive shonen manga into a must-see anime that may help define an era, such as with Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Attack on Titan. studio UFOtable, MAPPA, and Wit, respectively, all drew praise for what they created and made good names for themselves. Then there’s the matter of Studio Deen, which wowed fans with the parody anime Konosuba, only to fumble things with the increasingly wonky The Seven Deadly Sins anime series.

The source manga for The Seven Deadly Sins is perfectly fine, and the story is continuing in a sequel series, but animation is not the way to watch protagonist Meliodas’ Arthurian adventure come to life. The Seven Deadly Sins started off well enough with a good but not truly amazing anime, and then the series slipped further away from greatness as newer seasons arrived. Infamously, Studio Deen botched the frame rate of The Seven Deadly Sins, to the point that fans derided this anime as “The Seven Deadly Frames.” Fans have noted particular cases where the animation is clunky and choppy, making it feel all but pointless or even disgraceful to watch. Studio Deen’s reputation is protected somewhat by Konosuba, but all the same, fans won’t soon forget what this studio did to The Seven Deadly Sins.

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations Doesn’t Live Up to the Original Naruto Run

In all fairness, the Boruto: Naruto Next Generations anime does benefit from a lot of strong worldbuilding elements that it inherited from the original Naruto anime. The Naruto anime’s fantastic jutsu combat system, cool setting, and distinct visual style ensured that the minimum quality for Boruto would be relatively high, so there was no way it would collapse into a pile of trash right away. What is more, Boruto does have fans who have every right to enjoy what this anime does as a ninja adventure in a new era, with Hokage Naruto to oversee it all. In particular, the Blue Vortex manga is enhancing this overall franchise’s reputation long after author Masashi Kishimoto closed the book on Naruto.

Despite all that, many more shonen anime fans and Naruto fans in particular gave Boruto a big thumbs down, and that reflects on Studio Pierrot in a big way. This studio doesn’t always fumble with sequel anime, since it did well with Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, but fans are still not entirely keen on the Boruto anime. They view this anime as a clunky wannabe of the classic Naruto, and what is more, the anime in particular has a massive amount of filler or anime-only material compared to the leaner, meaner source manga. If anyone is going to have fun with Boruto, it will be in manga format, with fans not needing or even wanting Studio Pierrot’s help to launch Boruto Uzumaki’s shinobi quest.

One-Punch Man Is a Far Cry From ONE’s Original Manga

Both shonen and seinen anime fans adore the overall One-Punch Man franchise as a hilarious, exciting, and remarkably deep story about the struggle to find meaning or joy in one’s life. Saitama is the ideal deconstruction of superheroes and shonen protagonists in this seinen series, wondering how he’s supposed to enjoy all this when he can end each fight before it begins. There’s plenty to unpack with that premise as Saitama fights new foes and makes more friends, but fans will probably enjoy the process much more in manga format. First, One-Punch Man was a web comic with bare-bones visuals by author ONE, only to become a fantastic manga with artist Yusuke Murata illustrating the adventure. Then, studio J.C. Staff took a crack at it with their anime.

Season 1 of One-Punch Man‘s anime did J.C. Staff all kinds of favors, with viewers loving the slick, stunning animation as Saitama’s wacky superhero career took off on the small screen. Audiences were dying for more, but when they got it in Season 2, sentiment toward studio J.C. Staff soured in a hurry. The weak animation and iffy plotting of Season 2 tarnished the image of both the One-Punch Man anime and J.C. Staff, and things aren’t looking much better so far in Season 3, either. It’s a shame, since the source manga has such outstanding action with fantastic visuals, meaning One-Punch Man is best viewed as a wonderfully subversive manga that happens to have an anime, too.

The Promised Neverland Plowed Headfirst Into Disaster With Season 2

The dark yet intriguing manga The Promised Neverland did well and ended just fine, even if it wasn’t truly flawless. Readers may note how The Promised Neverland‘s manga started losing focus and used too much plot armor that hurt the suspense, but otherwise, it’s a solid adventure for fans of horror and thriller stories. Then there’s the matter of the anime adaptation by CloverWorks, which has since become a sort of cautionary tale in the industry. Like One-Punch Man, the anime version of The Promised Neverland got off to a great start with a terrific first season, one that took the anime world by storm with a memorable premise. Fans were positively dying to see how the young heroine Emma could lead the escape from the Grace Field House in Season 2, and then they found out — in a bad way.

Simply put, the second and last season of The Promised Neverland dropped the ball with this otherwise strong story. It seemed to drop every ball there is, most of all with the handling of the story. With Season 2 of The Promised Neverland rushing and omitting so much material, it felt like a ragged montage of what the original manga did. It was immensely unsatisfying and an overwhelming letdown, to the point that anime fans are no doubt still furious with studio CloverWorks for this. It may be some time before anime fans are ready to trust anything else CloverWorks produces, though fans still admire this studio’s other offerings, such as Spy x Family and Bocchi the Rock!. Anime like those may be the only reason CloverWorks isn’t the most hated name in the industry.