The More Fans See of ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime,’ the Less They Like It

Funny how quickly a fandom turns from, “100 years Rick and Morty!” to, “Hopefully the anime is only one season.”

Yesterday, Adult Swim made two simultaneous reveals regarding the flagship franchise, neither of which drew warm receptions from the show’s ravenously online fanbase. First, following a successful Season Seven, Rick and Morty will take more than a full year off the air before returning with an eighth season in 2025. And secondly, the network revealed the first clip of in-show footage from the upcoming offshoot series Rick and Morty: The Anime, coming later this year. Created by acclaimed animator and director Takashi Sano and starring the voice actors of the Rick and Morty Japanese dub, the anime series will follow up the five short films released between 2020 and 2021 that featured Rick and Morty adventures in five different popular anime styles.

While the short films received acclaim from both Rick and Morty and anime fans alike, each successive reveal from the full-length series has inspired increasingly negative reviews from online followers who are disappointed by the art style and tone depicted in the clips. As one Twitter user noted, “bro that is not rick and morty that is mick and rorty.”

“Can we let this rest it’s not even funny,” another Rick and Morty fan replied in the thread. Many fans decried how humorless the clips of Rick and Morty: The Anime have been compared to the rapid-fire comedy of the source material, but the most heated criticism on Twitter was for the art style. One such complaint reads, “Rick and Morty is already not a good-looking show, animation wise, with that stated HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS LOOK WORSE AND MORE UNFINISHED.”

Over in the Rick and Morty subreddit, users were similarly unimpressed by the clip, but their reactions were slightly more measured compared to their Twitter counterparts. “Yeah imma skip this. More power to you if you like it,” one commenter wrote, though remarks like “Yuck” and “Cringe” cluttered the thread. “I don’t see what’s actually good about it, because it completely lacks any attempt at humor, but I’m going to try and watch it anyway,” one almost-hopeful fan added.

That’s not to say the anime is without defenders — another Redditor called for fans to withhold judgement until we’ve seen the finished product. “This is a 25-second clip from a season still in production,” they pointed out, “An average episode is 22 minutes and most seasons are 10 episodes, meaning an average season is 220 minutes, or 13,200 seconds. That means this clip is just about 0.19% of the entire season. The fact that half the comments are people saying ‘Pass/Not for Me’ based on that is really something."

Though such a large portion of the Rick and Morty fandom has already decided that they hate the anime after watching the first few seconds, there is a silver lining to the predictably hyperbolic reaction — seeing as the show’s creators are bringing back the original Japanese actors, as one Instagram user wrote, “At least no one can hate on the new voices now.”