‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ Still Looks Like It’s More Anime Than ‘Rick and Morty’

The most recent teaser for the upcoming spin-off series Rick and Morty: The Anime is likely to excite anime fans a lot more than those of us who adore the Adult Swim megahit. For starters, it’s conspicuously missing the whole “Rick” aspect of Rick and Morty.

When Adult Swim first ordered a 10-episode series adaptation of the popular Toonami short films that reimagined their flagship comedy series in different anime art styles back in May 2022, the Rick and Morty fandom couldn’t have been more hyped. Unsurprisingly, the overlap between die-hard Rick and Morty fans and people who read the original Lone Wolf and Cub manga was sizable, and those short films, laden with anime in-jokes and dripping with effort, were viral hits during their initial run between 2020 and 2021. The Japanese Rick and Morty voice cast was set to reprise their roles in the new show, Takashi Sano, the writer and director of two of the five shorts, took the lead on the spin-off series, and fans saw no reason to doubt the spin-off’s success, given that the existing short films already proved the concept’s potential.

Then, at the beginning of this year, Adult Swim released the first footage of Rick and Morty: The Anime, and the crowd went… mild. The sneak peeks showed a significantly less inspired art style than those of the original shorts, and each clip was decidedly lacking in the fast-paced patter of the main series that is central to the Rick and Morty sense of humor. This past weekend, Adult Swim released a longer segment of Rick and Morty: The Anime that further confirms our fears that the humor of the OG series didn’t make it through both the adaptation and translation barriers. 

But, hey, at least this trailer didn’t have a cross-eyed Rick burning out our own retinas.

Back when Adult Swim released the first frames of Rick and Morty: The Anime to the public, the largest and angriest criticism was about the art style, which fans deemed outrageously ugly and somehow lower effort than the original series’ scribbles. They felt that the character design of Rick, specifically, was going to be hard to watch for a full 10 episodes, and the newest trailer seemed to have taken that note to heart by cutting Rick out of the preview entirely.

It’s telling that, even with so little Rick and Morty news coming out of the main show’s current off-season, the notoriously online fanbase of Rick and Morty has barely taken note of this new teaser. Twitter has been quiet about Rick and Morty: The Anime, and the hyperactive subreddit hasn’t seen a single post about this new video. Right now, the view count on Adult Swim’s YouTube video of the preview is still about 80,000 pairs of eyeballs behind their teaser of the next Smiling Friends episode, which they posted a day after this trailer.

The top comment on the teaser summarizes the fandom’s current feelings toward Rick and Morty: The Anime perfectly, reading, “This is the longest April Fools joke I have ever seen on the internet.”