‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ Is Like A Fanfiction Written By Someone Who Never Watched ‘Rick and Morty’

Ever since Adult Swim released the first trailer for Rick and Morty: The Anime, the Rick and Morty fandom has known that the spin-off series would probably be more anime than Rick and Morty, but we at least thought we’d be able to recognize the original characters underneath the eye-bleeding art style.

The first episode of Rick and Morty: The Anime hit streaming on Max this morning, more than four years after series creator and developer Takashi Sano debuted his first of three pilot short films featuring the titular characters battling their way through different anime worlds and art styles. The original series of anime Rick and Morty shorts was a stylish, charming and inspired pastiche of numerous influential anime properties, and the five total Rick and Morty anime specials perfectly merged the complementary yet separate nerd appeal of Dan Harmon’s animated series with the world of Japanese animation. Now that the full-length Rick and Morty: The Anime series has begun with a pilot episode titled, “Girl Who Manipulates Time,” it’s clear that something went horribly wrong between 2020 and 2024. 

Somehow, the same people who proved that a Rick-and-Morty-meets-anime crossover could work with the novel and delightful short films are now trudging out a lifeless, generic and conceptually muddled Rick and Morty adaptation that anyone who had so much as skimmed the show’s Wikipedia page could have written in an afternoon.

In the interest of transparency, I watched Rick and Morty: The Anime with the original Japanese voice actors and English subtitles out of respect for the “subs not dubs” believers of the anime community — and because the streaming version of the series on Max doesn’t have the English audio track yet. The Japanese voice actors behind both Rick and Morty are the same actors from the Japanese dub of the main series, so Rick and Morty: The Anime seems to be trying to keep the characters in the adaptation as close to indistinguishable from the real deal, despite the even-more-poorly-drawn character design.

The plot of “Girl Who Manipulates Time” is simultaneously simple and needlessly convoluted. Rick has invented a “gizmo” (his word) that decreases entropy and can reverse the flow of time, causing the Galactic Federation, which still exists in this alternate timeline, to pursue Rick as a terrorist. Summer plays Rick’s woman-in-the-chair without any of the bored snark or self-aggrandizing that characterizes her contribution to the chemistry of the main series, and Morty is trapped in a too-real virtual reality game (not nearly as hilarious or interesting as Roy: A Life Well Lived) because Rick wants him distracted while he carries out the current scheme for some unclear reason.

However, thanks to Rick’s meddling, multiple different timelines begin to crash into each other, both in the real world and Morty’s video game. Toward the end of the episode, Rick notes in a stupidly lazy expository line, “Space-time is getting all messed up because of the gizmo I mentioned earlier.” In his game, Morty meets two presumably video-game characters, Elle and Frank, who seem to offer him different paths through his VR life, and we see multiple Mortys live full lives and grow old within the video-game world. 

On paper, you can see how certain elements of “Girl Who Manipulates Time” could be inspired by Rick and Morty. The whole “Rick’s newest invention screws up the timeline and causes interdimensional chaos” plot is a stock storyline in the main series, as is “Morty is trapped in a virtual reality that’s too real.” But what makes Rick and Morty: The Anime feel different is that the story is just so basic. There’s no twist. There’s no meta element, and no self-awareness in general. There’s no running parody/homage to other sci-fi properties — the closest we get is a brief Citizen Kane-type scene in one of Morty’s VR lives.

More than that, the distinct and complex characters of Rick and Morty have been replaced by the flat, overused anime archetypes they most closely resemble. Instead of being a depressed anarchist with both agency and urgency, Rick is now just an old, eccentric genius who spends the entire episode sitting around doing nothing while waxing metaphysical. At one point, Rick ponders, “Despite the fact there are (sic) an infinite number of paths available to us, we only get one life to pick from. It’s pretty dumb, huh? And the dumbest part of all is that we’re the ones who choose it for ourselves.” 

In Rick and Morty: The Anime, Rick’s nihilism only amounts to calling things “dumb” — he even calls bombs “dumb” earlier in the episode, something the real Rick would never suggest.

But, ultimately, the worst part of the first Rick and Morty: The Anime episode is that the show’s writers are painfully, embarrassingly bad at adapting the original show’s distinct sense of humor for the new medium — really, they’re just terrible at writing comedy in a general sense. In the beginning of the episode, soldiers from the Galactic Federation raid the Smith house, and Jerry cracks, “Gosh, you know, I thought I called the plumber!” in a way that amazingly isn’t played for his family to mercilessly roast him for how hack and corny he is, as would be the case in the main series. 

Several minutes later, after the aliens arrest Rick (or his dummy hologram), Jerry makes a callback to the plumber gag, joking, “I just knew it had something to do with Rick. I mean, the only thing I’m guilty of is causing our toilet to flush constantly, which hardly warrants a response like that!” 

Again, no roasting — Jerry’s toilet trouble is a real running joke that Rick and Morty: The Anime really thought wouldn’t make us want to die.

Through the clichés, the crappy dialogue and the complete misunderstanding of the elements that made the original Rick and Morty such a massive success, Rick and Morty: The Anime has proven that it’s too stupid to even be derivative. Those cringey TikToks of Rick cosplayers vaping and twerking have more of the Rick and Morty spark than this pile of shit.