When we think about Asian animation, we usually think about Anime and the like. But there's an awful lot of the rest of Asia, with an awful lot of animated series... and Sturgeon's Law applies to them as much as anything. Not to be confused with horrible anime, which goes here.
Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviance (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this. Additionally, to ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):
- The Adventures of Panda Warrior (originally known as The Adventures of Jin Bao) is a Kung Fu Panda ripoff with terrible animation; a nonsensical, needlessly complicated, and boring story that has more in common with The Wizard of Oz or The Chronicles of Narnia than Kung Fu Panda; and terrible voice acting. To top it all off, it ends with everyone dancing to a pop song called "Miracle", and even two characters who died earlier in the movie come back to life for the end with no explanation!
- Ali Baba & the Gold Raiders has laughably amateurish animation that changes from a bad style to a worse one every 20 seconds, with hand-drawn characters incongruously imposed over a 3D background ("Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves", conveniently enough, did that better with 1937 technology!). Despite being set in the Scheherazade mythos, a guy wearing a Batman t-shirt, a stereotypical 80s metalhead, and a fat dude with sunglasses and a mohawk are seen at one point, telling us just how seriously the filmmakers are treating the source material. The plot is ridiculous, with many characters behaving like idiots, there is a plagiarized MIDI version of "Prince Ali" from Aladdin, and it has the stupidest ending ever: The main villain being tied up and yelled at to get out, despite the fact he's tied up... and then the words "Alibaba & The Gold Raiders" appear on the screen and the credits roll. With all that in mind, it's no wonder why Godfrey Ho's last video he directed was this back in 2002, as well as why it's the only known thing the Indonesian Bening Studio and Gabah Studio Yogyakarta ever put out. Marzgurl reviews it here
, and Phelous, Allison Pregler, Brad Jones, and Harry Partridge give another review here. Saberspark calls it the worst film he's ever seen, beating out a long-standing record of Trolland being the worst, until he saw Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale. - "Shoddy Knockoff Product" doesn't even begin to describe The Autobots, a 2015 computer-animated Chinese film that is actually a television series stitched together. Many elements are plagiarized from other sources: almost all of the cars' designs are stolen from Cars (though one design is original, and another design rips off the Batmobile), some of its music is taken from other works, its poster is very similar to Cars 2 (even going as far as to poorly edit character renders from that film to resemble this film's characters), and its Chinese title is suspiciously similar to that of Carsnote ; even the credits are stolen from Dragon Nest: Warriors' Dawn, but with all the names slightly altered. Aside from all that, the animation resembles an early-2000s video game at best, its story has loads of Padding, the writing is nonsensical, and some of the voice acting (particularly the cars) sounds literally phoned in. Making matters worse is that The Autobots was allegedly rushed out to exploit a government funding loophole. Notably, Disney sued the filmmakers (who claimed it wasn't a rip-off and threw a fit at critics who didn't like the film) for copyright infringement and won. Accented Cinema discusses the film in greater detail here, and Family Toy Review provides commentary over the film's beginning here.
- Beauty and Warrior, dubbed "The Worst Anime Ever" on YouTube (despite not being an anime), is what happens when you let a financial company from Indonesia make a movie that's not just a commercial. It has very stiff and limited animation, and painfully obvious overuse of Stock Footage. The plot is boring, incomprehensible, and almost nonexistent. There's a lot of random zooming on people's shocked, slack-jawed faces, and the camera holds those shots for far too long, in a way that sticks out even given where the film was produced.note The most glaring flaw, however, is that it only has two or three character designs. The only difference between the two brothers, for instance, is eye color. It is, fortunately though, only 50 minutes long. Marzgurl reviews it here.
- Blue Seagull is an obscure South Korean animated movie from 1994 that suffers from poor recycled animation, an incoherent story, unnecessary sex scenes that add nothing to the story except possibly a rape, uninteresting and bland characters, quick jump cuts, and weak pacing. The only thing of worth is the behind-the-scenes footage of animators slaving away at the movie during the end credits, and the beautiful credits music. Watch BobSamurai's review.
- How to Train a Dragon Warrior (or Battle of the Dragon Warriors when translating the Thai text below the English title) is the result of a company best known for their dubs of popular North American and Japanese media for their country of Thailand attempting to create their own version of Dreamworks' How to Train Your Dragon without any understanding of what made the original great in the first place. For a film released in 2011, the animation shown is very awkward and stiff to the point of clear plagarism in mind for designs, the audio is often overlaid with no harmony in mind, and the storyline is prone to constant Mood Whiplash. This film has no Wikipedia entry, no IMDb entry, and while the entire film was once uploaded onto both YouTube and Dailymotion in its entirety with translations in mind, very few people ever watched it while it was on those websites, as both links have since been taken down by the film's creator, TIGA Entertainment. The film is largely only known on the Internet due to blameitonjorge covering it as the third-worst Dreamworks ripoff film in a video with PhantomStrider in 2017, as well as through Saberspark, who covered it five years later initially with his friend Rishi on a livestream of the film with them trying to figure out what the plot was without any translations around before making a video talking about it.note It should also be noted that TIGA Entertainment is an offshoot of Chaiyo Productions, which is most infamous for attempting to steal the international rights to Tsuburaya Productions' Ultra Series while making unofficial and unlicensed merchandise and shows, including Ultraman: The Animation further down this list.
- The King of Tibetan Antelope is a 2010 animated miniseries by Shenzen Films. The plot is about a young Tibetan antelope who wanders off to the "Way of the Antelope's Home" with friends after losing his mother. The problem is not the plot (which, while not too original, could have been interesting), but rather the execution: Basically, it's too reminiscent of two Disney features, replacing Bambi's deer with antelope, and directly lifting the character designs of the antelope, the "Circle of Life" sequence, the Pride Rock pose, the orphan plot element, and so forth from The Lion King. Characters are Cel Shaded, making the series look like a cheap and flat-out attempt to achieve traditional animation visuals, the environments are computer-generated and don't blend at all with the characters, and most of the animations have very little sense of scale, depth, and movement - for example, when the walking animation of an adult antelope stops in poor timing after her model's movement in the beginning. Here is a video of the first episode with English subtitles. Fortunately, the 2015 film has a more decent plot and much better art to the point of Scenery Porn. The film adaptation has become a minor Cult Classic courtesy of a YouTube upload, which can be watched here.
- The Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit (Tu Xia Chuan Qi), a Chinese film that is very obviously a Kung Fu Panda Mockbuster, only with a rabbit who looks like a mix of Miyamoto Usagi, Richard Watterson, and a Moogle. It's also loaded with Padding, as it takes 60 minutes into this 90-minute "action movie" for the protagonist to even make a fist, and he only fights for 30 seconds at the end of the movie. It has a 3.3 on IMDb, a 2/5 on Redbox, and Japancinema.net gave it a D+. Watch the trailer here. Prestigious Panda Productions reviews it here, and Regularjosh1 takes a look at it here.
- Legend of The Condor Hero, an anime adaptation of Jin Yong's The Return of the Condor Heroes note . Note that only the first 26 episodes were actually made by Nippon Animation. This is due to production issues, low ratings, and glaring deviations from the source material, forcing them to hand over the series to Hong Kong-based studio Jade Animation to animate the remaining 52 episodes while Nippon is only responsible for the character designs. As a result, the series suffered from a huge drop in quality: stiff and reused animations (especially in the Siege of Xiangyang arc due to featuring hordes of Mongol soldiers), same bland soundtrack used over and over again to the point of being tiresome, Off-Model close-ups making dramatic moments bloated, and pacing even slower than the anime episodes. Only a select few post-Nippon episodes are better-drawn, but the special effects look fake and did not blend well with the animation style. The only saving grace is that the Hong Kong episodes are closer to the original novel and Jade Animation actually cleaned up some mess the anime made with the continuity (such as the absence of Huang Yaoshi) because they had more episodes allocated for them.
- Mustafa and the Magician is a computer-animated movie created in India, produced by Pentamedia Graphics, and distributed by Shemaroo Entertainment (who are also responsible for the aforementioned Kiara the Brave). Originally released in 2003 as Son of Alladin and re-edited for release in 2016 under its new title, it hardly looks it as the animation consists of awkward and herky-jerky Motion Capture (many of the characters look detailed to the point of creepy) that would've barely passed muster on the PlayStation 2. It shows how cheap the animation is that a character falls backward after being kicked on the side of his shoulder while another character is launched a huge distance by a light slap. The writing isn't much better: not only does the plot move at a sluggish pace, but (among other things) the run-of-the-mill villainous wizard's goal of trying to kill Alladin's son to reign supreme or else get defeated is ripped off from Hercules and Mustafa himself is a generic hero at best and an ethically dubious protagonist at worst (he stalks the princess, even when she's taking a bath, and proclaims his intent to vie for her hand in marriage after she clearly states how upset she is with it). Even worse, the 2016 version being edited down considerably causes the film to make less sense, one example is a song from the original celebrating Mustafa's transition to adulthood being removed which causes him to seemingly grow out of the blue. Saberspark reviewed it and declared it was so bad that he (begrudgingly) declared Leo the Lion is no longer the worst animated film on Netflix.
- Shen Shou Jing Gang (also known as Celestial Warriors) is clearly a rip-off of a certain popular show. The main hero is the Yellow Ranger (though to be fair, since the show uses The Four Gods, it's obvious that he's meant to be the Yellow Dragon, which is kind of the king of those beasts). Have we mentioned the awful early-season CG yet, or the absurdly cheap 2D or 3D animation depending on the season, or how the two are sometimes incongruent (the chubby Blue Ranger's CG model has the same body type as his fellows)? And why hasn't its licensing agent noticed what it rips off? More info.
- Space Thunder Kids, a South Korean animated movie about the Dark Empire trying to conquer the universe and three children try to stop them with every Humongous Mecha they have. Of course, the movie follows the plot very loosely as it will Jump Cut randomly, leaving the story with a lot of unanswered questions. Off-Model plagues this movie as characters, many of which count as a blatant generic anime Captain Ersatz, constantly get irreconcilable drawing styles and have very strange facial expressions. The whole incoherent mess was made by copypasting eight different 1980s movies, including Mockbusters of Mazinger Z and TRON.note The only redeeming factor about this movie is the occasional bits of weirdness note such as funny faces, random plot points thrown in and out, and the infamous tank scene.
- A certain movie was released in 2011 by the Indian company Shemaroo Entertainment under the name Super K - The Movie, which is centered around a nonsensical and Anvilicious plot referring to global warming involving a superpowered Indian child who can control the weather. Cinematic Excrement took a look at this garbage so you don't have to. MikeJ had a go at it as well, as did Bobsheaux.
- Tales in Mushroom Village is a 2009-10 CGI animated series by "Anhui Lister 3D Animation" from China. It's filled with anthropomorphic animals who look unintentionally grotesque (a hedgehog character has a strange resemblance to a Pikachu). The series comes with stolen music from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, sloppy animation, scary-looking movements, and unrealistic effects (one scene even has some gameplay footage of The King of Fighters 97, likely for the sole reason of the game being very popular in China), and the characters' faces are dull and overdetailed to where they look unsettling in some scenes. Here is the trailer, the "Alien Visitors" sequel trailer, description, and part one and part two of the show's DVD set.
- Thunder Prince (or Black Dragon King and Asylum Baluster when translating the original title) is a South Korean animated Cliché Storm that makes the Inheritance Cycle look original. It contains inconsistent character designs that make Jack Chick's shittier illustrations look like Dave Gibbons', as well as a spectacularly gory scene of the sidekick monkey playing around with the aqueous humor of a snake's eyeballs, which the creators felt the need to remind the audience of for no apparent reason. The Big Bad undergoes instantaneous Badass Decay, too.
- The Thai animation series Ultraman: The Animation (unofficial and unlicensed, of course) seems to take everything we know about Tsubaraya's epic Ultra Series and drop it on its head. With franchise favorite Ultraman Taro being reduced to little more than a laughing stock Cloud Cuckoolander, a generic Excuse Plot involving a monster reviving other monsters, characters that have no importance to the plot whatsoever getting far more attention than the supposed main cast, getting a random Original Character and recolors everywhere, and characters that just won't stop talking, you'd be far better off watching the Tsuburaya-approved Upin & Ipin Ultraman episodes.
- Xu You Ji, a company that Chinese families can supposedly pay $275 to feature their child in a movie, has gained infamy in recent years for its poor eye-burning productions. The unnerving combination of Uncanny Valley children and countless copyright violations has attracted much hate across the entire internet and led to demands to shut down the company. Here's an overview of their productions.
- One "film" not only completely rips off the mecha from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and bizarrely uses the cast from Monsters vs. Aliens as the villains, but it also features horrible CG-rendered kid protagonists in plugsuits. Moreover, it uses music from Code Geass and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 at fairly inappropriate times (the music that plays during a certain character's death scene in Code Geass, for example, is used as the opening song).
- Another notorious work from Xu You Ji features a girl becoming a mermaid. In the beginning, the villain arrives and petrifies the girl's unicorn, but the girl is transformed by the company's mascot angels into a mermaid to go on an underwater adventure, before returning to the surface and thwarting the villain. Nearly everything underwater is stolen, considering that the backgrounds and most sea creatures are from Finding Nemo and there is music from The Little Mermaid.
