Kaiju No. 8

Kaijuu 8-gou is perfect evidence that an anime can, indeed, be carried by the animation. It's no secret that this show is one of the most blatant attempts at getting American money funneled into anime, what with the streaming on Twitter deal and the bands brought in for the atrocious songs in the show, but even ignoring the blatant tech bro shilling with their insane AstroTurfing on it, this show is just bad. I’m to the point of saying this show should be renamed to AstroTurfing The Animation, because it’s one of the most blatant cases of artificial hype I’ve seen, to the point I’ve never seen anyone even mention this show despite its supposed success.

Let's start by listing the one positive aspect of this show, it looks great, Production IG continues showing why they're the top of the industry with clean visuals that MAPPA's edgy slop could only dream of having. And that's literally the one positive, because everything else, from the weak plot, to the insufferable characters, to the ear bleedingly bad music, to the ugly character designs, to the very unfunny attempts at jokes, all makes this show only not end up with a lower score because at least its battles look cool. This is the exact kind of slop that the meme "carried by the animation" is supposed to make fun of, because even middling shows like Demon Slayer and Frieren have other positive aspects to them, this show has nothing going on for it but IG's great production values.

And given this is a generic shounen, I can see a weak plot could be forgiven if the characters were likable, but this doesn't have that, in fact, the characters are all incredibly annoying and arguably the worst part of the show. The main character is probably the worst offender, being an extremely loud and obnoxious manchild who is supposed to be 32 years old, yet acts less than half that age, there's literally no joke to making the MC a grown man if he's going to act no better than the thousand other teens that normally headline this kind of series. There's also a female lead, and she's a "strong female protagonist" straight out of some Disney Star Wars streaming exclusive shit show, with no clear personality but with abilities far above our male lead because she needs no man. The rest of the cast are honestly so unmemorable I wouldn't be able to tell them apart, but they feel like nothing but one-note jokes that aren't even funny, because in general the comedy of this show is atrocious.

I don't get the point of this show. Unless you're the kind who thinks mindless action is all that's needed for a good series, don't even bother, there's no plot to get hooked on here. If I can't watch this for the characters, I can't watch it for the plot, and all that's left is some pretty colors, then the show sucks, no amount of good animation is fixing a badly written snoozefest like this one.

Thank you for reading