A massive pair of jugs fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Well, I mean, he didn’t just follow boobs, but as a lonely seventeen year old horndog struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic Japanese wasteland, his hormones ache for feminine contact, and since he doesn’t have a telepathic canine companion to act as his conscience or mentor, he’s pretty much on his own when it comes to managing his priorities. He of course also pursues resources like money and water, but he could frankly die happy if it meant not dying a virgin. Wearing an iconically oversized helmet, Kanta utilizes a certain set of elite skills to carve out a name and reputation for himself among all the other scum of the Great Kanto Desert, even if his hijinks and escapades go awry more often than not. Whether battling his rivals, matching wits against the busty Junko or striving to set a good example for his new apprentice Kosuna, every day is an adventure for the one and only Desert Punk!

If you couldn’t tell from the aspect ratio, this anime is just over twenty years old, and it very much looks like a product of its time. Desert Punk was produced by Studio Gonzo, who have always been known to be heavily inconsistent with the animation budgets that they’re willing to allot to their projects, pushing out cheaper anime more often than not, but Desert Punk seems to fall curiously in the middle. At first glance... Well, at many glances, it does not appear to have been a high priority for the studio in terms of resources, but it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as some of their cheapest titles. True, it does look really stiff and stilted most of the time, with its constant use of long, drawn out key frames and countless shots where they up the intensity with speed lines and shaky pan-ups, you know basically every corner-cutting trick in the book, but there are two saving grace for this production, and they are both due to the series’ primary director, Takayuki Inugaki, who you may know from Rosario Vampire?

I’m going to be honest, Inugaki has been credited as the primary director of several high profile anime titles, but I haven’t actually seen any of them, with the exception of Desert Punk and... Oh my God... Indian Summer, of all things, so I can’t personally attest to his abilities in that kind of position of project leadership, but from what I can see in Desert Punk, the fact that the series is bearable to look at period is due to his efforts. First off, I’ve said multiple times in the past that I really appreciate when a director is able to direct an anime so well that it looks good despite being burdened with a shoestring budget, and by that metric, Inugaki certainly does the best he possibly can, but it was always going to be an uphill battle with Gonzo. Thankfully, this show is mostly a silly gag comedy, so he seems to have made the smart call to lean into his financial limitations and use the inevitably stiff animation to his advantage, making it part of the show’s visual style and matching it to the pace of the comedy.

As a positive result of this, he was able to save money for the action scenes, which actually look quite good, with their more fluid movements, and a clever technique of blending shadows into the characters frames as they moved. The combat in this series is easily its biggest highlight, with Kanta enjoying several visually pleasing and engaging action set pieces against his numerous enemies, but this doesn’t make up for just how recognizably cheap the series looks the rest of the time. The designs are also kind of a mixed bag, because while they look really cool up front... Kanta’s desert armor looks so simple, yet so awesome at the same time, and there is a nice aesthetic to the honeycombed sand structures that are all that remain of some lost past society... There’s little to no variety to any of it, and the few assets that do look appealing at first start to become boring after a few episodes. Can we please have another setting other than the wasteland and the drably colored villages that inhabit it? Or maybe just a little color in general, other than just the bright pink Kosuna?

The character designs are even worse, because while Kanta does look pretty badass at first, there’s only about four different desert armor designs across the whole cast, and none of them look that much different from Kanta’s. Also, most of the human characters look absurdly ugly, including the so-called ‘attractive’ characters, and especially including Kanta himself, who we see without his mask way too early and way too often, long before any kind of mystique can set in or a proper face reveal can be built up. Aside from the human cast, the only real animals I can remember seeing are giant bugs, which people basically treat like purse dogs, and there is a clever idea there, but all I can focus on is how this detail does NOT help to improve the show’s aesthetic. I feel like this series probably looked a lot better back in 2004, when it was actually released, and standards were lower, but from a 2025 perspective, all I can say is that it looks archaic at best.

The English dub was a Funimation effort, and thankfully, this part of the show is actually really good. Eric Vale was in charge of writing the script for about sixteen episodes, which means he was writing his own off-beat dialogue as the lead role of Kanta, and I have to admit, His efforts... Along with ADR directors Jeremy Inman and Zach Bolton... Resulted in a script that was just as edgy as it needed to be without ever going too far overboard, and full of clever references. He was also clearly having a blast playing his part. I’m guessing the same can’t be said for Stephanie Young in the role of his main love interest Junko, as she changed her credited name from Stephanie to Callie after only three episodes, and given the direction her character went I can’t really blame her, but she did provide the perfect blend of sultry and spunk. Luci Christian practically carries some extended parts of the show as Kosuna, and Kenny Green’s Rain Spider is pretty amusing. Most of the 2004 Funimation stable appears at some point or another in various roles, they all do their jobs as well as you’d expect, dub fully recommended.

And speaking of 2004, this is, uh, this is definitely a show from 2004. Oh boy does this show wear the 2000s on it’s sleeve. For those of you who either weren’t born yet in the mid-2000s, or were just too young to keep up with what was popular among older demographics, the 2000s were a very, very different time from today, at least in terms of media. With South Park arguably at its peak, network executives were scrambling to fill the airwaves with edgy, irreverent comedy, most of which has not aged well. Now, I’m not saying that just because they were offensive. For example, there was a cartoon on Comedy Central at the time called Drawn Together, which was relentlessly offensive, and yet it’s still one of my favorite things ever because of the amount of effort, cleverness and creativity that went into it, or at least into the first two seasons. This wasn’t the case for a lot of media back then, because rather than offensiveness, the real issue with this brand of comedy is that at the time, it really didn’t have to try.

Back in the 2000s, you didn’t need a lot to succeed in comedic spaces. You’ve got a hyper masculine concept, that’s able to make fun of everything including masculinity itself? You’ve got attractive, well endowed women who are willing to be objectified for a paycheck? You’ve got a TV network that’s willing to let you get away with anything as long as you don’t incur any serious FCC fines? You’ve got a hit mid-2000s comedy! It was trendy at the time, and brought in a short term profit, but it eas never going to hold up. Do you remember the Spike TV adult animation block that featured such classics as Gary the Rat and Stripperella? Fuck no, you probably don’t even remember Spike TV. Remember The Man Show? Maybe, but it’s basically unwatchable through a modern lens, as it’s just three jokes interspersed with TV-safe fanservice that wouldn’t hold up against the results of a thirty second internet search. And yeah, a handful of Adult Swim shows still have a following, but most of their original programming was just stupid ugly bullshit.

This kind of material is hard to watch today, not just because it’s offensive, but because being offensive was the only fucking thing it had going for it, and this is the kind of thing I found myself reflecting on while rewatching Desert Punk, because I’m sorry, that’s how I feel about this show. And yeah, I know it's from Japan, but it's not unusual for anime to be influenced by American culture. I don’t think I always felt this way... I either liked it in 2009, or I just pretended to like it so I could fit in with my friends, I genuinely don’t remember... But right from the first episode, I found this show unbearable, and I’m pretty sure that has something to do with another way this show has aged poorly, that’s not entirely its own fault. Everything that may have been funny about it at one point has been beaten into the ground over the course of the last twenty years. I’m sure at one point, it was funny to see hapless male protagonists with high libidos that are never satisfied because they can’t catch a break, when all they want is to just get laid... Nowadays, that’s the most prevalent and annoying cliche ever. I could just as easily watch Highschool DXD for the same shtick, but with better fanservice and a much better story to boot.

And as far as Kanta goes, as a quippy, sarcastic antihero following a mix of selfish, questionable AND honorable motivations? Who happens to solve every problem through a mix of creativity, intelligence, quick wit and just pure dumb luck? Do I even have to fucking say it? That sort of thing has already been revitalized, perfected, and then buried right back into the ground through the combined efforts of Deadpool and Rick Sanchez, and Kanta brings nothing to the table that could ever compete with them. The vast majority of this series is a seamless blend of boring and unpleasant, with no overarching plot whatsoever, a backstory and lore that is relegated entirely to exposition about things we don’t get to see, and a story that I’m sure was fully fleshed out and engaging in the manga, but here, does anybody fucking care? Your investment in the series relies entirely on how badly you want to see Kanta succeed, survive and either grow up, get laid or both, so what reason does anybody have to care about the relationship between the mercenaries in the desert and the government of some place we never see called “The Oasis?”

The best way I could describe this series to anyone who hasn’t seen it is that it’s like Trigun, if Vash were actually the good for nothing horndog that he portrays himself as. He is every bit as punchable as that makes him sound, and if you want to make the argument that he’s meant to be a parody of male perversion and his frequent failures are some kind of feminist statement, well, that argument falls apart when you realize how awful of a character Junko is. Junko is basically the Fujiko Mine of this story, a love interest who’s always dancing just out of reach of the protagonist while constantly playing both sides, but there’s actual depth, complexity and allure to Fujiko. She feels like a real person, and you want to know more about her. Junko is basically just whatever the vignettes she appears in needs her to be at any given time. I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy seeing her beat the shit out of Kanta, but I also have to see her giggle like a schoolgirl while he pokes her in the breasts with his rifle. That is in no way an exaggeration or a metaphor.

The saving grace of this series is the character Kosuna, although to explain why would involve multiple spoilers from multiple points in the series. All I’m going to say about her is that while I don’t like the fact that Kanta is literally grooming her... That is, by definition, what their relationship is... She has a solid arc, and she’s a much better main character than Kanta is. Hell, if I’m being honest, the second half of the series is a lot better than the first half, because a lot of the show’s worst elements get toned down, they actually start making some halfway decent jokes that finally manage to get a couple of chuckles out of me, and the pacing finally takes its time to breathe. I wouldn’t say it ever gets good, although that might just be because I checked out kind of early, but it gets a lot more watchable, with a few fairly effective twists and reveals that I did appreciate... But when you consider the fact that the first half featured an episode where Kanta locks Junko in a sex dungeon to torture and degrade her while secretly stroking his sandworm, you take whatever improvements you can get.

Desert Punk is out of print from Funimation, but can be streamed on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime. The original manga by Masatoshi Usune is not available stateside.

When you say that a piece of media hasn’t aged well, or that it was a product of its time, there are plenty of potential reasons for this. They can range from content that’s no longer considered acceptable, to tropes that have become cliches, to comedy styles that are no longer as effective as they used to be. Desert Punk is kind of all of these. I don’t want it to sound like I’m saying no effort at all went into it, because that’s stupid, it’s an anime after all. Literally hundreds of people worked on it, and I do genuinely believe that the director poured his heart and soul into making it look as good as it could on a limited budget, and I have no desire to slander him for that. The writing, though? I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. I just don’t see anything meaningful hiding below the juvenile and off-putting surface of this one. It is a comedy at the end of the day, and everybody has a different sense of humor, so I guess I would recommend checking out the first episode to see if it resonates with you, but for me, this show just doesn’t hold up.

I give Desert Punk a 4/10