Rick and Morty: The Anime - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Rick and Morty: The Anime



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Like many other people, Rick and Morty became a staple during the pandemic years, when we all were stuck at home and looking for some fun entertainment to chew through. I had missed the first season or so, but during mid 2020 this became one of my new favorite animated shows. It was raunchy, rank, twisted, and pure gonzo fun for those of us who were getting bored of nearly 20 years of South Park, Family Guy and American Dad. It’s had some ups and downs, but over the last 7 seasons we’ve had some amazingly fun stories with fan theories abounding over convoluted “chicken or the egg” scenarios. Simultaneously, around the summer of 2020, we also got a set of 5 or 6 anime styled short film off shoots of the main series based upon the classic Lone Wolf and Cub samurai films. These 5 shorts acted as the premise for what we have today, a 10 episode Rick and Morty side story, done completely in anime style and directed by Takashi Sano.

Sadly the 5 shorts that spawned this idea didn’t make it to disc, even in special features form, and I can only conclude that it was either due to licensing issues with the collaboration, or else they didn’t want to go back and redub the entire series in English as well. But either way, those Samurai webisodes would have been the perfect addendum to this disc. But that aside, the disc we have before us is sadly sort of bloated and meandering. Much like most of Rick and Morty, the 10 episodes deal with a multiverse of unfolding story lines simultaneously, each taken from a different verse and stitched together into one 10 episode arc. But the thing is, it’s more confusing than ever, and really just falls apart less than one episode in.

Ironically, two of the animated shorts that I mentioned above were actually directed by Sano himself, so they would have been great to tie in, but it looks like a few 5 minute webisodes are a lot easier to do than over 3 hours worth of content, as can sadly be seen here with this arc. Episodes are full length 20 minute episodes, just with more focus on Summer and Morty rather than Rick this go around. And while this was originally produced in Japanese, the English dubs are given the main track here, and the Japanese track is relegated to lossy Dolby Digital with English SDH subs instead of actual subs.

I’m not sure just who is at fault. Whether it be Sano and his team during the story making process, or whether Warner Bros simply didn’t care that much about it and slapped the disc out here with a limited budget. There’s no real way to know until we find out how much time was spent by both parties crafting it all, and who had the bigger say in how things went. But at the end of the day Rick and Morty: The Anime has to be one of the biggest disappointments of the show’s history, as it’s devoid of the humor and fun that made the series great, and it doesn’t have that feudal Japanese vibe that the original 5 minute shorts did 5 years ago. Either way, this particular side project is kind of a dud for Rick and Morty fans.




Rating:

Rated TV-14 by the MPAA




Video:

Presented on Blu-ray with a 1080p AVC encode, Rick and Morty: The Anime looks really good. Maybe not AS good as the series does, but it’s pretty close (I noticed some mild banding and the animation style doesn’t lend itself towards massive amounts of detail). What I did notice was that this didn’t really look like most anime I’m familiar with. It looks kind of like regular Rick and Morty, just with slightly elongated faces and some of the classic Japanese brush strokes and spaceship designs (really reminiscent of the Irresponsible Captain Tylor ship designs from the 90s). And I’m not just saying that it doesn’t look like traditional Funimation or Bones style anime. It just doesn’t look very Anime at all. But hey, this is Rick and Morty. Nothing is traditional!









Audio:

The audio tracks are a bit weird here. As I mentioned in the main review, we have two audio mixes here, with an English dub in 2.0 DTS-HD MA, and a Japanese track (as it was produced in Japanese). But weirdly enough, the Japanese track only gets a loss Dolby Digital 2.0 track instead of a lossless mix. And to make it weirder, the English subtitles are Subs for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, not regular ones, so if you choose the Japanese track you have to slog through all the audio descriptions in subtitle form as well. That being said, the fidelity is solid enough, especially on the English lossless dub. Voices are clear, and the ambiance is pretty good. Of course no surrounds or LFE, but it’s a solid mix considering.











Extras:

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Final Score:

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I’m not sure why this didn’t hit home for me, especially when a couple of the original “anime” shorts that inspired this project were directed by the same man. Maybe it was the fact that a few minute short’s success doesn’t translate into long form success? Maybe it was a lack of creativity with Roiland gone? Or maybe it was Maybelline. I don’t know. But all I do know is that this particular side project just fell flat for me. I’m going to blame it on a lack of sharp witty humor like we’re used to, and the feeling that the voice actors (the major voice actors for Rick and Morty were both changed out after Roiland left in season 6) weren’t trying to mimic the original voice actors as well as they did in season 7. But hey, you can’t win em all. I’ll strongly suggest skipping this on unless you’re a collector.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Yôhei Tadano, Keisuke Chiba, Akiha Matsui, Joe Daniels, Gabriel Regojo, Donna Bella Litton
Directed by: Takashi Sano
Written by: Takashi Sano
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, Japanese DD 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Warner Bros
Rated: TV-14
Runtime: 207 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: April 29th, 2025

Recommendation: Skip It