Top 10 Anime Ruined by Terrible 3D

Top 10 Anime Ruined by Terrible 3D

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Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Anime Ruined by Terrible 3D. For this list, we’ll be looking at the series and scenes that were butchered by some incredibly abysmal CG animation. What’s the ugliest 3D anime you’ve ever seen? Commiserate in those comments!

#10: “One Piece 3D: Mugiwara Chase” (2011)

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For the series’ eleventh feature film, Luffy and the Straw Hats set sail all the way into the third dimension. There, they traversed through poorly-rendered glaciers, off-model characters, and a nauseously dizzying camera on their quest to get Luffy’s hat back. Yeah, that’s the whole story, and the visuals don’t help it feeling like an utter waste of time. Its attempts at recapturing the charm of the original’s aesthetic only succeeds in dropping anchor at the uncanny valley. Instead of enhancing the visuals, most of the characters feel less alive than they did in 2D. It’s clear that not even Luffy is supposed to stretch this much.

This bear definitely looks scary, but for all the wrong reasons. He appears less like an imposing force of nature than a rough draft that someone forgot to finish. There’s virtually no detail or texture to the 3D model, which makes calling it a bear at all kind of a stretch. Suffice it to say, the lackluster visuals robs the scene of any sense of tension whatsoever. It’s so bad that watching the characters dodge and counterattack is actually more comical than exciting. If this was the result, it may’ve been better for everyone had the bear just stayed in hibernation.

Nothing turns heads quite like a helicopter calling mayday. Except, the only thing this one crash-landed on was the movie’s tone. The ugly monstrosity flies through an even uglier cityscape on its way to completely obliterate any sense of immersion, drama, or gravitas from the scene. Compared to the rest of the film’s standout 2D animation, the clunky CGI copter is even more unforgivable. If they’d just taken the time to animate the helicopter properly, it would’ve easily flown to success. But, instead, we’re left with a sequence that’s abysmal even by 80s standards.

#7: “Ex-Arm” (2021-)

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Where do we even begin? This hopelessly misguided anime adaptation was practically doomed from the start. Most of its production staff hadn’t ever worked on animation before, and that fact became painfully clear when it began to air. The fight scenes, if you could even call them that, are pitifully rendered with absolutely no sense of weight or movement. The choreography is decent, but it’s hard to enjoy it when the actual animation feels like it’s trying to melt your eyeballs. Impressively, the unpolished models look rough even when they aren’t in motion. At least the production committee can boast they made the anime look as robotic as its main character.

#6: “Attack on Titan” (2013-)

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The first season of this post-apocalyptic series adapted its titular villains with beautifully-realized 2D animation. It brought an integral sense of scale to their warpath, which is why it was so noticeable when future seasons defaulted to 3D renders instead. This colossal downgrade exchanged their menace for stiff movement and a distinct lack of screen presence. Admittedly, it’s not the ugliest CGI to come from an anime, but it’s still a far cry from the heights of the first season. The dramatic life-or-death struggles just didn’t look the same. Without that bombastic scope, the Colossal Titan fell with a whimper.

Intentional or not, it’s pretty hilarious that Ainz asks for applause at the end of this scene. It’s like the animators knew that no one else was going to praise it, so they had to do it themselves. In Ainz’s defense, it’s supposed to be a really cool moment displaying his overwhelming strength. He uses the bodies of the enemy forces to summon - well, whatever the hell these creatures are supposed to be. The eye-rolling CGI makes their rampage resemble a parody of a cringey disaster film. But, at least those are so bad-they’re-good. This is just plain bad.

The word “brutal” applies to both this series’ narrative and its visuals. The grim tale of war and conquest consistently shifted between 3D and traditional animation.. The 2D segments looked great, but the story’s hypest brawls were bafflingly diminished to cheap CG cutscenes. Nothing hurts more than a show consistently reminding audiences of what could’ve been. Thankfully, this folktale has a happy ending. After two seasons of painfully inconsistent animation, a change in production companies left the CGI scenes in the dust. The series went full 2D, and the uptick in quality was impossible to ignore.

At a certain point, this anime feels like an elaborate joke that got way out of hand. The 2D animation - and we use that word loosely - is basically just a slideshow. But, even that’s better than the downright laughable excuse of CGI. The debris, textures, and machinery don’t organically interact with the rest of the 2D world at all. It lacks the barest shred of visual fidelity, to the point the whole thing feels woefully unfinished. Don’t even get us started on the monsters. If the goal was to make them so hideous you never want to look at them, then this was a complete success.

When Shiro decided to transfer part of his magical circuit to the wounded Saber, it’s presented as a quasi-romantic scene. At least, until a dragon shows up. No, you haven’t accidentally clicked on a video game walkthrough, this is actually what the dragon looks like. Although, that’s offensive to all the 3D games that look leagues better than this. There's absolutely no effort made to blend the CG textures with the show’s visual style, and the results are almost laughable. Instead of sensual desire, the only sensation this scene conjures is nausea.

#1: “Berserk” (2016-17)

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If Guts is really out for revenge, he should point his sword at whoever thought adapting Kentaro Miura's masterpiece with CGI was a good idea. But, shamefully, not even a beloved classic like this was safe from the clutches of poor 3D. The proportions are horrendous, the fights are wooden, and there’s a general sense of jank to even the tiniest movement. When the manga has more kinetic movement than the anime adaptation, you know you’ve done something horribly wrong. It’s not just ugly, it also fails to translate some of the series’ best moments to the screen. “Berserk” deserved much, much better.