The Worst Anime of Summer 2026

I think we’ve all gotten a little fed up with seminal shojo classics getting the short end of the animation stick. This season includes yet another log to the trash fire as we hope beyond hope that next time, it’ll be different. It joins its disappointing compatriots: the one where the camera is permanently attached to a theme park ride, the boring gamer power fantasy, and, somehow, a show by Kyoto Animation.

I was so ready to give Love Unseen Beneath the Clear Night Sky the benefit of the doubt. This romance between college student Kakeru and his blind classmate Koharu was a little preachy and clumsy about disability rights. It would lecture the audience about letting disabled people advocate for themselves, but then turn around and have their friend ask Kakeru to watch out for Koharu behind her back. Kakeru was a bit too inward-facing, comparing his sadness over being raised by a single mom to Koharu living with a disability.

But still, there was a charm to it. Koharu was a full person trying to live her life, not a walking avatar of pluck and grit who inspired Kakeru to get over himself. Kakeru was genuinely interested in getting to know Koharu, and the two’s relationship was sweet. Not particularly enthralling and still occasionally preachy, but clearly well-intentioned and engaging enough that I kept watching, planning to write about it when the season wrapped.

But then the big twist dropped, and the whole thing took a turn for the maudlin, saccharine, and outright creepy. See, Koharu lost her vision due to cancer, an illness that has a nasty tendency to refuse to ever truly go away. So, when she stops coming to class or answering her phone, Kakeru and his friends track her down. They follow a rumor that she was seen entering a hospital, go there, and wander the halls until they find her. When she tells them she has no memory of the past few months (what a twist!), they start volunteering in the pediatric ward, where she plays piano. No matter how many times she tells him to buzz off, Kakeru keeps coming back until she accepts him.

It’s so, so, so creepy. It’s literal stalking and harassment of an ill, disabled young woman, dressed up as a story of devotion and determination to live one’s life to the fullest. Koharu deserves to be treated with dignity and to have her wishes heard, but Kakeru simply knows better than her. Even if it weren’t unpalatable for this reason, the show’s emotional tone turns toward mawkish melodrama. Every twist is more ridiculous than the last: Koharu disappears! Koharu has super-cancer! Koharu plays piano for sick kids! Koharu cuts her beautiful hair to donate, which conveniently is the hairstyle she had when she was first diagnosed in middle school! Koharu has medically inexplicable memory loss! Just let us reach in and yank on those heartstrings for you!

I have zero patience for stories that put their female characters through hell for the development of a male protagonist, let alone ones that are this lionizing of violating their boundaries in the process.

—Caitlin Moore

Sometimes it feels a bit unfair to dunk on a studio so committed to its own artistic vision (however misguided), but GoHands remains committed to its war on human eyeballs, and this show is no exception. All of the usual trademarks of a typical GoHands production are on full display here: A camera that can’t stop rotating to the point of inducing nausea, terrible compositing that makes the overly detailed character designs and photorealistic backgrounds look like they exist on two separate planes of reality, garish color filters, and animation that’s detailed in all the worst areas when it comes to having every strand of hair on a character’s head flowing at all times. The show even adds new visual horrors to the mix, with the first episode featuring what is possibly the single most disorienting action montage I’ve ever seen, with scene transitions so bad it took a full minute for my brain to register what was being attempted. Shockingly, though, I’d say the look of this show is among the least of its problems. Now make no mistake, it does look pretty horrendous, but it’s far from GoHands worst in that regard, and if you can get past the first episode, you’ve likely already seen the heights of its insanity on that end.

The real death knell for this show is that it gives the worst eras of the One Piece anime a run for their money in having some of the most atrocious pacing of any show ever put to television. In nearly any given episode, there is only ever about maybe 10 to 14 minutes of actual progression, with the rest of the show’s runtime being riddled with flashbacks, constant reuse of specific shots, and sometimes quite literally just playing a full minute or two of the same scene back to back if it happened to play just before the spot for a commercial break. At best, only one or two story beats happen in any given episode, and even accounting for the show running for two cours, the narrative barely progresses past its inciting incident, making it an absolute slog to sit through. It’s a shame, too, because there’s otherwise potentially decent material here. Despite kicking off with the usual revenge fantasy premise of a “kicked out of the party” isekai, it manages to avoid coming off as particularly mean-spirited, and Elmyas is a reasonably likable protagonist who is generally more than happy to actually cooperate with others despite being looked down on for his supposedly terrible battle class. It even manages to avoid defaulting towards being a harem, as the jester girl Ruche who joins his party is his only female companion, and even gets to spend more of her screen time building up her confidence after being similarly put down by her ex-party members for also having a less than optimal class, than fawning over all of Elmyas’s actions. None of this is exactly the pinnacle of character writing, but it’s enough that a normal-looking and normal-paced version of this show could have made for some perfectly fine popcorn entertainment if nothing else.

Alas, even if you are a genuine fan of the material, this adaptation really doesn’t have much of anything going for it, and for anyone else, there is a sea of isekai out there that are at least more respectful of your time. Hand Shakers still takes the crown as the worst show GoHands has ever made from a production standpoint, but from an entertainment standpoint, this might actually be even more unwatchable. For all its many sins, you certainly can’t accuse Hand Shakers of being boring, and in terms of being a wild train wreck, there really is no other anime quite like it. This doesn’t even have that much going for it, and while I never would have thought there could be such a thing as a GoHands show so dull that the bad visuals rate among the least of its problems, this certainly seems to have done the impossible.

—Jairus Taylor

Next to the cardinal sin of causing boredom, what is the worst experience an anime can induce in its viewers? I’d argue strongly for disappointment, and Sparks of Tomorrow disappointed me more than almost any other anime of the past few years. The fact that the usually stellar animation studio Kyoto Animation made it was enough to get my hopes up. As the company responsible for such greats as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, and A Silent Voice, I hotly anticipated their next TV show, especially as the trailer looked gorgeous.

As an anime adapted from a novel published by Kyoto Animation‘s own KA Esuma Bunko imprint, Sparks of Tomorrow follows the pattern established by stablemates Free! and Violet Evergarden, and both of those are exceptional series. Like all of KyoAni’s works, Sparks of Tomorrow certainly looks incredible. No effort has been spared in creating a vibrant, colorful world: an alternate 1907 Japan where the invention of electricity never led to an energy revolution, and society still runs on steam power. That’s a fascinating idea, but unfortunately, the show has little beyond looks and ideas.

Every episode is an exercise in frustration at the show’s wasted potential. Perhaps this is a fault of the source material, but without an English-language version, it’s impossible to say. After all, the print and screen versions of Violet Evergarden are reportedly very different from one another. A major issue is the characters. They’re almost entirely static, barely develop, act repetitively, and, worse still, they’re annoying. White-haired main antagonist Yosuke Mizoe is one of the most nails-down-a-chalkboard, screechingly irritating characters ever committed to the screen. He’s a borderline offensive, loud and obnoxious, effeminate gay male caricature who drags down every single scene in which he appears. He has zero redeeming features, and his bizarre fixation on the protagonist’s elder brother is both creepy and off-putting. I know villains are supposed to be loathsome, but the best antagonists are usually at the very least charismatic. Yosuke has a yawning chasm of emptiness where charisma should be.

Protagonist Kihachi Sakamoto isn’t much better, as he rarely drives the narrative, acting more like a reactive cog in a plot machine that barely functions to tell a coherent story. Heroine Inako Momokawa isn’t much more interesting. Neither of them achieves much, and their repetitive adventures often end with them returning to square one. At least some of the supporting characters are amusing, especially Inako’s duo of bemused female friends.

The only episode to truly catch my attention is the gloriously demented “The Sound of Innovation,” where the hapless Kihachi and friends inadvertently invent heavy metal music. It’s a bonkers sequence you have to see (and hear) to believe. The rest of the show utterly fails to match this promise. What a shame.

—Kevin Cormack

Adaptation is a tricky game. Stick too close, and format changes can make a story drag. Stray too far, and fans of the source material will be sharpening their pitchforks. Red River somehow manages to create its own new category out of bits and pieces of both of these mistakes: it follows the events of the manga pretty faithfully, but it makes the unfortunate decision to dumb heroine Yuri down as far as it possibly can, rendering the plot devoid of character development and nuance so that it may as well only be a totally different story.

It’s unfair, really, because Chie Shinohara‘s original manga holds up well for a series written in the late 1990s, when shoujo manga took a very different attitude to things like “sexual assault” and “consent.” On the surface, it’s a story about a girl out of time: a modern Japanese teen sent back to the days of the Hittite Empire. But in practice, the manga follows a young woman as she rises to meet the challenges she faces, learns to navigate a difficult and dangerous world, and helps the historical record show why this king and culture were so impressive. Shinohara grounds her story firmly in history, bringing in real events, people, and legends, and carefully inserting Yuri as both the goddess Ishtar and a reasonable facsimile of the real-life Hittite queen Puduhepa. It’s excellent historical fiction.

The anime, though? Not so much. Yes, the events of the manga still play out, but Yuri, instead of growing and maturing through her hardships, spends most of the early episodes wailing or making incredibly stupid mistakes (RIP, Tito) before suddenly morphing into Ms. Competent with little or no reason. Why can this girl suddenly ride a horse? Or use a sword? How does she fall in love with Kail? And why on earth is she being touted as “brilliant” when she consistently does things like blunder into a situation she’s been warned about or scream “Thanks for coming to Rescue Me!” after a secret rescue mission? Manga Yuri and Anime Yuri are almost entirely different people, and that really brings the animated version down.

Also, it looks bad. Oh, I’ve seen worse, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t plenty awful on its own. Background characters (especially soldiers) move in the same awkward loop in every battle, main characters are consistently off-model, and even their movements are janky. This entire adaptation is a travesty, a slap in the face to fans of the original manga. Maybe it doesn’t come across as badly for anime-only viewers, but for this manga reader? You don’t get much worse than this.

—Rebecca Silverman

I am such a sucker for media that gets creative with mixing genres, art styles, and even cinematic techniques. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is one of the greatest films ever made; the Spider-Verse movies and their universe-melding completely redefined how modern animation looks and feels; and some of the coolest modern video games are going back to old-school methods of visual storytelling, like live-action FMVs and even stop-motion, to push the boundaries of artistic expression. The point is, even though I know absolutely nothing about it, I was really impressed by the first episodes of Thunder 3. When you put aside its limited 3D animation and some odd storytelling choices, the core premise is honestly brilliant: A bunch of goofy kids from a world of comic-strip caricatures get wrapped up in a dangerous rescue mission when protagonist Pyontaro’s little sister gets lost in a completely different dimension defined by its harrowing, relatively realistic alien domination. But since our kid heroes come from a world of nearly nonexistent stakes and lackadaisical physics, they’re blessed with incredible superpowers and resilience that let them fight back against the evil alien hordes.

Alas, what makes Thunder 3 one of the worst anime of this season instead of a secret sleeper-hit is the way it ultimately wastes all of its potential. For one, we have to talk about the animation, which was clearly not very good from the start, but that could have been forgiven if the show leveraged its creative story elements and the novelty of its blended art styles. Yet, at the end of the day, Thunder 3 does shockingly little with the wild setup of two fundamentally incompatible universes colliding. You’d think that the shock of Pyonataro and his friends meeting their more realistically proportioned alternate-universe counterparts would make for some fascinating story threads, but nope. In fact, the show often ignores its heroes to focus on the much less interesting (visually and narratively) characters from the Alien Invasion Universe, which is baffling. The inherent comic potential of seeing little girl Futaba innocently destroying fleets of alien warships practically writes itself; we should have been going full-on Earth Defense Force by, like, episode 4 at the latest.

Instead, Thunder 3 spins its wheels and wastes all of our time while it desperately delays the gratification of goofy, explosive hijinks that we were all promised in those opening episodes. The title characters have barely been a presence in their own show for most of the season. I hear that the manga of Thunder 3 is a much better product overall, which is a small reassurance, I suppose, but it’s a shame that this adaptation was bungled so thoroughly. This is one of those properties that practically begs to be explored in new mediums beyond print. Even if the practical limitations of the production meant that Thunder 3 was never going to be a AAA smash of blockbuster proportions, there is no reason whatsoever that it had to end up as such a lame disappointment.

—James Beckett

The first season of Hell Mode might be one of the most painfully slow-paced things in all of anime, manga, and light novels. With there being so many isekai anime out there based around protagonists who often land in some pretty optimal circumstances—overpowered innate skills, wealthy families, knowledge of later events, and so on—I can understand all too well the logic through which something like Hell Mode would sound like a breath of fresh air: Finally! An isekai about a protagonist with an ability that requires him to actually grind (a LOT) to see any meaningful results, is reborn into a world they’re wholly unfamiliar with, and in absolute poverty.

But as it turns out, there’s a reason no one else was doing that! It makes for an incredibly slow-paced—well, calling it a “story” in the first season feels generous. It doesn’t really start until the second season, when our protagonist Allen and his friends enter the Academy and learn some harsh truths about their world. Sort of. It doesn’t actually become meaningfully relevant until well into the second season, and even then, it’s surrounded by the series’ trademark grinding-slash-numbers-slop. This might not be a problem if Allen or any of his partymates were interesting characters, or at least had some cool dynamics going on, but even with the new characters in the main cast, there’s nothing of the sort.

A flatness so pervasive in every aspect of this already-tedious show makes it sleep-inducingly boring. The characters, the fights, the power and magic systems, the world, the environments, even what precious little we’ve seen of that story that’s allegedly hanging around somewhere. The production values certainly aren’t doing this show any favors either. In fact, with one of the absolute worst and most skippable intro songs I’ve heard in a while, and CG that I’d rank among the all-time worst in all of anime, they only drag it down further. It’s as though every single thing about this show seeks only to sabotage it.

Overall, this series frustrates me a lot. Not just because of how much work it feels like to get through even a single episode (although that’s obviously a part of it, too), but also because with even slightly better execution, this easily could’ve been so cool. As I said at the beginning, it breaks away from the norms of isekai anime in so many interesting ways. Forget Hell Mode; it should be easy mode making at least a decent series with so many fundamental differences. And yet, against all odds, Hell Mode still found a way to fumble its fortunes tremendously.

—Kennedy