Rick and Morty: The Anime - A STAR in Satirical Animation

Get Rick and Morty: The Anime is a satire that combines pop culture, anime, time-hopping, comedy and existentialism like no other multiverse can – taking on the likes of Rick and Morty, The Simpsons, and South Park.

The franchise has reached beyond its seven seasons of intergalactic shits and giggles, with a lengthy new season purportedly dropping ‘soon’. Rick and Morty: The Anime, catching a wave of that universe’s strangeness and bending it into time-shifty weird Japan-ness, is helmed by the otaku (geek) Takashi Sano – a director intent on the novelty of a franchise assignment, but not just a producer’s repository.

Opening a New Dimension of Entertainment

Just from its very title – Rick and Morty: The Anime – ‘RiMI’ makes it clear how the series will also innovate. While the show is familiar with both episodic chaos and overarching narratives, ‘RiMI’ carves out its own narrative space. Takashi Sano, director of Lupin 3: Crisis in Tokyo, gave the characters a clean animation makeover, creating entirely new characters and situations while maintaining the show’s signature themes.

The Vocal Symmetry of Stars

Listening to The Girl Who Manipulates Time and Fighting Mother, it’s clear that both localisers have done excellent jobs of capturing the spirit of Rick and Morty in Japanese and English. Each character is basically still the same – Rick’s grumpiness is intact, as is Morty’s range of emotions, thanks to the talents of Youhei Tadano (Rick’s Japanese voice actor) and Joe Daniels (Rick’s English voice actor) in the case of Rick, and Isukeiba (Morty’s Japanese voice actor) and Regojo (Morty’s English voice actor) in the case of Morty.

A Journey Through Time and SPACE

It is the episodic nature of ‘The Anime’ that encodes it as ‘The Girl Who Manipulates Time’, and starts the audience off in a Rick-on-the-run galaxy before Summer pulls out her technical support and Space Beth comes to everybody’s rescue. The series derives much of its success from self-contained plots, which offer novel ways to explore the Rick and Morty saga.

A Visual and Emotional Odyssey

The visual style of The Anime hits such a sweet spot between familiar and entirely new, and its visual storytelling is as compelling as that of the original, if not more so. The version of Sano’s Sailor Moon that she loves is there in the finale — her love for the original series is literally pouring out of the anime adaptation, its affection on the page contagious, its vision of the original series and its characters infectious, and its hope palpable. For Sailor Moon fans who hope to catch Sailor Moon (2014) for the first time and then go back to reading Sailor Moon and completely forget they had seen the anime, good luck with that. This is simply too visually and emotionally gratifying.

The Tune of the Universe: "Love Is Entropy"

Its theme song, ‘Love Is Entropy’ by Otonez, captures the show’s chaotic but endearing vibe, and sets the tone for a series that is at once as inscrutable as it is fascinating.

Exploring the STAR of the Show

The sheer ingenuity of the storytelling and characterisation in the constellation of content that ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ offers should be applauded, as should the level of detail and authenticity brought to the story by Takashi Sano and his team of writers and animators. ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ isn’t just solid adventure or a clone of Rick and Morty – it’s its very own hybrid that honours its source material while at the same time stringing together a narrative that feels familiar and brand new.

In addition, the fact that the series was simultaneously released in English and Japanese editions – allowing fans everywhere to view the show in the language of their choice – illustrates a level of investment in multilingualism and cultural diversity to be appreciated.

For as long as the ‘Rick and Morty’ multiverse keeps growing – and, indeed, 15 new episodes are scheduled to begin airing to viewers this Thursday on Adult Swim, and will be available to stream on Max – fans can be sure that their hunger for wacky cosmic escapades and quantum relativity shenanigans will never subside.

But essentially, Rick and Morty: The Anime is proof that there’s still room to be inventive and experimental in the ever-expanding Rick and Morty multiverse, and it’s a light in the darkness, a different way of looking at things, about time and space and family. Even if you’re a long-term fan, there’s something worth seeing and laughing at, but also worth being thrown off by.

The STAR: A Cosmic Epilogue

A star, fundamentally, is the pinprick of light in the sky, the shining beacon that outshines the darkness of space and guides the way, just as ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ is the shining beacon of creativity that guides the animated series, showcasing the understanding that stories can be both an invigorating exploration and a quest for knowledge into understanding the mysteries of a wondrous universe. As we begin this new inter-dimensional odyssey with Rick and Morty, let’s take a moment to appreciate the stars of the show – the stars of the night sky, and the stars of the stories that inspire us, challenge us and bring us together.