I Have Run Out of Ways to Call Deadman Wonderland Stupid, So Here’s the Worst Anime Ever

I never would have guessed that it would take but a month to find something worthy of a 1.

Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight (the movie’s typo, not mine) is not disgusting like Apocalypse Zero, irritating like Itsudatte My Santa! nor brain rottingly retarded like Shuffle! However, the experience of watching it is like being in a boxing match: You come into it full of energy and life, ready to throw down, but by the end, you’re struggling to stay on your feet, and there’s a good chance the repeated blows to the head will give you brain damage. Odin is a black hole of entertainment: 136 minutes of absolutely fuck all happening, pacing that makes Inuyasha seem like Baccano! and several scenes of inexplicable weirdness. What makes Odin the worst anime I’ve ever seen is that there isn’t one element you can pin down and say, “This is why this piece of shit is so awful.” It’s the totality of the experience that builds throughout the movie and mercilessly beats down the viewer until nothing is left but a babbling, incoherent mess.

I wish I could say what Odin is about, but I am not really sure. Odin itself is some sort of magical paradise world, or some shit like that, and a bunch of star sailors aboard the Starlight (which is a literal ship in space and operates via convoluted laser beams) find a girl aboard a wrecked spaceship who of course has some connection to Odin. And then they spend two hours tuning up their shit, running around while metal plays and lights flash in the background, and springing a mutiny because why old people gotta be harshin’ our buzz, know what I’m sayin’? This does not stop the young crew from running back to the veteran sailors crying later on when they’re getting their asses handed to them by ancient Norse spaceships. (?!?!)

But Odin is about the search for the titular land like Evangelion is about robot battles. Why waste time searching for undiscovered worlds when you can spend a five minute sequence on the sailors testing their gravity drive? Why show action of any kind when instead it’s clearly a better idea to have everyone run from one end of the ship to the other with the urgency of a race to the hospital, only to have everyone suddenly halt, calmly sit in their seats and start pushing buttons? (Is this how they report to duty every day? I guess you have to get your kicks in space somehow.) The pacing and plotting are so shot that everyone in the terribad anime group who watched this thought it was a distinct possibility that the movie would show the ship’s fine tuning in real time, and that would be the entire movie.

This is perhaps the most iconic (if you can call it that) scene in Odin: Sara, the lone survivor of the space shipwreck, has some sort of psychic connection with ancient runes or what the fuck ever, and the mental anguish is so much that she clutches her head and bellows, “ODEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN” I would say that text does not do this moment justice and encourage you all to hear this moment for yourself, but that would entail actually watching Odin, so fuck that. Listen to the aWo podcast episode about Odin instead.

Anyway, blah blah blah, the sailors fly to somewhere outside Odin and end up getting cockblocked by Space Asgard, who is against letting dirty fucking humans into this beautiful paradise. But instead of having godlike powers with which to blow up everything, they have starships and a giant computer that apparently has a self-destruct button (which the crew sets off by destroying the computer with a bomb one of the characters throws together that randomly has spikes all over it). Seriously, what the fuck. It ends up with everyone no closer to Odin than they were in the beginning, but the audience much closer to suicide than they were in the beginning.

The movie inexplicably ends with this music video playing over the credits sequence, which is undoubtedly the best part of the picture. An ’80s hair metal band with their fog machine in overdrive? Fuck. Yes.

The crazy thing about Odin is that it is a rather beautiful movie; it’s certainly by far the best animated anything we have watched (or will ever watch, I bet) in terribad. The human animation is fluid, the battles are solid, there are tons of little character touches that are interesting to watch . . . but, fuck me, it’s all wasted on NOTHING HAPPENING. Never has such a black hole of awfulness been so lovingly crafted. That’s the cruelest part of Odin: A common refrain in the group was that nobody expected the movie to be that bad. It starts off horribly with an irrelevant prologue about how humanity is all about exploration and whatnot, but the animation offers a glimmer of hope that maybe — just maybe — there is some shred of craft put into the movie. But, no, only the art received that craft. If you let your guard down, Odin will take you and buttfuck you into utter boredom.

Fuck Odin. God damn this movie.