10 Amazing Anime Everyone Ignores Because the Art Style is Creepy

Anime is renowned globally for the multifacetedness of its narratives and the artistic expressiveness of its visuals, consistently producing some of the most breathtaking and technically impressive works in the animation medium. While those outside of the community often criticize anime for the perceived sameness of its art styles, most series possess undeniable visual uniqueness, and how good the show looks frequently plays a significant role in its popularity. However, not every anime series chooses to abide by conventions by settling on a “safe” art style.

Plenty of shows defy expectations with their unconventional visuals, experimenting with character designs, animation techniques, and general aesthetics to add extra flair to their art style. Nonetheless, bold artistic decisions are just as likely to allure curious viewers as they are to be off-putting to those less comfortable with experimental visuals, and these series, which many find gorgeous, definitely lost fans due to their unconventional art styles.

10

Kaiji: the Ultimate Survivor’s Character Designs Are Appealing Yet Endlessly Expressive

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A suspenseful tale of survival following a down-on-his-luck gambler betting his life in a series of high-stakes games, Kaiji: the Ultimate Survivor is one of the most thrilling psychological series anime has ever produced. However, its odd art style is the reason so many potential fans turn away from the series without even giving it a shot.

Kaiji: the Ultimate Survivor’s character designs are pointy and grotesque, with cartoonishly extreme features that walk a fine line between creepy and ridiculous. Yet, these unusual characteristics, while not aesthetically pleasing, add significantly to the show’s expressiveness, as the characters’ faces contort into gut-wrenching grimaces and spell out their intense emotions much more effectively than possible with a more conventional art style.

9

Ping Pong the Animation Looks Nothing Like a Conventional Sports Anime

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Director Masaaki Yuasa is renowned for the distinctive look of his anime projects, most of them abandoning the generic “anime look” in favor of something more peculiar and purposefully messy. While some are understandably put off by Yuasa’s love for quirky visuals, their implementation results in niche masterpieces like Ping Pong the Animation – a sports series that, both narratively and visually, feels like nothing else in the genre.

The series first strikes the viewers with its oddly misshapen and definitively unattractive character designs, yet, once the picture starts moving, it becomes immediately apparent how fluidly both the heroes and their settings can move and morph thanks to the curious art style. With a narrative as nuanced and dense with symbolic storytelling, no other design choices could’ve possibly conveyed the rawness of the series’ emotions.

8

The Heike Story Captures Studio Science SARU’s Unorthodox Art Style at Its Finest

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What applies to series created by Masaaki Yuasa is also true of many works of his studio, Science SARU, including series he didn’t have a hand in directing. The Heike Story is a historical drama that chronicles the political intrigues and war horrors that led to the fall of the Taira clan, depicted through the eyes of a curious girl named Biwa, who possesses the power of clairvoyance.

Directed by Naoko Yamada, known for her conventionally gorgeous works like K-On! and A Silent Voice, The Heike Story definitely leans towards the more stylized, experimental aesthetics Science SARU has always been known for. With a vibrant color palette, simplistic yet expressive character designs, and an abundance of movement, The Heike Story looks gorgeous in every scene. However, as is often the case with Science SARU projects, this visual defiance of conventions is not as appreciated by fans as the studio’s less unusual-looking projects, like Dandadan.

7

Shiki’s Unsettling Visuals Work Surprisingly Well for a Disturbing Horror Story

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Set in a rural Japanese village of Sotoba that has fallen victim to a mysterious vampire virus, Shiki is an eerie horror tale that depicts how the most monstrous parts of humanity are uncovered in situations of extreme distress. At first glance, a vampire horror story would only be elevated by a fittingly eerie art style. Shiki’s visuals, however, don’t match this expectation immediately.

The series is notorious for its strangely bright color palette and surreal character designs with hairstyles that defy the laws of physics even more than anime fans are already accustomed to. Yet, the more one gets invested in Shiki’s nerve-wracking story, the less jarring its visuals become – even if some characters’ looks remain laughably ridiculous.

6

Welcome to Irabu’s Office Is an Avant Garde Drama with Fittingly Bizarre Visuals

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Welcome to Irabu’s Office is a niche series centered around a titular eccentric psychiatrist implementing oddball treatments on his various patients. The series is experimental in both its narrative and visual presentation. The art style of Welcome to Irabu’s Office is an inventive mixture of traditional animation, rotoscoping, live action, and other non-traditional techniques so rarely seen in anime.

The color palette of the show is equally loud and in-your-face, with vibrant, over-the-top colors that clash instead of complementing one another. For a series that deals with heavy themes of psychological distress in such an upbeat, almost jarringly comical way, Welcome to Irabu’s Office looks fittingly all over the place.

5

Air Takes the Aesthetics of Its Era Too Far

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Back in the mid-2000s, the moe aesthetic was on the rise, with the big-eyed, rounded character designs that prioritize cuteness over realism becoming increasingly more popular. A precursor to many moe cult classics like Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, Air is a supernatural romance series based on a visual novel by famed Studio Key. The adaptation was handled by Kyoto Animation, an animation house associated with many striking works with similar aesthetics, like Sound! Euphonium and K-On!.

Being one of the studio’s earliest projects, Air, however, went a bit overboard with its designs, resulting in rather uncanny visuals that would later become infamous. Instead of cutesy, the characters of Air look downright frightening, with enormous, bug-like eyes and no other discernible facial features. Even if the storyline of Air is stellarly touching, it’s hard to take it seriously in conjunction with its visuals.

4

xxxHolic’s Gorgeous Visuals Are Regrettably Distorted by the Anime Adaptation

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The revered manga group Clamp is known for their striking, detail-oriented visual designs, with every Clamp series, from Cardcaptor Sakura to Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, being a masterpiece of aesthetic expressiveness. However, not every style that works well in a manga format translates well into anime, as is evident in the adaptation of Clamp’s xxxHolic.

An iconic dark fantasy series that is, in every version, filled to the brim with gorgeous design work, xxxHolic is visually influenced by ukiyo-e wood prints, giving the designs an otherworldly, artistically alluring quality. The anime, nevertheless, exaggerated character proportions and struggled to stay on-model in most of the scenes, resulting in a hilariously overdramatized visual identity that hardly matches the stunning art of the original outside of stills.

3

Beastars Is a Hard Sell in Many Aspects – Including the Art Style

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The anime community has long since been wary of 3D animation – and not without reason. However, as a leading production house of 3DCG animation in the medium, Studio Orange has proven that their projects can look stunning despite not using traditional animation. Being a fully 3D series, Beastars, while relatively popular, still faces some criticism for its unusual art style. On top of being executed using 3DCG animation, the series also features a notoriously atypical plot, centering around a society of anthropomorphic animals and exploring many psychosexual themes viewers might find uncomfortable.

With every character being an anthropomorphic animal, the art style differs from the norm even more than in the cases of Studio Orange works that feature predominantly human characters, like Trigun Stampede. Yet, it’s hard to imagine that Beastars’ complex character designs could’ve been brought to life with traditional animation without an enormous production budget.

2

Gankutsuou’s Over-the-Top Style Is Not for Everyone

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A modernized adaptation of the classic The Count of Monte Cristo novel by Alexandre Dumas, Gankutsuou revamps the iconic revenge tale not just in terms of narrative but also the visuals. The series’ art is a wild combination of Western Impressionism and Japanese ukiyo-e artwork, with state-of-the-art digital animation techniques implemented to create Gankutsuou’s distinct visual style.

Every frame of the series features complex patterns layered on top of one another, and, while gorgeous and undeniably unique, Gankutsuou’s animation does feel overbearing and makes the characters’ movements feel somewhat unsettling and stiff. Gankutsuou is a visually noteworthy anime that, some believe, is overabundant in its stylistic approach.

1

Flowers of Evil Uses an Unusual Animation Technique to Mixed Results

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The original Flowers of Evil manga by Shuzo Oshimi is a celebrated psychological drama that deals with very mature and unsettling themes. To adapt such a nuanced narrative to anime, the series’ director, who originally saw the story as something that could only work in live-action, decided to use a technique very rarely implemented in the medium – rotoscoping.

Flowers of Evil was the first anime series to use rotoscoping to such an extent, and the novelty of the technique doesn’t reflect on its art style in the best way. The characters in the show look downright terrifying, the realism of real people’s expressions morphing with simplistic anime designs to create some truly unsettling imagery. Yet, given the subject matter of the series, some fans believe the uncanny look of Flowers of Evil to be a merit rather than a regretful detriment.