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To begin with, I don't want this topic to solely be about older anime. I think in their own time, the animation or art quality is probably decent, so it's unfair to say they have bad animation particularly if you saw the work 20 years after or something.

Now I don't think there's a topic on this, so blast away.

My vote goes to Arakawa under the Bridge. The first season had some really crappy art and animation for an anime in 2010. And compared to other of SHAFT's works, it just wasn't that inspiring, to be honest. Thankfully, the characters and the comedy made up for it. And made up for it indeed. It was the perfectly suited anime at that time for me to watch. To be honest, if I watched it now I probably will give it a 8 or a 9, but I'm overinflating this because I just felt reaaaallly satisfied with the timing and how the comedy matched my taste near perfection.

Then there's Kuuchuu Buranko/Irabu's Office, which is so weird in its animation, or rather the lack there of with at least 2 REAL people's faces, but it must be doing something right with the rating. To this day I have not seen this work because of my bias on weird animation.

NOTE: People will disagree what is bad and what is great but let's keep it civil.

Haibane Renmei had some pretty lousy animation at times. The backgrounds are really gorgeous at least.

Berserk... It may due to it's age, but it looks terrible; The story and cast, on the other hand, are some of the best I've ever seen.

I'm extremely picky on my animation. I thought Bakemonogatari had amazing but iffy animation at times due to it's weirdness. but right now I'm going to go with Serial Experiments Lain. The anime is iffy due to it's age, but it was one of the best anime I've ever sat my little butt through.

Gilgamesh I really loved this anime but the animation is garbage. There is a fight in the second episode that looks more like that slideshow than an animated battle. The animation improves a little bit as the series goes on but even ignoring the cheap animation the art is really kind of bland. The characters take a little getting used to and their hair is almost plastic looking.

But hot damn the story is one of the best paced things I've seen in anime. Each episode had steady progress and it was always revealing little parts of the mystery and giving out answers. Each episode was satisfying because there was always progress made in the story and unlike a lot of anime that I've seen it never wasted episodes or stalled on giving answers to artificially lengthen it's run time.

And the story itself was just interesting a dark dreary dystopian future of a world almost destroyed once and on the brink of destruction a second time. Moody and always dark Gilgamesh became an instant favorite of mine despite the lackluster animation and art style.

A second example would be Mahou Shoujo Tai Arusu. It was obvious this anime was made on the smallest of budgets. It used every trick in the book to avoid animating the characters when it could get away with it. However, it had a very nice if limited art style. It created this alternate world that while sparsely populated had some interesting creates in it. The anime in general was an interesting look at technology vs magic as well as the meaning of free will. Although the show was targeted at younger audiences it had enough substance to entertain me as an adult. It had some dark themes and a charming plot with some nice characters.

Trigun. Milly's huge block like appearance was a turn off. The gun fight's were incredibly bleh a lot of the time. Also I noticed that a lot of time when Wolfwood was smoking, the smoke from the cigarettes was very badly done. As in when it was flowing up, it wouldn't loop right, it'd literally just get cut off again and re-loop as if they forgot a few frames.

Kino no Tabi, sadly. I still hope there'll be a continuation (with better art and animation) someday :(

Easily Berserk. I usually don't mind too much if a show has subpar animation, but when your story is full of badass sword fights and large scale castle seige & warfare scenes, a picture slideshow with a load of blurry lines really doesn't do the material justice. Age wasn't anything to do with it either, as shows 20 years prior to it's release like Future Boy Conan and Rose of Versailles didn't have that problem...

In terms of modern shows, I've been watching Kemono no Shoujo Erin recently, and while the art itself is fine, there's alot of obvious budget cutting, lots of flashing back to previous scenes as montages, reusing the same shots of scenery etc. And of course, the infamous Bakemonogatari episode 10 where key scenes had more "BLACK" panels than actual art.

Kimi ni Todoke >.<, don't hate me xD.
I just hated the art for some reason :O.

I think BECK has pretty bad animation but story was... great. I think they should work on rework for this anime with new or even continuation of story.

Welcome to the NHK probably. The art is not as good as other anime, yet the story is fvcking amazing.

Oh god the artwork of Princess Tutu is absolutely horrendous, I couldn't stand watching it at some points. But the music and plot is so good.

But does hating the art mean the art is bad?
The art is typical shoujo and is how Karuho Shiina drew the manga. If either of those were "bad" why did anyone want to adapt the manga without changing the art style?

KnT could have been such sweet story on it's own but the art was cheesy with all the bubbly and sparkly backgrounds. It make the whole anime feel overly saccharine to the point of almost being nauseating. They sometimes tried to play it for laughs but it was jut headache inducing.



Beck went for an alternative art style and ended up looking like shit. The walk cycle on some of the characters was hilariously jerky and the character designs themselves were really unpleasant to look at.

Of course I hate Beck with a passion but the reasons why really aren't appropriate for this discussion.

Ah yeah Beck's art and animation was below average. It was even more hilarious when beat the crusaders sang in Engrish for the OP and whatnot. On a offnote, I generally like beat the crusaders but their Engrish is horrible. I couldn't get into it since the story isn't that appealing to me either. One of the first shows I dropped after a measly 1-2 episodes.

Yeah real Japanese accents from a J-band is so bad. Who the hell would want to hear that. They need to learn to speak English right and not with an accent. Japanese accents aren't cool unless it's a fake accent.

"Me so ronrery!"

^ Mmmmkay.

I just find it shitty that people get excited when dubs add accents and get pissed when the Japanese people speak in "Engrish", which is just the Japanese accent when speaking English.

Tokyo Majin I would say great story and opening but animation is quite poor

English in anime is an abomination, generally. That is not to say I care myself, or that it is exactly fair because I doubt most of us speak Japanese any better, but it IS normally terrible.

If the English itself is fine though, you are totally right.