Kindan no Mokushiroku: Crystal Triangle

When it comes to terrible anime, it's really hard to find ones that are bad in an enjoyable way, like The Room or Troll 2. With anime from this era, the bad stuff is usually just boring or frustratingly stupid. So imagine my delight when I finally stumbled upon this anti-masterpiece. It has a plot that moves like a mad lib, continuously getting more and more insane. Seriously, it starts as an Indiana Jones style story, but then all of the sudden the protagonist has super powers and is fighting aliens, then the movie immediately forgets about his powers again. He'll get into ... a seemingly inescapable situation, then it'll cut to him being fine, with only a brief mention that he has no idea how he got out of that. All this builds up to an amazingly nonsensical ending that had me grinning the whole time.

This isn't a good anime. It's in fact very bad. But it's one of my favorites, and in the right mindset, it could be one of yours as well.

Hey, Imagine if you crossed the Da Vinci Code, Raiders of the Lost Arc and a total lack of talent!
Congratulations, you just pictured something more coherent than "Crystal Triangle".

Here a modern day Indiana Jones fights off RPG-shooting Russian Clark Kent and demon monks with Kung Fu powers that are introduced 3 seconds before they are used.
The story is nonsensical, deranged doggerel with a Marty-Stu protagonist and multiple Deus ex Caterpillar plot "twists"

And, yes, I'll save you the suspense. God is a Worm; and not a cool, giant Shai-Hulud...but a sad trifle that looks like it belongs in the bottom of a bottle of Tequila.
And yes, ... God gets killed....after (squeakily) giving half of the "Answer" that the heroes fought and died for.

Somehow, I suspect this was either a pilot for an aborted TV series or an advert for a bad manga.
Either way, watch Spriggan instead. It's 10x better.

I'm on a quest to watch the shittiest anime known to man -- that's how I stumbled across this peculiar little OVA. Low ratings? Action anime? I was preparing myself for a hyper-violent cheesefest akin to M.D. Geist, but it seems I got something different instead.

This is not a great anime. But what separates this from the bad? This anime has effort and passion behind it.

Story & Characters:
The story and characters are this anime's weakest link. Imagine the over-the-top and convoluted sci-fi/political thriller of Metal Gear Solid crossed with the stock characters of an Indiana Jones film minus the originality. That's basically all this anime ... is. The characters are extremely underwritten and are only there to serve the plot.
The plot, on the other hand, is an extremely convoluted and ridiculous plot involving the Soviet Union, the US military, a shadowy cabal that controls the Japanese government, and a conspiracy by an ancient alien race disguised as Buddhist monks.
So what's good and bad about the plot? Well, everything is bad about the plot. But the best thing is how much the show believes in its own plot and takes itself seriously.

Art & sound:
Maybe it's because I've been looking at too much shit anime, but Crystal Triangle is a feast for my eyes. The animation has plenty of effort put into it -- the bouncy animation of the jeep in the opening, the detailed interior of the BMW that the secret agent drives, and the stunning colors of the life-support chamber that looks ripped right out of Evangelion (Anno worked on animation in this show) -- there are details to be found in plenty of places here.
Sound is alright. Serviceable. Of special note is that they actually got Russian and English VAs in the Japanese original -- accented, but still, the effort is admirable.

Enjoyment:
Anime is an audiovisual storytelling medium. The story of Crystal Triangle creaks under its own weight, but man, is there passion in the visuals and even the story itself. The story is the best kind of bad story -- the kind that takes itself seriously, and the visuals do their best to make that bad story seem as cool as possible. The visual details, the effort put into the voice acting and the grandiose story add up to a very enjoyable effort (at least in my opinion).


In conclusion:
Some bad anime are charming because of how bad they feel.
Crystal Triangle is charming because it does its level best to make itself good -- and it almost succeeds.