Rick And Morty Meets Anime In An Amazing New Short

Yare yare daze – Rick and Morty fans can hardly keep up with all the incredible news that's rolled out recently. 

Following the release of a first-look clip from Rick and Morty season 5 earlier in the weekend, a brand-new Rick and Morty anime short was unveiled during Adult Swim Con's Toonami segment on Saturday, July 25, 2020. 

Directed by Tower of God filmmaker Takeshi Sano, the anime short bears a badass title: "Rick and Morty vs. Genocider." Though its tiny synopsis teases that "nothing weird happens," fans know better than to take anything Rick and Morty-related at face value. The eight-and-a-half-minute short finds various multiverse iterations of the genius scientist Rick Sanchez and his wobbly-voiced grandson Morty Smith traversing through Japan to escape a faction of assassins known as the Genocider — killing machines who eliminate Ricks and Morties by erasing the past and manipulating people's memories. "Our" Morty heads to Tokyo, Japan to help stop the Genocider from fulfilling its dastardly deeds.

Without spoiling anything, "Rick and Morty vs. Genocider" takes several twists and turns before its action culminates in a hair-raising, literally explosive battle sequence. It all wraps up with a few lines of dialogue that may make even the steeliest Rick and Morty fans shed a tear — or at least think about it. 

The release of "Rick and Morty vs. Genocider" comes just few months after Adult Swim rolled out a blood-soaked Rick and Morty anime short in March 2020. Entitled "Samurai & Shogun (Rick and Morty)," the short hails from anime production house Studio Deen (Patlabor, Ranma 1/2, Neo Yokio), and depicts Rick as a samurai who's tasked with looking after a levitating-wheelchair-bound Morty. When a legion of ninja Ricks emerge through various portals in the middle of a field, samurai Rick goes on the defense — especially so when he learns that the ninjas want to capture the shogun Morty for their own, given he embodies the soul of all the ninjas. 

Adult Swim's senior vice president and creative director on-air Jason DeMarco explained Observer in March 2020 how the anime short came to be: "The idea for a Rick and Morty anime short came from myself. [...] Adult Swim went to Maki Terashima, a producer we've known for years, who took the idea to Studio Deen. Studio Deen spoke to Kaichi Sato, who is a massive Rick and Morty fan, and asked him to direct it. From there, Adult Swim oversaw all of the work, but Studio Deen and Sato were the people driving the project."

Inspired by Lone Wolf and Cub, writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima's acclaimed manga that ran for six years in the 1970s, "Samurai & Shogun (Rick and Morty)" is heavy on the bloodshed and inventive in its action — thanks to writer-director Kaichi Sato and producer Maki Terashima. We won't give away too much about "Samurai & Shogun (Rick and Morty)" since it's best experienced visually on one's own, but be prepared to see heads roll, faces get sliced off, and Rick fight against ... hypnotic alien creatures in the middle of space.

With Rick and Morty season 5 bearing no official release date as of this writing, these two anime shorts will have to hold fans over until more episodes of the series head their way.