The 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards have come and gone, and the ceremony remains as divisive as ever. Solo Leveling dominated the awards while anime like One Piece, Delicious in Dungeon, and Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War continue to go unrecognized for their achievements. It came off as another example of the Anime Awards being a popularity contest more than anything, and it was hard to sit through because of it.

The 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards are one of the most controversial yet, and a surprising amount of that controversy stems from one specific category. As disputable as many of the winners were, especially with how many categories Solo Leveling won, there’s at least some logic to why each of them won, whether it’s popularity or the genuine quality of the shows in question. That being said, one specific winner in the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards is completely unjustified, and it’s hard to argue with that.

Crunchyroll’s Best Original Anime Didn’t Deserve To Win, At All

Why Ninja Kamui Shouldn't Have Won At The Crunchyroll Anime Awards

One of the most noteworthy categories for the Crunchyroll Anime Awards was for Best Original Anime, and the anime that ultimately won the award was E&H production’s Ninja Kamui. The series was the first original anime by Sunghoo Park of Jujutsu Kaisen fame, and while the first few episodes were good, it quickly lost favor with fans and critics for its melodramatic storytelling and suddenly becoming reliant on clunky CGI. Ninja Kamui went from being a hotly anticipated series to one of the most maligned anime of 2024, and it’s ridiculous that it won such a big award.

What makes Ninja Kamui’s win even more insulting is the great anime that were snubbed in the process. While Bucchigiri?! and Metallic Rouge weren’t great, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night at least looked consistently great, Train to the End of the World had one of the most engaging stories of any anime in 2024, and Toei Animation’s Girls Band Cry’s strong writing and stellar 3D visuals made it one of the most popular anime of 2024, by far. Nearly every other anime nominated for Best Original Anime was more deserving than Ninja Kamui, and that’s impossibly hard to deny.

The Crunchyroll Anime Awards Are Unbelievably Flawed

Why The Crunchyroll Anime Awards Don't Always Get The Job Done

If there’s anything to take away from Ninja Kamui’s big win, it’s another reminder of how flawed the Crunchyroll Anime Awards are. A big part of how the voting process for the Anime Awards comes from fans being allowed to vote for nominees for about a week, and while the intention is to allow fans to have a say in what wins, it heavily skews votes towards whatever’s popular in the moment as opposed to whatever actually deserves a win. Fan participation is an inherently flawed part of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, and that only gets worse every year.

That problem is probably the main reason why Ninja Kamui won, despite how unpopular it was. As maligned as Ninja Kamui was, between airing on Toonami and being directed by Sunghoo Park of Jujutsu Kaisen, it got the most attention of the Best Original Anime nominees, by far, with everything else being of a lower profile and Girls Band Cry not even being licensed until after it finished airing in Japan. Ninja Kamui likely only won Best Original Anime because it was the only one most people knew about, and that’s unfortunate to think about.

While it would be disingenuous to say that there has never been a winner at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards that didn’t deserve it, it’s clearer than ever that most of the winners are determined by popularity as opposed to actual merit. That’s nothing new for awards shows, of course, but regardless, the Crunchyroll Anime Awards’ current setup only does a disservice to anime’s reputation by making it so hard for some anime to gain genuine recognition. As things stand, Crunchyroll’s unlikely to fix any of the problems with the Anime Awards, but hopefully, situations like Ninja Kamui won’t happen again.