To simulate sheet metal forming processes precisely, an in-house dynamic explicit code was developed to apply a new solid-shell element to sheet metal forming analyses, with a corotational coordinate system utilized to simplify the nonlinearity and to integrate the element with anisotropic constitutive laws. The enhancing parameter of the solid-shell element, implemented to circumvent the volumetric and thickness locking phenomena, was condensed into an explicit form. To avoid the rank deficiency, a modified physical stabilization involving the B-bar method and reconstruction of transverse shear components was adopted. For computational efficiency of the solid-shell element in numerical applications, an adaptive mesh subdivision scheme was developed, with element geometry and contact condition taken as subdivision criteria. To accurately capture the anisotropic behavior of sheet metals, material models with three different anisotropic yield functions were incorporated. Several numerical examples were carried out to validate the accuracy of the proposed element and the efficiency of the adaptive mesh subdivision.