This Week in Anime

Politics as Usual

Chris
Hey Lucas, you know one thing I love about watching anime? The escapism from the horrors of the real world!

Opening jokes aside, I'm well familiar with the maxim that all art is political—because it is. Even stories not explicitly about political ideas still reflect the political realities of the times and places they're created in. Claiming to be "apolitical" is, as you said, itself a political position to consciously take. Diving into these realities and how they reflect the ideas of their creators is one of my actual favorite parts of assessing art, anime included.

That said, there are some anime that get more explicitly political than others, with all the provocation that brings, such as this season's The Darwin Incident.

I reviewed the first volume of The Darwin Incident's original manga, and have been doing episode reviews for the anime as it's released this season. And honestly? I'm still trying to figure out for myself what this show thinks it's saying and if it's doing it effectively!

Notably, this Japanese series specifically banks on its portrayal of American activism and sociopolitics, with its humanzee hybrid protagonist Charlie both showing how his presence in-universe would galvanize animal-rights activists (specifically oddly honed in on veganism) while also serving as a blunt allegory for real-world minorities who struggle for their rights in this country. It is...a lot for author Shun Umezawa to play with, and much of the time I question how much of this is out of genuine interest in analyzing these elements and how much is instead simply a gimmick for provocation's sake.

It's hard to tell, honestly, because so much of The Darwin Incident feels like we're waiting to see where it lands on its issues before we can conclude how it really feels about its various subjects. To be sure, it's definitely dealing in ideas more complex than something like BNA's mangled racial allegory. Least of all because Darwin Incident's real-world America setting means it can address regular, real-world bigotry at the same time. But then that setting also sees Umezawa include elements seemingly just because he knows they're politically provocative. So you have a vegan activist turning into a school shooter in a move seemingly designed to grab entertainment headlines, even as it's knowingly disconnected from what we still struggle to understand about this kind of real-world mass violence. Fair play, as this storyline was the most I saw anyone talking on my timeline about The Darwin Incident—which is to say, at all.

The audacity that Akiba Maid War frames itself in means it hits that much harder when the really salient social subjects make themselves apparent. The fact that the characters involved are a combination of organized crime/service industry makes the labor allegories that much more relevantly absurd. There's also a whole bunch about the commodification of female labor in said industry and how it comes across in otaku culture. You see what we mean when we say it's all political? Even the wackiest anime full of maid outfits and stylish ultraviolence can give itself to this kind of reading so long as the ideas are meaty enough.

Any amount of audacity still doesn't preclude too relevant political themes. You mentioned Studio Trigger's BNA, which did that racial animal allegory thing way clunkier than BEASTARS or even friggin' Zootopia. But Trigger's works have always traded in pretty political points alongside all their artistic gusto. Kill la Kill is a multi-layered treatise on fascism that supposedly partially owes that to them noticing the word's similarity to "fashion." And then there's Promare, which features...an ice-themed police force that rounds up an unfairly targeted minority group that's being persecuted as a distraction from broader energy and environmental crises.

Trigger's team allegedly claims there wasn't any intended direct parallel to real-world events, but...come on. This came out in 2019. Y'all ain't slick.

Granted, it does make it stand out then that Sushio, who designs and animates for Trigger, seemingly fell for recent nationalist, anti-immigrant Japanese political positions. Dude, did you even watch the anime you worked on?

But this means you may be right that the stylized veneer of Trigger shows and how they work gives them plausible deniability as to what specific political moments, if any, their works are actually about. It's not like there aren't contemporary comparisons that are more clear, like Shinichirō Watanabe's Carole & Tuesday, which also came out in 2019 and is decidedly more up-front about the issues it's patterning itself on.

If you thought "Freeze Force" was too subtle, then "MICE" is here to make things crystal clear.

As I mentioned, Kill la Kill is steeped in several political ideas. The subject of the outfits even gets covered textually in the series, arguing for your point about the alleged empowerment of going into battle double-cheeked-up on a Thursday afternoon. Buuuuuut yeah, this still, to me, reads as a post-hoc rationalization for designing and drawing said fanservicey outfits in the first place. It is, itself, its own political position, but I think it's fair to say that while Kill la Kill has some strongly articulated ideas on the role of clothes, uniforms, and fashion in controlling masses under fascist rule, this part isn't its densest commentary.

The 2003 version of Fullmetal Alchemist also used its take on events to invoke Middle Eastern conflicts and comment on the military involvement in them. But a lot of anime that brush up against these kinds of events are going to do like Great Pretender there: being set in ostensibly the real world and having the history that comes with that. One of my all-time favorites, Black Lagoon does this with several subjects, including the fallout of the Cold War and cartel conflicts in Colombia. Still, one notable instance sees Rock coming into conflict with Japanese anti-government terrorist Takenaka. His views were specifically borne out of the Japanese protests of the late 60s (parallel to similar protests worldwide), which gave rise to groups like the Japanese Red Army. These are protests that had a profound effect on Japanese political movements afterward (and also get referenced in other anime, including Young Black Jack) and thus inform a lot of the beliefs creators bring in today. It's one of the more nuanced takes on this kind of subject matter in Black Lagoon, which, for comparison's sake, earlier in the season has Revy murder a literal boatload of neo-Nazis. Politics!

Obviously, it depends on the author, but some will be very direct and blatant about it. Black Lagoon's author, Rei Hiroe, broke from the Japanese standard of Twitter for social media, migrating to Bluesky because he very publicly haaaaaates Elon Musk. And with that as a springboard, you can regularly see him commenting on American political happenings.

And as with your Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man examples, you get authors like these directly invoking the American political moment on the page. So it goes that we've recently gotten Yujiro Hanma from Baki threatening Trump and Musk, or the 2020 Death Note one-shot that ended with a cameo from ol' Orange Julius.

Though I'll concede that instances like this are probably more about doing riffs to catch attention as opposed to serious political commentary. Yet it still is a political point that creators from abroad portray these figures in these particular ways.

That's one reason I like a series like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which is 'political' not in that it's covering or commenting on any specific moment, but rather laying out the cyclical nature of human conflict and the conversations that came through that.

You also see this relevance in series like Gatchaman Crowds, which also had a column recently from Coop and Sylvia. That series was commenting on the undercurrents of Japanese politics at the time, which happened to reflect the movements things would make over here that led us to our own particular moment. I agree that these are more engaging (and in their own way, heartening) invocations of political moments in anime, compared to what something like The Darwin Incident is doing, where it's seemingly referencing American-style sociopolitical activism as a provocative starting point.

Granted, seeing sincere beliefs manifested means you're going to encounter authors whose views don't line up with the admittedly left-leaning instances we've largely brought up as examples. Whether it's Tsugumi Ohba's aforementioned noxious beliefs, the seemingly ghastly anti-immigrant sentiment invoked in Kuraku Ichikawa's Drama Queen, or a shocking number of light novel authors who have decidedly lax views on slavery, learning about the individuals behind these makes it clear it does, in fact, take all kinds.

It's instructive, in a way, I suppose.

Right. A series doesn't need to be waving around references like in The Darwin Incident to make clear that the people behind it exist and interface in a world powered by politics. It can manifest anywhere. Kazuki Takahashi drew Yu-Gi-Oh! art urging people to vote against the Abe administration. Digimon put Mimi in America when 9/11 happened. Rui Takatō, author of a fanservice fighting manga titled "Booty Royale" over here, wrote a manifesto of a statement where he called out past Japanese war crimes and the rising fascism of the right-wing movement.

These stories might not take place in our world, but they are created in our world, and acknowledging the contexts that inform them makes experiencing them in our world all the richer.

We can take their examples as reminders of the work that has to be done. As the saying goes, if we don't do politics, politics will do us.