Director: Alex Burunova
Writers: Julia Yorks (Writer), Meggy Garol (additional writer)
Stars: Kenji Kamiyama, Shinji Aramaki, Kôzô Morishita, Tania Nolan |
Netflix
With Enter the Anime director/presenter Alex Burunova bit off more than she could chew. And by the end of the all-too-brief hour, she admits as such.
It’s not that she didn’t try. She interviewed some of the biggest names in anime, and looked at the inner workings of production houses like TOEI Animation and Polygon Pictures, along with IP like Aggretsuko, Evangelion and Ultraman. For fans of anime it was a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the genre. But it won’t do a good job of preparing someone who hasn’t seen anime for watching it. Beyond, perhaps, an admonition that the new viewer should be prepared for just about anything.
Anime faithfully reflects the complexities and layers of Japanese culture (there are major non-Japanese anime studios in Korea, China, Canada, and the US, but we’re just going to pretend those don’t exist for now).
The problem is that Japanese culture is a fantastic beast. Sublime, ridiculous, subtle, blatant, serene, screaming, beautiful, tawdry, cerebral, idiotic, dignified and asinine. Kabuki dancers sway next to Goth Steampunk prostitutes. And that’s just downtown Tokyo.
Not only does anime incorporate all those elements, it has numerous subgenres, ranging from anime aimed at toddlers to truly sick porn. Even in individual series there can be wild swings in tone—one of the best, Full Metal Alchemist, has incidental music ranging from achingly beautiful Russian ballads to screaming death metal—and the music is appropriate to the scenes. How do you describe that in an hour?
I’ve watched enough anime that I could make a list of my top twenty shows. Anyone looking at the list might consider it a pretty eclectic list: even similar titles reflect hugely different shows. Space Dandy, for example, is the sort anime that you might see if Al Capp and Douglas Adams were still around to co-write anime. Wild, incoherent, hilarious and surreal. The overlying story arc is only mildly inconvenienced by the deaths and unexplained resurrections of the central characters, and each of the thousands of different space aliens in the show are each uniquely designed and drawn by a different artist. The show takes a turn when the narrator discovers that he is God. Space Brothers, on the other hand, could have been written by Arthur C. Clarke. Cerebral, scientifically literate, slow-paced with good character development. Both shows, incredibly, are literate and sophisticated.
But my list barely dips a toe in the vast ocean of anime that is out there, with hundreds and hundreds of new titles every year. Not only do I ignore entire genres such as toddler, hentai or ecchi, but most of the subgenres within the sorts of anime I do watch.
Then there’s the matter of Sturgeon’s Law. Ninety percent of anime is crap. The good news is you can usually tell a series is crap in the first few minutes. I didn’t sit through two hundred series to get a top 20 list.
Anime is a vast field, so I don’t blame Burunova for not capturing the soul of the medium. Nobody could. But she gave it a good effort, and for people who like their own sliver of the genre, it’s a fun watch.
It’s speculated that Enter the Anime is a reasonably subtle effort to promote a coming tidal wave of anime on Netflix. They had considerable success with their latest in-house project, Castlevania, and are working on dozens of original new shows along with amassing a large library of existing titles. They already have several dozen at hand, and a surprisingly high percentage of them represent top efforts. Additionally, there are a dozen major anime websites that have free streaming series representing thousands of titles.
If Enter the Anime has an underlying premise, it is this: Give the genre a look. You are bound to find something you like, even if you have to search a bit.
Now on Netflix.