On Anime

No one will doubt that there is something abysmal in anime, which is easy to understand when we consider that it was created by a people and a country that were recovering and emerging precisely from their own collective abyss. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the immediate roots of anime lie in the post-war economic boom. Having been constrained by greater forces, the vital impulse of the entire Japanese nation could evidently no longer utilize the same forms of expression with which it had become familiar until the defeat of 1945. Forced to adopt those forms of the Western victor that their modernizing and industrializing impetus had deemed dispensable and incompatible with Nipponic tradition and authoritarianism, the Japanese were traumatically compelled as well to psychologically identify with the way of being and the social types and customs that they previously considered unworthy and indicative of a decadent and indolent culture. This is how, then, we immediately understand the deep complex and the exacerbated neurosis that become apparent in many anime productions. It would be difficult, for example, not to see in the figure of the "magical girl" – who, with her outward femininity and fragility, nevertheless possesses a fortitude of spirit and the warrior capabilities to fight against truly formidable enemies – a form of reflection on the country's own collective castration and, more notably, a kind of acceptance and stabilization of historical antinomies under a bizarre but socio-historically significant archetype. Similarly, in the "mecha" genre there is an echo of Japanese naval power (more precisely in the hope that technology, in the form of steel monstrosities endowed with immense military might, will lead to the characters' triumph just as the Japanese navy would lead to the country's victory and its path to the future), a power that, as we know, was a primary enabler of its territorial expansion, colonizing and mercantile-imperialist process, just as the "isekai", by frequently directing its protagonists to fantasy worlds inspired by Western history and reality, manifests the collective hope and desire for psychological assimilation with the triumphant Caucasian.

In fact, there is even a connection to be made between anime and fascism that goes beyond the fascistoid peculiarities of Japanese culture, a connection that seems to become self-aware through the association between anime and Nazism, and between anime and the far-right. This association occurs primarily because the castrated and, therefore, sexually frustrated Japanese man finds his natural counterpart in the Western middle class of first-world countries, equally frustrated and castrated to the extent that the trends of proletarianization of the middle strata and the importation of foreign proletarian labor advance.

All these traumatic interventions blend and combine to give anime its indecisive and neurotic escapist character, sometimes leaning towards retreat and solace in silly "slice of life" comedy narratives involving female schoolgirls, at other times "going on the offensive" through its bizarrely bloody stories that often feature decapitations, dismemberments, disgusting bodily mutilations, torture, sexual abuse and other forms of violation that seem to express typically Eastern destructive tendencies. It is in this obsession with cruelty that we find the unconscious rejection of the new social roles and values ​​instituted after the defeat of 1945. A typically Japanese form of pornography, which consists of depicting women engaging in sexual acts with oversized insects, expresses this tendency better than anything else. Emasculated, the Japanese consumer of pornography is no longer even capable of projecting himself onto the usual pornographic material, so great is the loss of his masculine potency, and instead needs the pornographer to replace the masculine part of the copulation with a singularly vile non-human being, the ultimate symbol of his frustration and hatred. Similarly, the aggressive tendency of certain anime productions expresses the dissatisfaction of the man who, in addition to having to endure the extremely alienating customs of an authoritarian and closed society, has to deal with the defeat, humiliation and shame that his own generation embodies in the face of his ancestors (and let us not forget that ancestors are of paramount importance to Eastern culture and play a role in it for which there is no equivalent in the West today).

Ambivalence, psychologically speaking, is therefore the most peculiar characteristic of Japanese anime. The Nipponic anime consumer cannot decide whether to silently accept the consolation prize imposed in the form of Western-style entertainment, a pacifying spectacle that even in the West also serves, in a way, as a narcotic, or whether to revolt against the cultural metamorphosis of his own country and against the externally commanded geopolitical status. In the end, he decides to do a little of both, and it is this unique and exclusive trait of anime and anime-style media that makes them, in a certain respect, superior in quality or, at least, distinct vis-à-vis Western mass art and its cultural industry. The psychological insecurity of the Japanese consumer forces anime producers to innovate in their productions, creating a kind of art that aims to meet the specific demands of a people in a sui generis situation, and which therefore is also equally sui generis.

In "slice of life" comedies, however, we find the opposite tendency to that which is evident in the more aggressive and neurotic variants of anime. Here the acceptance of the new geopolitical and cultural reality, of the castration of the samurai, is total: it is not by chance that these are also the healthiest examples of its art that the anime style has been able to offer to this day. The televiewer's assimilation of the life and plot of the young female characters indicates a full acceptance of the new status quo. The consumer of "slice of life" comedies no longer even thinks like their ancestors and has significantly overcome the complexes that still afflict their country and their generation. They represent a completely new type of individual, one that is decidedly oriented towards the future.

Sexual frustration and impotence among the male audience are also expressed in the eroticism of anime, which is far from healthy and balanced. The excessive and forced presence of sexually suggestive moments, although sometimes disguised as mere harmless humor, actually represents a kind of mediatic Viagra, a somewhat drastic effort and desire to see the collective phallus of the nation re-erected. It is noteworthy that the very decisive mark of the anime style – the large heads with their expressive and enlarged eyes – fundamentally constitutes this same effort, this same Viagra, that is, it has no other purpose than to enable a greater degree of eroticism and erotic-sensual expressiveness in the characters. The head is large to accommodate large eyes, and large eyes are sensual and typically feminine marks of sensitivity. The frequent portrayal of female characters in vulnerable positions and in situations of "strategic" disadvantage also suggests alienation regarding one's own sexuality and the members of the opposite sex.

But perhaps the most dangerous tendency in anime-style media is its pseudo-intellectualism, as it appears, for example, in works classified with the term "chunibyo". First of all, it must be said that there is absolutely nothing intellectually profound in anime, but what is presented as supposedly significant from an intellectual point of view is always stated by misfits, insane or sick individuals, and in a way that is itself always maladjusted and twisted, not, as sometimes happens in traditional art, when a difficult truth has to be put in the mouth of a madman because the very society portrayed is incapable of producing and accepting it, but as a parody of intellectuality itself, of thought itself and even of science itself, as if to say "this is what a thinker or scientific investigator truly is: a madman". Here the subdued masculine impulse attempts to resist castration in a completely new way, turning against rationality itself and the very possibility of the dialectical solution of the conflict through the mediation of higher instincts. The individual to whom the term "chunibyo complex" applies is a castrated person of the worst kind because he is also the most dangerous. He believes himself to be an intellectual and, when he encounters true intellectualism, he tries to crush and deny it because he is psychologically intransigent and, therefore, does not submit to the dialectical process of healing and of overcoming the collective traumas, nor does he even accept its prospect. In truth, his hidden ambition is to destroy the very superegoic rationality that manifests itself in the incessant search for knowledge and truth, in the instinct that, as men of knowledge, leads us to constant doubt. In him there is nothing scientific or philosophical – on the contrary, he is a tormented samurai.

There is something worrying about the fact that anime is increasingly emerging as a decidedly popular form of entertainment worldwide, although this is not at all surprising. As a country at the forefront of all the positive and negative trends of late capitalism, Japan is in a privileged position to develop those forms of culture, art and entertainment that will become spectacular successes in the near future, but the triumph of anime seems to suggest a movement of decline rather than any significant progress. It is a sign that the masses feel frustrated culturally, socially, sexually, politically and financially. Its backdrop is the strengthening of the far-right in the whole world. It is undeniable that the authoritarian and fascistoid characteristics of Japanese culture are revealed through anime and that a portion of the Western population recognizes itself in at least some of them. Add to this the deterioration of economic conditions that particularly affects the middle class and the recipe for fascism is more than complete.