I watched the most recent episode of 16 bit Sensation, a mostly-original adaptation of Wakaki Tamiki’s Manga of the same name.
It is a good show, but like is common in his work, there’s surprising amounts of themes and views portrayed that hint at a leftist worldview. When I went to investigate by reading his blog, I was not able to discover much even from his political posts. Making sense of Japanese politics is hard, especially when filtered through a bad machine translation.
I would like to know if there are any, particularly modern, mangaka or anime directors you know of that explicitly identify with the political left or are anticapitalist in spite of the nature of bourgeois media.
Hayao Miyazaki is of course the big example, explicitly identifying as a Marxist until the second half of the 1980s. He abandoned those positions afterwards, but his utopian environmentalist pacifism remained.
Mamoru Oshii was a member of the 1960s/1970s new left and his works heavily lean on those experiences. An episode of Patlabor’s second OVA is a parody of the whole era in fact. The live action version of this Mecha show is filled with random hammer and sickles, Mao Zedongs etc. for seemingly no reason. Vlad Love features a joke mocking the social democrats’ “you can’t do that” attitude.
Riyoko Ikeda of Rose of Versailles’ fame was a member of the Japanese Communist Party youth in the 1970s. Iirc she would later deradicalize and even have a high profile affair with a right wing politician in the mid 80s.
Osamu Tezuka was reportedly a member of the Communist Party. He died in 1989.
Are there more modern examples?
yoshiyuki tomino, creator of gundam. still working but very much of that same generation
i think there are more modern anime and manga you could point to that are leftist, and a lot that could be interpreted through a leftist lens, but creators are less open about their politics now unless they’re right wing
Tomino’s politics are… odd.
His works do not really reflect it and are generally good, but the really big elephant in the room is the very antisemitic early draft of Zeta Gundam. Having a fragile mental health didn’t help in making sense of his beliefs.
tomino’s weird, yeah. even just when it comes to his attitudes towards women, if you compare 0079, zeta, zz victory, and turn a, they’re all completely different in their levels of misogyny. zeta is constantly fridging women, 0079 has a mild undercurrent of stay in the kitchen, victory kills a lot of women but is actually less bad than zeta on that front and is also all about how women must nurture and mother in some weird ways, zz is kind of a “women are crazy, amiright?” type show but is otherwise chill, and turn a gundam is a perfect show
but most importantly i think he was a member of the new left and thus fulfills the criteria of leftist anime director
In addition to the fridging, Zeta has Reccoa woog herself into joining a fascist paramilitary and gassing a city.
I did not like Zeta Gundam.
yeah me neither. my least favorite full length gundam i’ve seen, and i don’t expect that to change unless i watch like age or seed or something. maybe wing is too stupid for me to enjoy. i could maybe reevaluate wfm even more and end up fully hating it instead of just really being bummed out by the ending?
(for the curious: turn a>ibo>0079>zz>victory>g-witch>zeta. turn a is so good, please watch it if you haven’t)
I’ve only seen 0079, zeta, and g-witch. I was really liking g-witch until the latter half of season 2 when it went suddenly very bad both in terms of personal character motivations and in terms of its politics.
That’s how you know it’s by the Code Geass guy.
I have to remind myself of this every time I wish G-Witch got a 50 episode run. They 100% would have missed the landing no matter what.
what exactly did you like about g-witch? character drama and relationship stuff? fights that aren’t always super high stakes? queer woman of color as the main character*? try turn a gundam
*interpretation of loran cehack’s gender identity may vary
also sorry if this is annoying, i just got to the end in turn a and it’s eating my brain a little
Ok, ok, I’ll try turn a next.
I think what I liked most about g-witch is how Suletta’s status as a superpowered cinnamon roll interacts with the rest of the pretty grim setting. She has the combination of strength and temperament to draw Miorine, Elan, and Guel out of their bullshit.
In my hypothetical headcanon good ending version of g-witch, Prospera simply continues to be a good mother to both her daughters and instead of leaving Suletta floating in space explains her history and goal of destroying the Benerit Group to her, then Miorine brings her to Earth where she meets the so-called terrorists and realizes that by moving forward and helping them she can gain two: Prospera’s justified revenge and an end to Spacian oppression of Earthians.
And then Suletta and Miorine kiss very lesbianly on screen, damn it.
I just started Turn A and I think I’m already seeing what you mean about Loran’s gender identity. Also, I’m loving the weird anachronistic Earth tech base, especially the airplanes. A flying wing zeppelin and a canard biplane, that’s good shit.
G Gundam is fun (especially the first half) and I highly recommend After War Gundam X if you’re a UC enjoyer. It’s a neat spin on the stuff that’s built up in Tomino’s work.
i got into gundam with g-witch and am watching in production order outside when a friend asks if i wanna watch a show that’s not in order, so g gundam is next, then wing then x! then i might be done with mainline series tbh, i’m watching 00 along with a podcast rn and so i’ll only have seed and age left
Reconguista in G
Great to see you become Turn A brained lol.
Victory has some crappy gender essentialism stuff in it (lots of “women are here to be mothers”), but it doesn’t feel as hateful to the characters as the second half of Zeta Gundam. I like Zeta a lot, but the second half really does just hit a pattern of: ♀️ establish female character -> ❤️ set up romance or similar relationship -> 💀 ded.
yeah, victory has more egregious stuff in it imo, but because of the way it goes about it i can’t actually get as mad about it as i do zeta. zeta feels kind of malicious at times, and the rosamia/sarah stuff is such a bad way to spend the last 10 episode it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth
I swear I’ve seen a manga where Vasilisa the Beautiful is a Soviet communist during WWII, but I cannot find it on google. : (
oh yeah i read that! kutsuzure sensen, it was a pretty good yuri
Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece
oda does not explicitly identify as a leftist, and given the number of arcs that end with “we’ve deposed the bad king and installed the rightful king in his place (including one arc where the rightful king was explicitly a settler with an indigenous guerilla movement resisting him before the bad king took over) so everything is good now” i definitely don’t feel comfortable labeling him as a leftist
that’s not to say that he’s evil or anyone is bad for enjoying one piece. i like one piece! it’s just not as leftist as a lot of people act. it’ll probably end with the world government being toppled but that alone does not a leftist make
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Me
I’ve not read it, but this list on MAL says the author of Kamui den was a communist.
That’s still of that generation that published in the 60s, though.
He was supposedly, yes. Unfortunately neither the Manga nor the 60s Anime is possible to find in English.
Also the list isn’t exactly well researched. For example, Ashita no Joe was popular among the left (and indeed a good story), but the author himself even ran for office for the right wing Liberal Democratic Party.
Yup, “manga with a tenuous connection to the left” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it lol
Not outwardly communist or even leftist, but ONE’s manga/webcomics (One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100) both have as essentially the core message “true strength is the ability to make friends”
Which is still pretty incredible compared to 99% of manga
I don’t know some parts of Mob Psycho 100 were going into the “Pull yourself up by your boot-straps”-direction too much I would say.
Do you mean about the NEET guy? I feel like actual social problems (poverty, homelessness, etc.) don’t really come up at all - it definitely has a moral of “only you can begin the process of helping yourself”, and the ‘good ending’ for various villains is just getting ‘normal’ jobs in what is still a capitalist society, but the actual path to becoming a better person is always reaching out and connecting with the people around you.
Like, Mob’s incredible power, which is a standard gimmick in any one of the thousands of regular kinda-fascist-ubermensch power fantasy type manga, doesn’t help him at all as a person, only his relationships and developing friendships do. I guess the biggest problem is that it’s an inspiring story for becoming a better person, but set in a world that isn’t coming apart at the seams the way ours is.
Yea its kind of absurd to think the “growing up as a person” theme is problematic.
Tell me you never watched mob psycho without telling me.
everyone should watch mob psycho, its such a gem.
I’m a big Rose of Versailles fan (username and all), it’s a shame Ikeda dropped her membership.
I don’t know if she ever formally did, but all signs point to it to my limited information. And yes, Rose of Versailles is an amazing show. 1979 was an unusually good year for anime, much like 1993.
