That's right, horrified at the way things are going I've embraced a period of escapism and watched a horrifying speculative future 2010s where the police have the firepower of militaries, the world is heavily polluted, the politicians only care about re-election and corporations believe employment contracts give them the right to control their employees own bodies. In hindsight, that wasn't the best plan I've authored.
It's the holiday period, and I've caught several winter bugs over the past two months. So in addition to having time off, an erratic sleep pattern and semiregular periods of imposed isolation has led to quite a bit more time on my hands than I had planned for. And I filled part of the hiatus catching up on a backlog of films and television. I finally scratched a few things off my list, including It's a Wonderful Life, and also today's topic for discussion Dominion Tank Police, and its sequel (kinda) New Dominion Tank Police. The Tank Police OVAs have been on my list for some time, why the long wait? Well, a combination of them being in limited availability in my markets and a reputation for not being great pieces of entertainment. What fanbase they do have is largely thanks to being early action Sci-Fi anime that were licensed internationally, and being based on Manga by Shirow Masmune, the creator of Ghost in the Shell didn't hurt either. They also benefited by the existence of Anna and Uni Puma who are androids, sisters and Cat girls.
Apart from that, both shows have their issues, the first series from the late 1980s is quite cheap, the animation can be choppy and reuse of assets is obvious, the dubbing itself is also a bit spotty, some of the voice acting feels weak, and the dialogue sounds weird. It also struggles with tone, it's a rather cynical take on cyber punk futures and cop dramas with very crude humour and extremely hard to like protagonists. Only to drop most of the jokes and refocus attention on a comedic fool villain (Buaku) and his tragic past at the end. Oh, and it ends on a cliffhanger that is not followed up on in New Tank Police.
New Tank Police on paper has a lot more going for it. Released in the mid 90s, it looks more professionally made, the characters have more detail, the animation is smoother, and I didn't notice much reusing and recycling of previous footage. The dialogue sounds a lot more like things people would actually say, and the cast who are the same voice actors who worked on Tank Police either gained more experience and confidence in the years between releases, or they received a lot more support direction wise. And the action set pieces have more going on too, most of the action in the first series were basic chases with some gag stunts thrown in. In New Tank Police, there are clever escalations and use of vertical space.
And yet, and yet, I found myself having stronger feelings for the choppier and cheaper series. Which is a little odd since that show's four episode run goes from stealing jars of piss and anti-tank mines that are dick jokes - yes I am serious- to a sad look at the life of a hairy android crook for hire whose stealing a piece of fine art and risking his life, not for the massive pay-off, but because he was the subject of that painting, and it depicts his early life in a lab where he was physically and mentally tortured since creation by uncaring scientists who used him as raw material for experiments. So, as far as he (Buaku) is concerned it's his by right, oh, and it also contains hidden data that can prove the existence of that experiment and the existence of his fellow lab mates who did not survive and escape the lab. It's extremely sad, and it makes it perfectly crystal clear just how crooked, horrible and miserable this world is.
New Tank Police, well Lenoa Ozaki the female cop on the top image and the protagonist of the franchise has to investigate the murder of an old friend on the motorcycle police, and there's some corporate scheming going on with cyborg henchmen. It's perfectly fine sci-fi with a cynical edge where the protagonists are cops. It's perfectly fine, didn't get very engaged with it, wasn't put off by it. I did find it slightly amusing to learn that New Tank Police took place in 2016, well, I found it funny at first, now I'm a little sad.
Speaking of sad, I was surprised to see how different the Cat Women were to what I had been primed to expect from the marketing. The Puma sisters were the breakout characters of this franchise, most
marketing material I've found about these two series heavily pushes
them, sometimes to the exclusion of tanks and police. I suspect quite a few people who watched these two miniseries were quite disappointed. Yes the Puma sisters appear frequently, yes they wear costumes that are usually revealing, and they do a striptease. Just the one though, and it's depicted as very goofy if many cutaways to reaction shots of SWAT police behaving like the Wolf from those Tex Avery cartoons.
No, they don't wear anything like that in the show. And not to get into a slap fight with TV Guide, but the word sometimes is doing the heavy lifting in that quote.
There are raunchy anime OVAs, but the Tank Police ones are not in that number. The sister's main contributions were comedy and then some tear-jerking because as androids they are treated very poorly by society. They're in Buaku's gang because that's the only prospect of regular money that they can get that isn't stripping. And in New Tank Police where Buaku is completely absent, they sleep in an underground car park and have nothing going for them except more crime. Even when they move over into sort of doing the right thing territory, they get hassled and harassed by the Tank Police anyway.
Having watched both, I now understand why it's largely been relegated as an artefact of the 90s-early 2000s.Though watching in 2023 I think it may have aged pretty well. It's a cynical franchise where the label hero doesn't fit anyone comfortably, and the protagonists would be denounced and avoided if they were real people, but here the violence and cruelty is softened with crude humour and a strong distrust of everyone and everything. Like how the Home Alone movies use slapstick sensibilities and heart string tugging to take the sting out of scenes of Kevin McCallister throwing bricks at Daniel Stern's head.
Grenade torture, Dominion Tank Police's first running joke
Despite this, unfortunately, the march of time has shown that its depictions of cops as a bunch of self obsessed jerks and violent thugs barely qualifies as satire. The first four minutes of the first episode of Tank Police is a back and forth shouting match between two characters, the mayor and the Chief of Police, the Mayor is furious that the Tank Police are causing so much damage to the city while the Chief couldn't care less about that and is demanding even more dangerous and powerful weapons. Since the 1980s, police forces across the world have been showered with military grade weapon systems, including armoured vehicles, so Main Battle Tanks aren't so farfetched.
How about the attitude? Well, the Tank Police are depicted as selfish arseholes who only bother to fight crime because they view the activities of criminals as a direct challenge to them personally. In the first Tank Police episode, the captain of the force is lecturing Lenoa and another rookie on how the most important thing is to preserve their Tanks. There's a violent incident every 36 seconds on average in that city, and if they were too active in responding, they'd soon be worn down. He even overrules the rookies who which to answer a call for back up from the SWAT police, since he views his fellow police officers with contempt. He only bothers to try and stop Buaku's gang when they rear end his Tank and thus insult him personally.
Lenoa is no better, unlike the Captain she doesn't subscribe to How to Kill magazine, but once her Tank gets scratched in yet another grenade "Interrogation" scene which she set up she tries to gun down an unarmed prisoner who is suspended from a game show spin wheel. She sort of sees Buaku as a person by the end of Tank Police thanks to how that plot line goes, but she's more than willing to kill and torture anyone who runs afoul of her. Many cop centred media products deal with abuse of power and usually covers for it with some appeal to pragmatism or threatening potential outcome, if the detective doesn't murder the child murderer the bill of rights and lawyers will set them free, or there's a ticking time bomb and people's lives are at stake so they had to beat the suspect until they can't walk any more, or show that the bad things made the police feel bad about doing them.
Tank Police throws all of that out of the window. The criminals who get the grenade treatment are bad people who admit to horrible actions, but it's crystal clear that the "interrogations" were excuses for the Tank Police to torture people for fun. One of them confesses to multiple murders, which they didn't ask him about because they didn't know anything about them. When they deploy they frequently level the City, they in fact do much more damage to than the criminals do, and they are fully aware of this and do not care about it. They don't even like supporting fellow police officers, Lenoa's dramatic climax is using her damaged Tank to shut a civilian jet out of the air, killing everyone on board. The passengers are shady corporate criminals, but she's avenging a friend and has no real interest in whatever their scheme was. Make the Tank Police into a rival gang with better connections to international arms markets and nothing much changes in how they operate. You could even keep the paperwork jokes and change them to being compensation payments that are deducted from their protection racket income. Which is functionally what taxes to pay for the police are.
So, surely this level of callous self interest must be a product of cynical imagination, right? Well, in the United States of America the doctrine of Qualified Immunity protects police officers in what are blatent examples of brutality.
To push Brooks to step out of her car, one of the officers pulled out a Taser and asked her if she knew what it was. She didn’t, but told the officer she was seven months pregnant. The officers chatted in front of her, casually discussing which part of her body they would tase: “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one of them said, “do it in her thigh.” The officers twisted Brooks’s arm behind her back and tased her three separate times—first on her thigh, then in the arm, and then in the neck—before dragging her into the street, laying her face down, and cuffing her.Brooks sued the officers to hold them accountable for their conduct. Six federal judges agreed that the officers’ use of severe force absent any threat to their safety violated the U.S. Constitution. But those same judges dismissed her case, relying on a legal doctrine called “qualified immunity.” Qualified Immunity Explained
And said actions of brutality are not uncommon. Furthermore, funding these police forces is draining multiple city budgets.
And as for giving a damn about other people, well they haven't done that for a long time if they ever did. Currently as I'm writing this in the United Kingdom every month there's another reveleation that police forces especially the Metropolitan have been harbouring and covering for murderers and rapists within there ranks. And Uvalde Texas showed the world that over 400 police officers from multiple forces including special tactical response units with military grade equipment will just stay in cover listening to gunfire and calls for help from schoolchildren for over an hour before deciding they had enough strength assembled to intervene. The shooter entered the school at 11:30 am and wasn't confronted and eliminated untill 12:50. At the start of the attack there were 19 officers inside the school building the majority of the back up stayed outside for the duration.
Practically the only thing that still science fiction about the Tank Police franchise is that we don't have fully sapient Cat Women gynoids and anti-tank mines that humoursly flip the tank over like a Chef's spatula only more phallic. We're stuck with weird walking dog leg robots and anti-tank mines that explode and maim or kill everyone in the vicinity. Once again reality has ruined a joke.
In 2021, I was scrolling through Netflix and saw a trailer for some animated show about a mopey bloke bickering with an Armadillo. It's called Tear Along the Dotted Line, It scratched my curiosity itch, so I decided to give it a chance. I knew it was a European series, Italian to be more precise, and since Netflix usually has terrible dubbing of European content I made sure to pick subtitles with the Italian audio. And nearly abandoned the show in the first five minutes. I don't speak Italian, but I am familiar with some words and phrases and my reading speed is pretty good. The main character Zero spoke so fast I could not keep up.
Instead of surrender, I bit the bullet and switched to English audio, and was surprised because the dubbing was great. The protagonist Zero is a Roman working class type associated with lefty politics, the punk scene and the pop-culture of a 1990s childhood. So, whichever company did the dubbing figured out correctly that there is a British version of Zero out in the wild and cast him to do the voice. The monologue is very authentic, the slang used sounds like something a character like Zero would use in real conversation and avoids the trap of trying too hard to sound streetwise. The references that don't translate to an international audience or can't be replaced with a British equivalent are explained clearly and quickly, and each episode has an extremely snappy pace.
The plot of the series revolves around a shock revelation, so I won't spoil that. The premise though is the life of Zero, a real life Italian comic artist, and his struggles with his own emotional hang-ups. The Armadillo is supposed to be an imaginary representation of his conscience, but it seems more interested in manipulating him into negative behaviours. The show is autobiographical and uses a stream of consciousness narrative, Zero not only narrates the events and his emotional state but does all the voices of the other characters. It was surprisingly engaging seeing him struggle with imposter syndrome social anxiety and his slow, constantly halting progress towards a better place.
In short, I really enjoyed the show it had a lot for me to chew on, the jokes landed for me more often than not and despite guessing what the revelation was going to be I still felt an emotional punch once it was out in the open. It's the sort of thing I wished I had bothered to write about when it was new, I recommended it to some friends, all of whom agreed it sounded interesting and all promptly ignored it. And the series ended pretty conclusively, or so I thought. I was surprised to see that this year they had released a second series, This World Won't Tear Me Down.
Which is why I'm finally getting off my proverbial backside to talk about the show now. Now strictly speaking This World Can't Tear Me Down, is standalone, you do not have to watch Tear Along the Dotted Line to understand what's going on. It re-introduces the characters and how the show works very well and while there are references to what happened in Tear Along, they are not crucial. I would strongly recommend you watch Tear Along first, though. Watching them out of order, you lose the sense of Zero's emotional progression. Zero is still the protagonist and a stream of consciousness is how the narrative progresses, but the voice cast is expanded, Zero only does other people's voices when he's explicitly recounting events, so he has finally learnt to let his friends take part in his world and doesn't treat them like props in his play. And the Armadillo while still a glass half empty grump has stopped trying to manipulate Zero into stagnation and does give advice that's more reasonable and leave it up to Zero to make the decisions without pressuring him.
Zero's narcissism has declined sharply since last time, though he is still struggling with a "the world rests on my shoulders" attitude and is still struggling with imposter syndrome thanks to his further commercial success. This World, also vindicates my choice as there are multiple jokes about how even Italians struggled to keep up with his motor mouth in Tear Along.
Fans of Tear Along, will find plenty to like in This World. I certainly did, ended up watching the all six episodes in one night, though admittedly I was sick at the time so had difficulty sleeping and had nothing to do the next morning.
The story has expanded beyond Zero's personal life to looking at how his struggles are part of what's going on in Italy and the world. Much of the conflict this time revolves around the growing boldness of Italian Neo-Fascism. In Tear Along, Zero's disgust with the far right is noticeable, but it's part of the background of the world Zero lives in and what makes him tick. It was good to see that emotional issues aren't a barrier to opposing the forces of reaction, politically and socially, Zero seems pretty sound. However, the first series came out in 2021 and a lot has changed since then. Now fascist posters are littering the streets Zero walks down, and the police have been arresting Zero's friends for counterprotests against far right political groups.
I should stress these two series are autobiographical, the events they depict are true, it's just names and identities are changed. Half the new characters are represented by alias and drawn as some kind of Dinosaur to protect them. This creates a bit of a clash with the gritty street level of the events, but you get used to seeing a Triceratops deck a black shirt or a Pterodactyl slag off the local council for capitulating to an obvious strong arm tactic. This World Can't Tear Me Down is an open and overt Anti-fascist animation. And not just because of the baddies' goose-stepping into battle, their ideology and strategies are explored, exposed and condemned.
The Fascists or Nazis as Zero keeps calling them* are opportunistic thugs exploited the failures of the Italian state to rally the discontented to their banner to pressure a weak and complicit political establishment to make concessions which will strengthen them further to repeat the cycle. They're doing this in two ways, first in a deprived area of Rome the government shipped a number of refugees into a building that was abandoned. The Nazis are targeting this district with posters and other propaganda accusing the government of selling out the local population and "Pure" Italians for these foreigners, with a major source of tension being the proximity to a school. And the second case is how they recruit new members. A childhood friend of Zero's called Cesare has returned to the neighbourhood after a long absence and is having trouble reconnecting with the community. He was in a clinic for drug addiction and in addition to find readjusting to life outside to be a challenge, he resents how he and his family were treated by the authorities. He is not a true believer, but the Nazis are exploiting both his resentment and isolation to get him to join up. They seem sympathetic to him, and they've used the lack of support for him to stoke anger over the refugees.
In both cases, they're shown to be opportunistic deceivers. The refugees were placed there recently, but the district has been stagnating with a loss of services and employment opportunities for decades. Forcing a few dozen desperate people to move somewhere else will do nothing to fix that, it just makes life harder for people. And as for Cesare, encouraging an addict with a criminal record into further acts of violence isn't in his best interests, it will not help him reconnect with the world outside, it keeps isolated and in conflict with the few friends he had left, and their false comradery breaks down once Cesare fails to transition into a good malleable soldier. They abandon him to his fate after that. There is no happy ending here, the anti-fascists successfully break up this one attempt to divide the community, but the Nazis are still around and Cesare is free of the negative influence of the far right squadisti and probably won't go to prison because the only direct evidence of his actions was recorded by the anti-fascists who delete it rather than turn it over to the police, but he's still adrift and having to struggle with a community that in addition to difficulties understanding addiction now know he's associated with violent extremism.
It's a tough watch, but it's important, this isn't fiction it's real life. I know first hand that society fails many of its members and leaves them isolated and resentful. The scenes with Zero visiting Cesare and his mother at the beginning were a little painful to watch as they reminded me of how I and my family treated several people who were addicts** at first, constantly torn between addressing it or just trying to ignore hoping they'll just tell us the boundaries without havign to be asked. The pitiful amount of resources set up to process refugees in conditions that are just bleak at best and prisons at best isn't sufficient to address that problem, but is more than enough to create footholds for opportunistic peddlers of hate, and the respectable political representatives who are supposed to improve society are completely incapable of addressing these issues and that's assuming they aren't directly complicit which increasingly is the case.
In a sense This World Can't Tear Me Down, is rather bleak, there is no magic cure all presented in the conclusion of the show. Italy (or the UK or France etc) is fundamentally broken, and no solution will come from it. However, despite that people can work together, reject the lies and resist the manipulation by outside forces and resist the reactionary turn. To drive that message home, there is a sequence where Zero makes conversation with some of the refugees who are grateful for the show of support but weren't worried too much about the Nazis, because instead of being the vulnerable victims Zero and the Anti-fash assumed they were they due to there experiences of violence and depredation were used to fighting and had formed a defence ring around the building and had built up an armoury or improvised weapons. The events unfolded with the Nazis failing to get inside the grounds (lucky for them I guess) so the refugees were relegated to spectators. The implication being that while what Zero and his friends did was important and a good thing, it would have been more beneficial had they communicated with the refugees and worked with them instead of just acting on their behalf.
Also this bit of dialogue from Secco really spoke to me.
"Where did I grow up? I'm an orphan. I was on the streets from the age of 15. I've never had a job, no one to support me nothing. Everything I have, I got for myself and I've never taken anything from those who were worse off than me. I get that you feel guilty but do you think that Zerocalcare is the only enligthened one that knows right from wrong?"
This was in response to Zero's handwringing about not judging Cesare for supporting the Nazis. It doesn't deny that Cesare has struggles but it shootsdown the idea that these are in anyway valid explanations or excuses for supporting far right bandwagons and lashing out at others. There's been a growing divide in anti-fascism for sometime over how to deal with the alienated recruits of the contemporary far right in Europe. Its a difficult issue to address but Secco is 100%, I also felt bad for Cesare but that isn't an excuse for what he's doing and not all addicts join up with the supporters of the new Reich. Throwing bricks through the windows of foreigners won't help Cesare or any of the alienated footsoldiers, and nor would it make what they're doing okay if it did somehow solve their personal problems. It treats Fascism and how to oppose it seriously and with nuance and years of experience, several episodes even explain tactics for street clashes and how to take precautions.
Its anti-fascist content is enough for me to recommend it as an educational tool, its emotional maturity and clever handling of personal drama and dark humour make it one of my favourite shows.
*This is addressed directly. Fascism has managed to become semi-respectable in Italian society again, whereas Nazism is still a no-go area. So, in response, anti-fascists like Zero have resorted to using the Nazi label to describe the diverse ecosystem of far right grouplets to remind wider society of what the end game of these people are.
** If you're wondering why I keep referring to individuals who have been clean for sometime as addicts its because that's what the family and friends I know who have gone through view it. Addiciton and rehabilitation are complex issues with many different ways of working with it, I'm not an expert and just going off of what little I know, I apologise if this has caused offense.
This short sequence says more about early 90s Eastern Europe than entire forests of books.
I'm reading a book on the history of censorship in animation. The book covers many well known examples and also documents some lesser known ones. It also covers the filmography of Jan Švankmajer, a Czech director and animator who serves as an example of what it was like to work in the film industry in the Warsaw Pact. To get a film or program funded, scripts had to be approved by the responsible bureaucrats, Jan Švankmajer had some success for a time getting projects off the ground, but it eventually he got a reputation for making films that were pessimistic and individualistic, in short, bad art in the opinion of the Communist Party.
Jan Švankmajer is a committed Surrealist. In the popular parlance, surrealism is just an adjective to describe work that's odd. A painting that doesn't look much like something or a play that plays with the fourth wall or a film that has a sequence that breaks the rules of conventional cinema will be described as surrealist. However, the original Surrealists were a group of political radicals closely associated with Anarchism and libertarian socialism. It's this political Surrealism that Švankmajer was inspired by.
The opposition force Švankmajer to find new work as a puppet maker and painter. Fortunately for Jan Švankmajer he was noticed by the West German film industry who introduced his work to the rest of Western Europe. Several financiers including the UK's Channel Four and the BBC made overtures to fund some of his projects, which meant the Czechoslovak film authorities reluctantly allow him to return, though opposition continued. Jan Švankmajer's film Alice, an adaption of Alice in Wonderland, was made while he was supposed to be working on a different film and was only allowed to be completed after a bitter dispute in which the foreign funders threatened to withdraw if Alice wasn't completed.
So, with all those headaches, it's not surprising that once the regime collapsed in 1989 that Švankmajer would take the opportunity to comment on its demise. In 1990, with assistance from the BBC, he released a ten-minute animated short titled The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. I've wanted to see this film for some time after seeing clips of his Alice. And now thanks to a YouTube channel I got my chance. It's simply excellent, the imagery is striking, the claymation animation is not only interesting to watch on its own, but it makes many of the film's points in itself. There's a sequence where clay workers in flat caps and overalls, the men who populated every Soviet poster from 1918-91 created via moulds, going through an assembly line and then hanged, after which their bodies fall into a bucket and turn back into clay which is then moulded back into workers which go back on the line and so on and so on, meanwhile the film juxtaposes imagery from Czechoslovakia's Five-Year plans with the production targets getting higher and higher.
Practically every sequence is like this, the imagery and transitions and movements work together to make the point crystal clear even if you can't read Czech. I could describe the entire ten-minute run time, the crumpling up of posters of old Czechoslovak/Soviet leaders followed by uncrumpling those posters to reveal their replacements, meet the new boss, mostly the same as the old, as a quick example. But I'll restrain myself and just discuss what for me is the most important sequence, the film has a bookend sequence, it starts with a creaky old Stalin bust having surgery, his skull is cut open to reveal his brain, the surgeon plunges both hands into the gory matter and pulls out a smaller bust of Klement Gottwald, ardent Czech Stalinist and leader of the 1948 coup that established the Communist party dictatorship. After cleaning up the blood and tying off the umbilical cord, the Gottwald bust comes to life, the birth of Stalinism in Bohemia. At the end of the film the chronology has entered the late 80s and the soundtrack is full of jubilant crowds and photographs of mass demonstrations in the streets. While this is going on, the hands that have been controlling everything throughout the film start painting everything with the Czech national flag. A new coat of paint on rusty equipment, including an old and dirty Stalin bust. This Czech national flag Stalin bust undergoes the same surgery and those hands plunge back into the brain matter, but the film ends before we can see what emerges from it.
The film is open about its existence as a form of Agitprop,
agitational propaganda and Švankmajer has stated that he thought the
film would age very quickly because it's a direct commentary upon
current events "Despite the fact that this film
emerged along the same path of imagination as all my other films, I
never pretended that it was anything more than propaganda. Therefore, I
think it is a film which will age more quickly than any of the others." To call a film Agitprop or propaganda is to insult in conventional circles. Art is supposed to rise above petty political statements, this film is the best rebuttal to that assumption I've come across so far. Removing the politics from this film is to leave it an empty husk, its politics is its art.
Most political film animated or otherwise are frankly quite blunt and simplistic, there's a bad guy who demonstrates all the qualities the makers criticize, the good people eventually triumph etc. Here the villain is a system, it isn't the death of Stalin in Bohemia, it's the Death of Stalinism in Bohemia with a question mark. Stalin died in 1953 just days before Klement Gottwald died oddly enough. And even Stalin is manipulated by the hands of the unseen operator of the system, who is still around in 1990 and working hard to mutate into a more politically acceptable Czechoslovak national form to continue its work.
The scepticism wasn't some paranoia from an artist who thinks too much, either. The book I'm reading that reminded me to look up Švankmajer's work was published in the middle of the 1990s several years after The Death of Stalinism, was released. It includes comments by Czech filmmakers that things haven't changed completely, many of the old Communist party bureaucrats were still in positions of power in the industry and not all of them had adapted to the changing times. Which is what the Stalin bust with the flag paint was about, the collapse of the old regimes removed some of the most high profile and infamous personalities, but left thousands of lower level authorities in place, and it was an open question just how far these authorities would be willing to change.
And of course, the reason much of the imagery is obvious despite cultural distance is that much of what is odious about the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe can be found in Western European capitalism. I've worked in factories with grimy walls covered in propaganda posters while sweating and aching to fill ridiculous quotas. The secret police are gone, but the regular police are quite capable of repression, the governing institutions are just as invested in keeping the population passive through a combination of restrictions and distractions.
I've been to Czechia and Slovakia, so I'm under no illusion that these two things are the same, there are differences, just not as much as the propagandists of both systems would like us to believe.
I'm going to start watching season 02, or part 02 or whatever they're calling it, of the newest Gundam show Witch from Mercury. Why only now? Well, we'll get to that later. First, though, I wanted to jot down my thoughts on the first part. I've been a Gundam fan since I was the age of a typical Gundam protagonist, Wing was my introduction to the franchise, and I've been dipping into its back catalogue ever since. Witch from Mercury - Witch for convenience - was a bit of a surprise. I'd heard some news about it being in development, but didn't follow it very closely. I found out that it had been released because I saw a lot of fan art about it.
Unfortunately, due to circumstances, it took me a while before I could watch the show. My IT systems were in storage, and I was confined to the house with an old smart TV and a chromebook, so I patiently waited for it to become available on the Gundam YouTube channel. Meanwhile, I had fan art and fan guesses to navigate past to avoid spoilers. When I did manage to watch the first season, it ended, leaving me with some thoughts about what I've watched and where it could be going in the next season.
So, before I take the plunge, I'll sketch them out and see how close my predictions are and how it handles what it built up in season 01. I know I'm not the first one to notice that Witch differs quite a bit from what is considered typical Gundam, but that isn't automatically a bad thing. Nor is it the first time that's happened, SD Gundam (chibi style comedy shorts) and the Fighter G Gundam (think wrestling with Mechs, or the anime adaption of the film Robot Jox) were extremely different and while not everyone in the fandom has come around on them, they have their fans. Personally, since I'm not a Japanese Gundam fanatic from the 1980s I think SD Gundam misses more than it hits, but there are still some episodes I quite like, and I really enjoyed the energy of Fighter.
And Witch being different has opened the franchise to a new audience. I said that I discovered that the show had started airing thanks to the explosion of fan art, but interestingly, most of the fan art was being made or shared by people I follow on social media that had never expressed any interest in Gundam before. The Gundam fandom outside Japan has been growing over time and the Netflix deals gave it more of a push, but it's still a small pond, so further growth is welcome. Of course, Witch being atypical will mean that not every Witch fan will evolve into a Gundam fan, but in the gaps between seasons I have seen some start mining the franchise for another fix. And I saw an article that claimed that sales of the Mobile Suit model kits (Gunpla) in Japan have broken records, if true that means there's a lot more new friends to welcome.
Overall, I like Witch, and I think many of the changes from the formula work well and are refreshing. In the fandom, a vocal minority has been wishing for a female protagonist for some time, so it's good that it finally happened and the character and her plot is interesting. It's a bit odd looking back how long this has taken given how many Gundam stories have come out and how even back in the 1970s the shows would include viable candidates for main character status but just kept to the old formula despite being willing to change and experiment with the rest of it. I watched Reconguista a few months ago and well that's a blog post in itself but one of the few positives for that show was Aida Sururgan, making her the main character and the boy Bell her back-up/possible romantic partner* would've been an improvement. Anyway, back to Witch, I like Suletta and I like Miorine, I even remembered how to spell their names without looking it up!** I like both as individual characters, but at first I wasn't buying the relationship between them. I know that's something of a "hot take" given that the lesbian relationship seems to have been its main selling point amongst the Gundam first timer fans.
Works of this nature were how I discovered the show, I'd credit the artist, but I found this on a wallpaper site uncredited.
I do understand the appeal both in having a main character LGBTQ relationship in a very popular show - I really loved how the show quickly established same sex attraction is considered practically normal in most of the society of the show, nipping that "but we're both X" angst in the bud- and that both parts of the relationship are very interesting personality wise and clash quite a bit creating friction in the will they, won't they? Style of teasing. And it doesn't hurt that the cute red head Suletta's character design made her easy to turn into a cuddly Racoon by fan artists. But, the relationship as depicted struck me extremely toxic. Suletta surprised me a lot in just how close to the bone she cut me. Watching her clumsy and confused attempts to navigate her emotions in what is essentially a military training camp for adolescents was giving me some quite vivid flashbacks. She even has red hair. And Miorine's abrasive isolation and defensiveness read very realistic to me. I'm not saying any of this is bad, I found it very interesting to watch, I just wasn't convinced the lovey-dovey path was viable and found the multiple episode cycle of Suletta clumsily trying to connect with Miorine without actually connecting (another deep cut there) while Miorine maintains a cold detachment and lashes out (and another) started to grate. Fortunately, around the time I was getting actively annoyed at the closed circle was when the show started to move on this. And the last few episodes seem to be confirming an awareness of the emotional vulnerabilities of the two main characters, the toxic relationship between Miorine and her father is obvious from the first episode, and once Suletta's dear mother shows up it quickly became clear to me that that relationship is just as rotten.
I was a little worried that the show would keep these two characters locked in an angsty will they, won't they? Oh, woe is me, why can they not see that they're perfect for each other? Cycle. Only to have a last minute or deathbed confession, but once the show dropped hints that the relationship has some issues that need to be worked out, my fears were calmed. And then the last scene of season 01 happens, and we get Suletta's sweet smile after she= well I won't spoil that, but after that scene I'm officially really intrigued and willing to follow this relationship wherever it goes.
The setting has moved from battles between political-national factions, Zeon vs Earth Federation, Zaft vs a different Earth Alliance, MAFTI vs Earth Federation, the boys in Wing vs well everyone else, etc. To a setting dominated by corporations. This makes sense both in relation to the current year when corporations continue to grow in influence and importance in society and in international relations, and it builds on the limited criticisms of corporations and greed in military affairs that previous Gundam shows touched on, Anaheim Electronics supplying both sides, the cabal of industrial giants in Seed Destiny and son. But I find far less interesting as a setting. I get it, they're corporate heads, so they're petty and nakedly self-serving, but I find the talk of stock prices and intrigues over market concerns opaque and not very interesting. When Miorine forms her own company and essentially drags her friends acquaintances into joining her, I like the parts where they're trying to work together and interact with each other, but I still have no interest in the corporate side of it. I just do not have the interest or respect for business culture to buy into any of it. One of my hopes for the next season is that since the violence has ratcheted up quite a bit, the fights and physical conflicts will take more attention away from the corporate culture. Yes, functionally speaking scenes where bad people gather in a poorly lit room with a map and a communications system and plot violence are the same whether they're wearing military uniforms or smart casual office attire, I just do not care for their expositionary blather in the latter.
Class, class commentary has always been present in Gundam and Witch is no exception. Usually in the settings there is a distinct divide between those who live on Earth (Earthnoids) and those who live in Space (Spacenoids) and usually the upper crust and the elite are on Earth while the downtrodden are on the Moon, or asteroids or in city sized space stations. Witch has this divide too, Mercury in the title refers to a community living on the planet Mercury, but has flipped the positions. In this show, it is the Earthnoids who are the downtrodden underclass, with the Spacenoids exploiting and deriding them. I like how Miorine and Suletta as outsiders gravitate to the students from Earth, but they don't do much with this dynamic in season 01, though again the final bits of that season strongly suggest that season 02 will do more with this theme going forward.
So, that's where I am now, so far patiently waiting for the Gundam channel to make the season 02 videos available in my country. I know they've been uploaded because the Americans I follow have been chattering about them, and a plugin I have tells me they're hidden in the playlist. When I voice my displeasure at region blocking for online content, someone pipes up about VPNs. Yeah, I could use one of those, I could a lot of things in fact, that's missing the point, consumer hostile actions don't become okay because consumers can make use of loopholes.
Appendix
Gundam shows you might like if you like Witch (no refunds)
Gundam Wing; back in the day, Gundam Wing was the show that provoked a massive influx of new fans to the franchise. Partly because it was the first show to get a big push in English speaking regions, but also due to its five main characters being angsty boys with a lot of trauma and relationship issues with each other and everyone else they weren't tyring to murder inside a big machine. I tried watching the show again some years a go and, well I thought it was terrible, but maybe Heero and Duo and the rest's charms will work for you, I fell for them hard back in the day.
Turn A Gundam: Another show that was atypical to what had come before, features a plot full of intrigues between wealthy indivdiuals and also did experiment with gender representation. Is noted for having the first explicitly homosexual character in the franchise, though in the present day I don't think he'd be held up as a positive example, though I think it works in a sad way. Also its protagonist Loran reminds me quite abit of Suletta, though with a different background and upbringing so I wouldn't say she's a female copy of him.
Iron Blooded Orphans: The series before Witch, its standalone so you don't have to worry too much about the lore of the franchise getting in the way. Had some LGBTQ and non-conventional relationships and leaned heavily into the power dynamics of the world. Also very bloody and covers some darker aspects of the setting which Witch has hinted at and may go down that root too but might hold back. We'll see.
*Yeah, I saw that twist coming and was hoping it'd swerve it.
** You can play a game with Gundam shows, type the names of characters into the Gundam wiki based on how they were pronounced on the show, Japanese original or dubbed, either way it'll be a challenge.
So I've been watching Dallos. Dallos is an early science fiction OVA series, considered the first OVA by some in fact. I stumbled upon it flicking through anime reviews by the youtube channel Kaiserbeamz. I'll link the video as it will save some time.
The video explains the history of the production and its impact on Japan's home video market better than I could. I will briefly outline the show itself, any way to help ground my thoughts. KaiserBeamz mentioned that the show was commissioned in part to compete with and enjoy the market share of the still young Gundam franchise. And over its four episode run I can see clear inspiration's. This is a world where the Earth is in a lot of trouble, and the way it resolves the crisis was to colonise the earth system. Though instead of floating colony cities, human has built settlements on the Moon. There is also an Earth Federation ruling humanity, and like in Gundam it is corrupt and is exploiting the people who live on the Moon, and their main enemy is a rebelling group of space born humans who want independence.
Dallos also has mechanised vehicles that are similar to Gundam's mobile suits. Though mostly construction and mining suits, and the police use transforming bipedal walkers.
The plot of the four episodes of Dallos are about class warfare. The conflict is between the representatives of the Earth Federation who use violence and armed force to maintain control, and the communities of Miners led by Dog (or Doug in the English release) McCoy. The people of the Moon are overwhelmingly discontented with their lot, but McCoy leads a small band willing to take violent action to end it. McCoy hopes to inspire the majority of the Moon's inhabitants to join the struggle. Interestingly, despite being science fiction and about insurrection, the combat doesn't overtake the story.
McCoy's main strategy is to rally the workers into staging a general strike that will cut off earth from the resources the Moon provides, this will force the Earth Federation to take notice and hopefully make concessions. The street battles and raids on police armouries are to show that resistance is possible and to build up the military strength to resist attacks by the police and the Earth army while the pressure builds. The response by the colonial government is brutal and heavy-handed, attempting to crush the growing rebellion with greater force. It's this violent reaction coupled with the authorities' inability to finish off the resistance that radicalises more of the Moon population.
One action in particular pushes the older generation who originally came from Earth and still have connections to it over to the side of resistance. And that is the attack on Dallos, the mysterious structure on the surface of the Moon. McCoy and his group shelter within it, and the police attack damages it. Many Moon citizens, especially the older ones, have come to worship Dallos as a sort of local deity, so they don't take kindly to the armed police firing missiles on it. This gives McCoy and the resistance the numbers they need to halt work at all the mines, which quickly depletes the ore processing and gets the attention of the Federation. Their response is to deploy a garrison to support the police and continue attacking rebel strongholds. During a battle, Dallos repairs itself and attacks and devastates both sides.
With Dallos restored miners start drifting back to work, and with both sides mauled a stalemate of sorts is created, and that's where the show stops. I get a strong sense that Dallos was supposed to be a pilot miniseries for a bigger franchise, either a full series or a movie or something. I don't know if that was the intention, but it would explain the last few minutes, both the main Colonial governor and McCoy predict future conflict and the tensions haven't been resolved.
Overall, I have some mixed feelings about Dallos. I'm impressed it didn't devolve liberation struggles into an action set piece with an impossibly skilled protagonist, and the battle scenes it did have were beautiful and took advantage of the setting, there are some excellent low gravity action scenes here. But there are a lot of shortcomings. For example, I have not mentioned the protagonist of Dallos, that's partly because I'm more interested in the depictions of class conflict than I was in its actual plot, but also because he left such little impression on me that I forgot his name. He's a young adolescent whose brother was killed in mysterious circumstances and has a sort of love triangle with his friend and the beautiful VIP from Earth who becomes a hostage of the rebels. Nothing ground breaking, though I did appreciate that he quickly makes a firm choice to support the rebellion instead of being conflicted and dragged around the conflict by plot convenience like some protagonists.
And Dallos itself is honestly more hindrance than asset here. At first, it's mysterious and intriguing, but we don't anything about it and its place as a deity despite its obvious alien and constructed nature is baffling. I suspect if a continuation was commissioned, the revelations of Dallos would've been key to the plot, but its potential is wasted.
During the Tokyo Olympics multiple team GB commentators repeatedly failing to understand what those giant Gundam statues were. In addition to calling it a transformer during the speed climbing, I remember hearing the talking voices for a marathon fixture get the name right but trip over pronouncing it. "Gan-damn" its pronounced Gun-dam, though some Japanese voice actors put an extra syllable on the end sometimes.
It's a mammoth of a franchise, has lasted decades and has spun off a mountain of products and creative directions. Taken as a whole it's arguably the largest, most in depth attempt to grapple with militarism, conflict and its associated traumas. At least when it isn't being a light-hearted comedy or a show about a martial arts tournament with giant mobile suits.
It's not surprising that none of the team GB hangers on knew about Mobile Suit Gundam, because it practically doesn't exist here if you're too old to be an avid consumer of fansubs and torrents. The title says short, and it will be, because there just isn't much to talk about.
A quick primer, the "robots" aren't robots they're mobile suits, most of them have a pilot inside them who directs what they do, it's more accurate to think of them as human shaped tanks or jet fighters. Not every mobile suit is a Gundam, but don't worry, you'll know when one shows up. Broadly speaking the television shows and movies are set in a future where humanity has begun to explore the solar system, there's usually space stations and cities on the moon. And the story is usually concerned with war and its effects on people and the environment, though comedy is still found, and some outlier series are more light-hearted.
While Gundam as a franchise has been in existence from 1979 to the present with projects queued for release in the future it's had surprisingly little impact in English-speaking territories, and this was especially the case for the UK. The first official major release of the franchise was the English dub of Gundam Wing on the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, in the early 2000s. Gundam Wing was released in Japan in 1995 and was a standalone continuity. If there was an earlier official release of a Gundam property I could find no evidence, the closest I could find is American VHS tapes which could be second hand.
Wing was quite popular in the United States, I can't find much information on how popular it was in the UK, I watched it, and remember there were some toys in shops, not the famous model kits, these were more like action figures with detachable accessories (guns, swords, shields) and alternate limbs. Anecdotally speaking, none of my friends and schoolmates who liked anime were into it, I think I met one over kid who watched it. Cartoon Network at the time was only available on Satellite and Cable, so quite limited in audience reach back then. And also in general English-speaking circles Wing hasn't left a very big impact, outside its prominence in popularising same sex pairing fan fiction in the west.
In North America, watershed events included the broadcast of the anime series Gundam Wing - Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-cultural Fandom of the Genre
In my experience this largely what gets Wing talked about to this day, the only exceptions I can think of are when a Gundam forum user talks about it as part of rewatch and is amazed at how well it holds up or is baffled by how poorly it holds up. Personally I'm in the latter category.
Other than that, in 2007-8 the UKs first and so far only channel dedicated to Anime, Anime Central aired Gundam Seed, I never watched Gundam Seed at the time, but I do remember seeing adverts for it in between shows I did watch, mostly Cowboy Bebop! Again the potential audience was very limited, Anime Central was only available on Sky Satellite and shutdown within a year. And that's it for TV broadcasts as far as I know.
It's not the most gripping branding, but it got the point across.
There is however one other area where the Gundam franchise made its presence felt in the UK, video games. Despite only seen one series and film (Endless Waltz) I considered myself a fan of the franchise because I really enjoyed playing them. The most popular where Gundam spin-offs of the Dynasty Warriors games, a serious I've enjoyed for a long time. Dynasty Warriors was still a niche product in the UK but it had a fanbase and that fanbase grew over time. In fact, I can remember a tv show that reviewed video games having a brief introduction to the setting before it reviewed one of the games, it ended with a sarcy "what do you mean you've never heard of it?"which I probably remember out of a sense of satisfaction since I had in fact heard of it.
I first learnt about Amuro Ray and Char Aznable through playing their story missions in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 1 and 2. There were other games released by other developers, but I don't remember them very well. It was also through these games that I first began to grasp just how vast this setting actually was, there were characters from dozens of shows and films with their original art styles that stretched over 40 years of animation developments. Mashing the square button and occasionally throwing in a random triangle for flavour was quite engaging and got me curious. So I turned to the net, where most of the Gundam franchise was available in varying quality. If you live in the UK and you had opinions on Gundam pre-2015, you almost certainly encountered it on the internet or via an anime club that ripped DVDs of fansubs without the teacher finding out. Thanks to these shady means, I was able to explore a large chunk of the available media, but there's so much of it that from 2010 to now I've still only experienced a minority of it. And I occasionally I have to google lists of releases to check if I'm missing something.
At the present DVDs and Blu rays, have gradually increased in availability, though it's dependent on the US market getting a release with the UK being a secondary route of sales. In still more positive news Netflix the dominant streaming service which is now available in over half of all homes in the UK also shows some of the franchise, mainly Iron Blooded Orphans and Gundam Unicorn, both very new shows, but occasionally alternating some older shows. Currently, they have a number of movies released in the 1980s to 2021.
The IP holders have also released a youtube channel Gundaminfo which cycles through the franchise. And as a result of this growing official presence, and it's less than legal channels the audience within the UK and in English-speaking parts of the web generally has been steadily growing, though it still lags behind other parts of the world, especially Japan, but also Italy and Latin America. There's never been a better time to check it out if you're in the UK.
This January there was some strange news from China, the airing of a Karl Marx animated series usually called Karl Marx the anime, but actually titled The Leader. There was quite a bit of fuss on news sites and social media, but oddly once episodes started floating around the net it quickly disappeared. It doesn't seem to have gained much traction even in the circles that make image reactions and jokes.
I found a youtube channel that not only uploaded all seven episodes but had also fansubbed the Chinese dialogue into English and Russian. I watched the whole show, and I think I see why it didn't last. Using the channel statistics as a guide, episode one has 100,000+ views, episode 2 though plummeted to 15,000 and the drop continued with the last episode getting around 7,000. There's a lot to untangle so I'm going to break it down a bit.
Expectations
I wasn't expecting much going in, its a biopic of Karl Marx that's seven episodes long. Each episode is around 24 minutes long, but at least four of those minutes are dedicated to credit sequences and a preview of the next episode. I was expecting more of a brief timeline and introduction to his ideas and inspirations. This seems to be what they were aiming for and some episodes mostly live up to this but the rest fall quite short.
The Look
Bluntly the show is very incompetent, both in animation and story structure, it seems to have deliberately gone out of its way to show off how poorly made much of it is. There's no consistency, it switches between 3D and 2D animation styles arbitrarily, the models are extremely janky in movement and stick out from the backgrounds. They often look creepy especially when laughing.
The models are also recycled heavily, Marx doesn't appear to age or change his clothes much from age 17 until the 1850's when he starts to show the beginnings of a beard. His wife Jenny is usually seen wearing her wealthy noblewoman dress and her maid is wearing a sexy formal French maids outfit. The crowds are some of the laziest I've ever seen, a good chunk of multiple episodes are dedicated to Marx giving a speech, and we get reaction shots from the audience, but whats weird is that these audience usually stay motionless until the speech is finished, and then they applaud robotically. Most do not even emote during, and many not in the front row despite being clearly visible often do not have faces.
This is not the worst example of lifeless crowds, this is only the first example. From the first episode, about two minutes in
It looks cheap and its very jarring. Even the show opener highlights many of the worst features of the animation. But what's really strange is that the first episode is the cheapest looking one, every other episode while not perfect is an improvement. Now animations having spikes and drops in quality is nothing unusual, budgets of both time and money can effect production, but I've never known the opening episode to be the one that's the most cheap looking. I honestly had to pause the episode multiple times to process what I was looking at, its not just that it looks bad, it often actively confuses.
An obvious 3D Gatling gun model
One two second cut later, and its transformed
I think the last episode looks the best, and its much easier to follow, but that's mainly because aside from an epilogue it focusses mostly on Marx coming to terms with his age and ill health. The section with him and his wife Jenny was surprisingly quite emotional.
The Education
I was expecting this to be a brief introduction friendly to people who knew nothing of Karl Marx, and I think that was the intent, but it often falls short. I personally think it might be better to skip episodes 1 and 2 and start with 3, not only do the production values increase but not much is lost. Though later episodes do still have some pretty serious issues.
It presents the information in small chunks, but sometimes it does so in a way that only makes sense if you already familiar with the topic at hand. The bits on Hegel and Kant are pretty blatant examples. Episode 2 covers the deep impression Hegel made on Marx, particularly the "Dialectic" but it doesn't explain what that is, and both philosophers and many others that pop up in the show are reduced to some very quick summaries that rely on terms that aren't in common usage.
Another time Marx is outlining his ides on Historical Materialism, and his brief explanation is overlaid random scenes on a street in Brussels, but the connection between what he's saying and the imagery is not made clear.
Episode 5 the highpoint for me, is the best at this, it takes its time explaining some of the passages from Capital, and its framing works in the episode. It also has an effective use of colourful imagery, the Vampire like capitalist relationship. Other than that its main problem is its brief run time, big and important ideas and lessons are briefly mentioned and then everything has moved on.
I picked out this comment to highlight how poor a job it seems to be doing in teaching people about Karl Marx, most of the other comments weren't much better
The Revisionism
This overlaps a lot with both education and looks, but I wanted to make this its own section for clarity sake. While focussed almost exclusively on Marx, -with one exception to be dealt with later- it does reference and introduce, often for less than a minute some of the other political radicals that Marx rubbed shoulders with. Including his criticism of them. with the exception of Ruge whose briefly mentioned before he appears everyone else Marx interacts with just turns up is introduced by a brief name plate, cross swords with Marx and either immediately leaves to be banished for ever, or like Engels sticks around to become his admirer.
Episode 4 takes this to the extreme. Wietling walks into the Marx home, is briefly introduced for his accomplishments, he then talks and moves incredibly smugly, talks about Christian communism for a bit and toasts himself before Marx speaks up. Every part of this scene, the dialogue, the character movements, the facial emotions etc. Is telling the audience to dislike him, but the argument between him and Marx is so quick and surface level its mostly just angry words. The only part of the disagreement that's clear between the two if you don't already know all about their ideas is that Wietling thinks workers allying with the bourgeoisie is a mistake because they are enemies, and Marx disagrees because of his views on history.
Who was right? Well we're supposed to sympathise with Marx and Wietling literally storms out of his house never to be seen again so I guess that's a win for Marx*. The International Working Men's Association is depicted as being the soul fruit of the labour of Marx, and it largely accords with his views. The reality was that it was diverse body full of people he couldn't stand and didn't fall under his direct control until 1872, when it promptly haemorrhaged members and collapsed.
In episode 6 there is a Marx/Bakunin stand off at the Hague Congress, Marx ridicules Bakunin as a conspirator, Bakunin has no allies, and he and his group are expelled. In reality Bakunin was never at the Hague Congress, Marx's motion to expel Bakunin failed, he was later expelled for questioning the new General Council, and when he left the majority of the membership also left, either to join him or like the other non Marx non Bakunin aligned groups like Blanqui's supporters simply to get away from the direction Marx was driving. The narration and the final episode don't acknowledge this at all, they give the impression that Marx's decision to prevent a split of the international, by well splitting the international was roaring success.
This episode (heh) demonstrates a key failing in The Leader. Its supposed to be biographical, but it won't tolerate even mild and universally accepted criticism of Marx as political advocate or as a human being. Marx is apparently faultless, when I saw they were including Helene Demuth the maid I wondered if they'd dare depict him getting her pregnant. They didn't, it'd probably get in the way of depicting his relationship with Jenny as a fairy tale romance. His well known binge drinking is also absent, at one point he even criticises other revolutionaries for drinking too much. His behaviour with his enemies real and imagined is always depicted as noble and correct, but it can't go into detail about their opposing views and criticisms even to set up their defeat, so it all comes across as extremely shallow, which also makes Marx the character seem shallow and clueless. Marx never really convinces by the power of his argument, he just registers his dislike and the reactions of the characters does the hard work of presenting this as a victory to the audience.
Self Sabotage
Again this is tied in with all the other examples. A bizarre fault with the show is that it kept undermining what it was trying to achieve. An early scene in episode one that seems based on that famous scene from Good Will Hunting with the Bully, is supposed to establish Karl Marx as a genius but it totally undermines itself. Marx does this by reciting a very simplified explanation of Kant's views on dogmatism and scepticism, which shouldn't be a problem, but this is shown to stump all the other students, and more importantly the scene immediately before that was Karl Marx in a class room listening to his teacher tell him this. So we're supposed to be impressed by his ability to remember basic information told to him three hours earlier.
Another example in episode 3 and 4 they address the poverty of the Marx family, but each time this done while the maid and his wife are onscreen in there expensive clothing, because they were too cheap to update their models. Shortly after criticising Wietling, Marx starts ripping into Kriege's ideas on universal love, specifically the absurd notion that capitalists and lenders can be reached by appeals to their better nature. He's saying all of this to his good friend and dependable comrade Friedrich Engels, whom the show has established is a factory manager, and was moved to become a Communist because witnessing the plight of the working poor appealed to his better nature.
Lest you feel I'm being a bit hard, I personally agree with the criticism of Kriege, its just that The Leader is just giving out mixed signals in its incompetence.
Last but not least, there's the case of Pierre Proudhon. Engels gives Marx a copy of his Proudhon's new book Philosophy of Poverty. While Marx is holding the book unopened, two random people start throwing out snippets of Proudhon's beliefs. At which point Marx still holding the unopened book starts ranting about Proudhon's "Petits-bourgeois" socialism and declares he will write a criticism called Poverty of Philosophy. It was at this point that I wasn't sure whether some of the instances of self sabotage were deliberate or not, Marx did write Poverty of Philosophy as an attack on Proudhon, and for many years it was considered a masterpiece in Marxist criticism.
Until people started reading Proudhons book, where it was discovered that many of Marx's criticisms were incredibly inaccurate if not made up.
Propaganda
AKA, the reason this was really made. The Leader isn't really supposed to be an educational text, its made to capitalise on Karl Marx and use his legacy to legitimise the Chinese Communist Party. The CPC fully supported the creation of The Leader, particularly the Propaganda Department of the Communist Youth League and the Central Office for the Research and Construction of Marxist
Theory were involved.
This is the final image of the end credits of every episode. The credits are a timeline of Karl Marx's life so the connections aren't subtle.
It was made and released just before the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's death, and the first speech Karl Marx gives on the show “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession” was also chosen as an extract for Xi Jinping's speech commemorating the 200th anniversary.
“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually be at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”
Even the titles for the episodes sound like they were taken from propaganda posters
Different Youth
Defending the Rights of the People
New World View
Scientific Socialism Shines Brightly
Great Work Das Kapital
First International
Marx Forever
And of course the name of the series The Leader isn't exactly subtle. But in case you didn't get it the last part of the final episode really drives it home. The ending credits are a timeline of key events in Marx's life, except for episode seven. In that episode the timeline is replaced with a history of Marxism-Leninism, through to the present day in the People's Republic. Complete with a narrator praising Mao Zedong, then Deng Xiaoping then the Three Represents and then finally Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping's new era of socialism with Chinese Characteristics together will bring the people forward into a new era for China
The intention is of course is crystal clear, Karl Marx is the indisputable leader of Communism, and the CPC is the heir to Communism, and so it is the heir to Karl Marx.
Of course its not exactly a new claim, just a few more heads to squeeze on the banners.
There is some attempt to justify this posture though, in an early episode Marx is absolutely indignant at the oppression of peasantry by the landlord class, and the Paris Commune is criticised for not having a strong central leadership. Also Marx did briefly talk about the importance of theory adapting it to historical conditions and reality. Which the narrator echoes at the end by claiming that Maoism through to Xi is just the Sinification of Marxism.
I also think though this is speculation that the propaganda potential of the series is the explanation for its poor production values, especially in earlier episodes. The series premiered on the 28th of January, with an episode a week, meaning it ended roughly around the anniversary date. If the decision to make the series had come late, with the anniversary being the hard deadline it must reach, then that would explain why the earlier episodes are the worst with the most obvious time and cost cutting. The later episodes which look much better would have had more time available to work on. But even in the last episodes there are obvious signs of short cuts in some sequences.
Conclusion
I think The Leader is doomed to be a curiosity, unless the CPC believes it was successful at propagandising to the youth of China I can't see this experiment being repeated. Its a shame but I don't recommend it, its not without its charms, but the combination of animation issues, shallow information, and propaganda distortions -and there were many more examples I could have listed- leave this as something best avoided.
Which is a shame, as I don't believe the idea of an animated series is without merit, the Manga adaptation of Capital was largely a success, the films Young Karl Marx and the West German film about Rosa Luxemburg were very informative and interesting to watch, and historical drama's are becoming increasingly common and more refined. If the CPC didn't cobble this together to meet its targets and it was allowed artistic freedom it could've been something great. For all its faults the final episode was quite good so the people doing the actual work of making the production seem to have been capable of doing good work.
* Incidentally this same episode covers the revolutions of 1848, during which time many of Europe's bourgeoisie eventually allied with their despotic aristocracy to destroy the more radical workers and student revolutionaries. So it seems like Wietling was largely correct on that point but this is never addressed.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice the correlation between young people engaging with words like `Socialism` and sentiments like `Eat the Rich` with anime avatars? Currently everything that can present itself as an alternative to capitalism from religious spiritualism to Anarchistic terrorism is experiencing a boom in popularity.
The other thing the kids are into right now is mass market Japanese pulp entertainment lumped under the banner of anime. Now Anime (I'm also including the stuff that comes with it like comics, games, toys etc.) is incredibly divisive, there have been arguments about its artistic merits if any, workplace practices within the industry, this one has a consensus that its generally low paid highly demanding work, but what is to be done about it is still pretty controversial, and its political content. Oh boy, that last one can get fierce.
The way I see it Anime isn't a genre or art style its a medium, animation. All anime are cartoons and all cartoons are anime. Overall Japan's animation industry is like anyone else's, its also become increasingly incorporated into the global animation industry, the credits of most of them include South Korean and Chinese studio's for example. Some films were created by Directors because it was their life long ambition to make them, others were churned out by committee so a corporation to milk a trend before the consumer base moved on to something else.
Cyber punk and Blade Runner were also hugely influential in the 80s and 90s, so there are a lot of shows from those periods about fighting the big bad megacorps. Bubblegum Crisis is one that gets highly rated for this.
However this does mean that their are some really interesting stuff for anyone if they're willing to look. For example I don't like Japanese jokes, even when I understand the pun its just a lame pun, but I really enjoy trashy, gory horror flicks, and I've been enjoying anime versions of these since I was a child, thank you very much SciFi channel and that German language channel on diamond cable.
If you're feeling misanthropic, then there are plenty of direct to video movies from the lte 80s-early 90s made by creators whom sincerely believed that humanity was a mistake and so made miserable films about humans being really horrible to each other.
If that doesn't suit you, then there are plenty of fluffy slice of life comedy series that are just about friends being hanging out and being good friends. Like Azumnaga Daioh, Lucky Star, Free! etc.
And I know of at least one Anime that called Angel Cop, which was made to promote Nazi party anti-Semitism. That is not a joke or me reading into something, the plot of Angel Cop is that a Communist terrorist movement and an American multinational corporation are both attacking the prosperous and independent nation of Japan. It turns out that both are being controlled by "The Jews"... Incidentally that was one of the earlier animes to be released in the West, you know how they handled the anti-Semitism? They just cut out the references to Jewish people, and left all the other nationalism and bigotry in.
Fortunately overtly political message anime tends to lean the over way, a number of famous and influential directors, writers, artists and animators came out of the Japanese New left of the 1960s and 70s. Including the very famous Hayao Miyazaki, and so I've decided to compile a list of socialistic ( a broad sense) anime's. For both the anime leftist and confused new comer alike. This is just a list and brief description of merits, I have seen more in epth reviews of a number of these shows and will include them, though do bear in mind I don't necessarily agree with everything the say.
Steam Boy
A story about the invention of a revolutionary new form of steam power that could improve the whole of mankind. Essentially cold fusion but with steam. Unfortunately the cost of developed this new power meant the inventors had to get investment funds from a company called O'Hara and while its pleased the research project was successful, it really wants dividends on its investment as soon as possible and the fastest way to get a quick profit is of course weapon sales.
In a sense its about how property holds back technological development. The British Imperial Government gets involved, and at first it seems noble compared to the O'Hara mega company, but it becomes clear that they wish to get a hold of the steam technology to develop their own weapons programs and prevent O'Hara from selling weapons to its Imperial rivals.
So neither government or capital come out of this film looking very good, they're both self interested and hypocritical. There's a battle scene between the police and a private security army, highlighting the similarities.
Our hero is a working class lad from Manchester and his inventor Grandad whom wanted to build a new society using the nearly unlimited energy of this new invention he largely pioneered. Its animation is beautiful, it has a very steam punk look, with tanks and fighter planes as they might have looked in the 1860s. It did get some criticism from purists because it was an early adopter of Computer Graphic animation, but it blends with the traditional animations pretty well in my opinion.
If you can, I'd recommend watching the English dub, the dialogue is full of nineteenth century colloquialism's and the cast even manage to pull off Mancunian accents.
The Wings of Honnêamise
No I don't know what a Honnêamise is either, googling just brings up this anime film. I'm just going to call it Wings from now on. Wings is a lot like Steamboy, its about an attempt to put a man into space. Its like Yuri Gagarin the anime. It set in a world that isn't really earth, they're all humans but the nations and history and cultures are very different.
The space agency is incredibly underfunded, and the only way for them to get some support from their government to get a rocket ship and capsule built and ready for launch is to highlight its potential military capabilities. They're all dedicated to space exploration and have no interest in war but they're desperate for funds. One drawback is that a hostile nation now views the program as a threat and tensions between the two nations increase.
Again naked greed and self interest from the powerful actively impedes scientific progress and discovery. It ends with Lhadatt the cosmonaut getting into space and reflecting and praying for humanity to improve itself.
And unfortunately I'm not doing it much justice, its very beautiful in both its looks and its music and sound design.
There's a video review that does show some of that off, but it does also go into extreme detail about the plot and characters so use with caution.
There is however one flaw in this film which I should mention, at one point there's an attempted rape scene. I don't why its there, its uncomfortable and doesn't seem to add anything to the story or characters, if anything it diminishes it. It doesn't last long, but it does stick out there. I've been told there are censored versions that just cut that part out, I don't know if that's true, but if it is I'd recommend watching that version.
The Great Adventure of Horus Prince of the Sun
The Adventure of Horus was an early project of Hayao Miyazaki. He and his colleagues had a mission statement to make a film about `Socialist principles`. What this meant in practice is a fairy tale like fantasy film set in a Vikingish land where Horus and his fishing village must work together to defeat an evil Wizard. The villains are all guilty of selfishness in one form or another, wealth, immortality at the expense of other lives etc, and unlike most fantasy stories where the hero and maybe a band of warriors does all the work Horus does need the help and support of the village to resist and defeat the Evil Power.
Personally I think this is perfect for young children, it has lovely singing, and talking animals, including an adorable bear cub called Koro. Gundam 0083 - War in the Pocket
Gundam is a massive franchise, and I mean massive. There are dozens of anime series, some have continuity with others, some don't, there have been multiple films, video games, comic series, novels toys and model kits. It can be incredibly overwhelming. I've started getting into it, but I had to use a guide written up by a mega fan who had seen it all to figure out where to start and what to skip.
The franchise is famous for its criticisms of war and militarism and given that its been in existence since 1979 and is still going strong today, it maybe the longest running criticism of war and militarism in existence. Unfortunately the quality and extent of that criticism can vary wildly depending on what part of the franchise is being looked at.
With that in mind I've picked War in the Pocket as out of what I've seen its both the most damming in its criticism and accessible to newcomers. It was the first series I'd seen, I didn't really know much at all about the franchise but I had no trouble getting it.
Its six episodes long, and fairly self contained, it does have connections to other shows in the franchise but it isn't vital. It concerns a young boy in a fair away colony. There's a war going on but so far its left their part of space alone, Alfred and his friends like most young boys when there's a war on far away are obsessed with it. Trading stories and war toys etc. Then the war comes home and Alfred still obsessed with the exciting adventure gets caught up in it, makes friends with some soldiers and well the ending is very bitter.
SFDebris did a review of each episode of the series if you'd want more info, massively spoilers though.
Berserk
I've already talked at length about Berserk previously, so I'll just quickly summarise Berserk is in my opinion about power. Domination be it economic, political or personal is never benign. The rich and powerful are cruel even if they don't intend to be, those whom pursue power and wealth do so at the expense of others.
As a consequence of this the series is full of depictions of violence, torture, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, death in many forms, bigotry, discrimination, persecution, exploitation, slavery, etc. But unlike certain animes that indulge in these things for marketing its all key to the themes, plot and character development.
Guts the protagonist (with the big sword) is a damaged young man who was raised by a mercenary whom while teaching him how to fight and having a sort of paternalistic affection for him, also relentlessly exploited the power and influence he had on the boy and ultimately betrayed him. It takes him years to even start coming to terms with his trauma's and in a way he never has done. The reason he's such an excellent fighter, is revealed to be because fighting in a life or death struggle was the only way he knew how to cope with the emotional turmoil he was in. It takes him years to even tolerate being physically touched by even a friend.
Authorities of every type, religious, military, financial, governmental are shown to be self interested and harmful to the common people.
There's a review of the 1997 series
And a review of the 1997 series and manga
The Flying Ghost Ship
This one is admittedly quite light, its more a fun mystery adventure then a meaty stew of themes and political discourse. It starts out like a anime version of Scooby Doo, it even has an intelligent Great Dane. This was also another early film Hayao Miyazaki worked on in 1969. It was also the first anime to be shown in theatres in the Soviet Union, and is so popular in Russia that they redubbed it in the 90s, though I've not been able to find a reason why.
Its a light mystery involving a ghost ship, a giant robot that menaces the city, and a conspiracy between private companies and the government complete with a Roger Moore era Bond villain secret base. It has something for everyone. I won't spoil the plot since its a mystery show, but I will tell you that involves the pushing of an addictive soda drink.
Its probably the most spotty in terms of animation, at one point a character is literally slid onto the screen. But all the parts that need to look good, the robot attacks, the Ghost ship, the tanks moving into the city etc. I heard Toei had funding issues at this time, if so then they prioritised very well, the set pieces all look and move very well.
AKIRA
This is controversial for me, I know a lot of people responded to AKIRA as a story about punkish youths getting caught up in a government conspiracy to do... well something, and its probably something bad given that this a pretty authoritarian government with a powerful and very active police and army.
And if you've never seen it its worth watching. Its interesting it looks great, and I do know a few people who responded really well to a general impression of anti establishment resistance the film gives off.
But politically speaking its incredibly vague and kind of a mess, Kaneda the youth on the iconic red bike just stumbles into the plot because a mate of his gets nabbed and he's really attracted to Kei, and her rebel group is shown to be puppets of a corrupt politician. It doesn't help that the plot of the film is itself vague and kind of a mess.
Aggretsuko
Aggretsuko is a short series about modern Japanese worklife. Retsuko is an officious worker whose treated very poorly like most staff, however a combination of her being very nice and eager to help and being a woman means she's singled out for additional abuse and exploitation. She works long hours in a career that's stalled for an abusive manager whose literally a sexist pig.
She can complain about his behaviour, but her coworkers and friends point out how nothing will probably happen to him apart from alerting him that she tried to get him in trouble. Her only consolation is going to a Karaoke booth after work and screaming out Death Metal tirades about how terrible her boss and work is.
The whole show is about alienation at work and sexism. Later on she does befriend two women who are higher up in the company whom help her and she reaches a sort of truce with her sexist manager. This has put off some people who were really into the show. However this does lead to a really important bit, after some confrontations her manager reflects on why he's been so personally abusive and exploitative of his power over the office staff.
He hasn't just been demanding the staff commit to the workload and follow the companies rules, he's been dumping his own work on them and demanding of servant like behaviour too. He realises that back when he was a grunt in the company his managers treated him in the same way, only it was worse because back then there were fewer safeguards and an even more hostile workplace culture rooted in seniority. So when he became a manager he took out all his frustrations on the employee's beneath him and exploited everything shred of power he had.
There's a pretty good review of it here.
Jin-Roh
This ones a bit different, you may have seen an image of what looks like a future Nazi stormtrooper, being shared around on forums and social media, something like this
This character is from Jin-Roh. Jin-Roh is a sort of alternative history film. Japan is largely a police state with a very large and very active militant left wing revolutionary movement. The opening of Jin-Roh is a riot with a very well armed resistance taking on armed riot police. In response to this social upheaval the government created another police unit specifically to destroy armed terrorists.
Those are the fellows in the armour and glowing red eyes. Essentially they're a death squad. That and the look is probably why right wing types on the net love sharing images and clips of the film. Out of context its a powerful and intimidating image of right wing power. For me though I just assume they haven't bothered watching the film, because in context he doesn't say what they want it to say.
Jin-Roh is the story of one of the members of these special units. You may wonder why I'm including this here, well its because the film doesn't actually glorify these Special Units at all. On the contrary it comes across rather critical, the plot involves power plays between the Special Units and other rival police forces who are constantly jockeying for position in this authoritarian regime. Its also concerned with the question of how much humanity does someone in that position have left? The answer is not much, its incredibly dehumanising, that armour may look cool and intimidating but do that job for long enough and eventually all you are is a bit of armour and a gun, a miserable, sad and lonely existence. Kill La Kill
Kill La Kill (KLK) is basically the reason I thought about making this list. When I first noticed that internet users with anime avatars were no longer just spewing racist bile or calling me a Jewish agent, a lot of the openly left wing ones had avatars based on characters from KLK or were sharing meme's images and clips from this show. So I got curious.
It popped up on Netflix and I binged the show in a couple of days. Its very watchable and I can see why it appealed. The first scenes open on a lecture about the Nazi party and it uses school uniforms and clothing in general as a metaphor for social conformity and oppression. The main character Ryuko Matoi the girl with the black hair with the red stripe, (incidentally I don't think her red and black colour scheme is coincidental) is new student, she's a rebel at heart who rejects all arbitrary rules. She quickly finds herself in conflict with the school authorities whom have a regime based on strict discipline and hierarchy.
And its quickly revealed that theirs a whole social system being built on the same lines throughout Japan, and there's a clothing company that's busy monopolising the global textile markets in the background.
Its a great show, unfortunately there is one area that I know from experience does put off some people from getting into it. KLK involves a lot of scenes with scantily clad high schools. Unlike some anime's I don't remember it showing this in a leering way, the tone is usually self aware joking, but it still is jokes about high school students beating each other up in skimpy costumes. I don't recommend searching KLK at work, even some of the official promotional material and merchandise would raise some eyebrows.
For me its the weakest part of the show, and I can't really blame anyone for being put off because of it. Though that is a shame.
Tokyo Godfathers
Tokyo Godfathers is a film about three homeless people whom discover an abandoned baby at Christmas. They decide to look after the baby they call Kiyoko, for a night or two before handing her over to the authorities because they fear the baby will grow up to associate Christmas with abandonment. While doing this they decide to track down the parents to reunite the baby, or at least find out why the baby was abandoned in the first place.
This leads to a wacky adventure full of coincidences. The film is like a mix of Down and Out in Paris and London, a Charlie Chaplin era physical comedy. While their are jokes, the fact these people are homeless is never mocked or the subject of a joke, the humour comes from the personalities. Being homeless is depicted as rather bleak even with close friends and a sort of support network. It's full of examples of how homelessness in Japan is treated (about as poorly as everywhere else) and how the homeless survive. We see the three -a transwoman who worked as a drag queen at a cross dressers bar, a young girl runaway and Gin a man who due to debts had his family life destroyed- deal with all sorts of obstacles just moving through the city.
Official society, especially the police are no help at all and aside from handouts from a Christian group who give them a meal in exchange for being proselytised to, they're only help is from other outcasts. They could just give the baby up to the nearest police station, but all that will happen then is that the baby will be swallowed up and passed around by the foster system. At least this way the baby has a chance at family life first.
They essentially form a quasi family and mutual aid group, by working together and pooling what money and connections they have they're able to make it across Tokyo while looking after a baby.
Its really emotional, but due to the subject it covers a lot of pretty raw topics. Hana the transwoman is called a man and several slur words (at least that was how the subtitles translated them*) throughout though Hana is not ridiculed by the film and is shown to be accepted by the other homeless and the character who does insult her a lot is shown to be an well meaning but flippant and ignorant arse. Its not depicted as malicious and he is shown to care about her deeply and they have a weird surrogate relationship going on.
It also covers abandonment, the destructive power of debt, social prejudices, trauma, suicide, relationship breakdowns and how hard it can be to reconnect with family members even when both sides are willing to give it a go.
Despite the humour and the strong emotional core its still quite a sad film.
*I watched this subtitled without an English language track. Apparently while Tokyo Godfathers was localised and released internationally the company that did it didn't bother to dub it at all.
A review
Skip to around 07:42 to avoid a tiresome tangent about subbing and dubbing.
Manga's Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths
Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths is a fictionalised autobiographical manga by Shigeru Mizuki based on his experiences as a conscript in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) sent to Papua New Guinea. When pushed Mizuki has stated that about 90% of it is fact. During the war the most of his compatriots were killed and he lost his left arm, and while I recall a lot of the men dying I don't recall a character losing their left arm, so I guess that was the 10% fiction.
Its incredibly bleak, the men are exhausted, starving and eaten by the wildlife and that's before the American army arrive to shoot at them. The style is like a newspaper cartoon with characters heavily caricatured, the exception is scenes of brutality which are almost photorealistic. Its a chilling contrast. Onwards doesn't just say war is physically hell and leave it at that though. It actively depicts military discipline and the officers as brutal, and it ridicules and denounces the militaristic propaganda and the bizarre cult of death prominent amongst Japan's right wing.
A character actually asks a superior why the IJA aren't allowed to surrender after a hard fight, it can't be that surrendering is a form of weakness, the European and American soldiers are allowed to surrender and their winning the battle and the war. The only answer he gets is a smack in the mouth. The unit is eventually order on a suicide march against a superior opposition.
Capital
Capital is a two volume Manga that explains and illustrates various parts of Karl Marx's economic work Das Kapital. Not really much to say really, their is an linking story of a business that grows from a simple one man workshop into a massive cheese production factory. If you're having trouble with the original I recommend giving the manga a try.
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