project-two-five-zero-one

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Looks pretty raw

Raw Danger! [2007] Irem - PlayStation 2

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Valentine Hugo, Paysage surréaliste, 1938, oil on panel

[project-two-five-zero-one]

[project-two-five-zero-one]

[project-two-five-zero-one]

The Fox by Leo Dillon (1967)

[project-two-five-zero-one]

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Astronaut Barbie

#brbchasingdreams

prints | tutorials | my artbook

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Mi-Young Choi (Korean, b. 1971, South Korea, based London, England) - Enlightenment, 2013, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Hi, it's been a while because I forgot tumblr

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Donkey Kong-themed "relationship tip for gamers" posted on Nintendo's official Facebook account in 2013.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source

[project-two-five-zero-one]

And then after the SKR protagonist martyrs himself for mercy and is resurrected he and his disciple decide that actually what they should do is work hand in hand with the cops from now on. It is a very pro-cop film lol. SHOCKER may reference New Age cults but it’s also clearly expressed as a utopian collectivist ideology, which in Anno’s world consistently makes you a villain. (Consider also Anno’s handpicked translator “updating” Evangelion’s script to clarify that the terrorists at the periphery of the plot are leftists, clearly meant to invoke the Maoist groups whose violent activity shook the country during Anno’s youth.)

I strongly recommend anyone curious about how Japanese right-wingers think and how they’ve influenced Japanese pop culture check out Ichiro Itano’s ANGEL COP - preferably in its uncensored original Japanese, which clearly lays out the fascist and antisemitic ideology that the famously campy English dub toned down. It was released at the height of the OVA boom and clearly influenced a generation of Japanese creatives, including Anno. It’s the earliest anime I’ve seen to use the plotline of cop/soldier heroes having to battle their own government after being framed by (((foreign conspirators))), which incidentally is also the plot of END OF EVANGELION (whose battle sequences were *also* influenced by Anno’s favorite pro-imperialist war film, THE BATTLE OF OKINAWA). Before that it’s about gritty cop protagonists just straight up torturing and killing Maoist terror cells transparently modeled after the Japanese Red Army and learning how mercy gets you killed.

Again, not saying Anno necessarily believes what these unabashedly, propagandistically right-wing filmmakers he admires and emulates believe, but it’s context worth taking into account!

Do you think Hideaki Anno is right-wing or is it too difficult to tell from his works?

Haha that's a question.

I'll focus on nationalism rather than trying to get into, say, gender politics here, since that's the accusation that most seems to follow Anno around.

Anno's politics are... hard to pin down from his work alone, I think. He's like... a prototypical case of that generation of 'apolitical' otaku that followed after the Anpo generation, with Eva pretty much the definitive statement of the 90s psychological turn. But that said... I can definitely see the argument that there are nationalist themes in some of his works like Gunbuster, though I definitely don't buy every reading in this series (lots of dubious kanji reading). He definitely has that otaku fascination with war machinery and war media (apparently he's a big fan of The Battle for Okinawa and watched it over 100 times), which can easily blend into imperialist ideology.

But there's complications here. For example, the Animekritik series cites the setting of Gunbuster in Okinawa as something formative to the nationalist ideology they are trying to illustrate - in part in relation to the ongoing controversy over American military bases in Okinawa. Anno has at least been on record as saying he's disinterested in Western culture, and I can see the reading of Jung-Freud as an external Other who is shown up by the Japanese girls, somehow simultaneously representing the USSR, Europe and the States. But anti-Americanism in Japan can come in both left and right wing flavours (c.f. Anpo). Communists want the Americans out too! Portraying Okinawa as a military training camp in a Japan-led military coalition certainly comes across as a more nationalist take on that whole matter, but I feel like it's got about the same level of serious nationalist commitment as Doctor Who putting random British people all over space.

When Gainax has played around with nationalist imagery it's usually been in a kind of ironic sendup way - see Ash's writeup about the Aikoku Sentai Dai Nippon controversy, in which Daicon Film staff were disdainful at the accusation that their goofy toku film reflected a genuine nationalist sentiment. While Imaishi takes it further, a lot of Anno's work is also about playfully reappropriating past works. In Anno's case a lot of that is classic tokusatsu, Ultraman in particular, and also Leiji Matsumoto's scifi, notably Space Battleship Yamato, which, well... you know the deal there lol. But it's not so simple to go from that to 'Anno is a nationalist'.

Eva doesn't tend to attract these accusations, but I recall the controversy came back around with Shin Godzilla, though to my mind it's hard to find a straightforwardly nationalist reading of that movie. (It's a film about the experience of the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, and it's critical of Japan's bureaucracy, but equally one where the JSDF repeatedly get their shit handed to them and civilian infrastructure is what actually stops Godzilla - not to mention Godzilla is painted as quite a tragic figure here!) It all feels pretty tenuous.

I haven't seen as many of Anno's live action films as I'd like, so I can't comment as much on the more recent Shin films, Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu etc. And it's always possible for subtler allusions to slip by the anglophone viewer. Still, I don't personally think Anno's post-Gunbuster work is particularly nationalist in outlook. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of him favouring, say, war crime denial, anti-Korean sentiment, remilitarisation, etc etc. - he's definitely not as dubious a figure as someone like Hajime Isayama. But it's not like, anti-nationalist either! It's just kind of hard to read in those terms.

So I lean towards your second option, I'm not convinced he's a nationalist or particularly right wing. He happily associates with Hayao Miyazaki, who's definitely not a right wing guy. But Anno'll also let hilariously cooked stuff like whatever On A Gloomy Night was supposed to be into the Animator Expo. So I don't think he's particularly left wing either, he's no Ikuni! But Anno's fiction is very individual focused, full of psychoanalytic themes and internal conflict. He can vividly portray trauma and complex power dynamics. There's a lot to appreciate in works like Eva from a left-wing angle. I don't really know why this association of nationalism follows him around.

Idk, maybe there's a bunch of interviews I'm missing! Presumably you have a reason for asking this question...

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Others have pointed this out in the comments but I would emphasize that SHIN KAMEN RIDER in particular is not only emphatically pro-cop but concludes that A) cops (which the film treats as synecdoches of the Japanese state generally) should be more willing to use their guns and B) radicals are sick and sad people who should fix themselves instead of trying to fix society. I don’t think Anno’s a hate-filled foaming-at-the-mouth fascist (and he’s clearly sympathetic to women and queer people) but the overwhelming evidence paints him as *conservative* in ways that fully align with mainstream center-right parties in the developed world.

In my personal opinion the key to understanding a lot of the ideological substance of Anno’s work is examining his admiration for Tony Scott’s TOP GUN, which was an admitted inspiration for GUNBUSTER. Scott’s films (and those of his longtime production partner, Jerry Bruckheimer) dealt heavily with the tension between individualism and service to the state, and the genius of TOP GUN is its synthesis of both: the “maverick” Tom Cruise, after struggling against the system, attains his ultimate self-actualization by giving everything to the Navy and finding his place among his comrades-in-arms, fighting America’s wars not for ideology but a subtle cocktail of his own ego and loyalty to the group (his unit, flag, etc.). This “liberal nationalism”, this constantly navigated tension of being both an individual against the system and the loyal agent of its preservation, has been the unifying theme of “apolitical” conservative ideology in America since the Reagan era, which Scott and Bruckheimer more than anyone have crystallized and exported to the world through cinema. Despite Anno’s supposed disdain for the West, once you see the thematic similarities between his work and Scott’s - the romanticism of the police, military and patriotism overlapping with the private psychodrama of individuals within the system struggling to self-actualize - I think a lot falls into place. (Note how much both Scott and Anno despise inefficient bureaucracies and regulations that keep their heroes from getting shit done.)

Other misc. points on which I’d push back against overlooking Anno’s conservative sympathies:

- SHIN GODZILLA is actually a lot less hostile in its portrayal of American influence than much of Japanese pop culture: of course the American military fails to contain Godzilla and brave representatives of the Japanese state need to answer the threat, but the film portrays the Americans more as crude and bumbling than malevolent, and some of them are sympathetic allies. Ultimately it’s the UN, not the US, that threatens to nuke Japan. (!!!) Compare this to basically any anime by Kenji Kamiyama (on the left) or Ichiro Itano (on the right) where American scheming is the heart of all evil and Japanese-American government employees are depicted as sniveling traitors.

- GUNBUSTER’s vision of a reconstituted Japanese empire is not exactly the same as DOCTOR WHO depicting British people all over space - it’d be more like if DOCTOR WHO specifically depicted British people in charge of India, Ireland or Hong Kong in the future. Okinawa and Hawaii aren’t just random locations, they’re places Imperial Japan actively sought to colonize and deployed extreme violence in pursuit of that. So writing a sci-fi future setting where a quasi-imperialist Japan has turned both of these places into Japanese military bases is, uhhh, a pretty distinct statement. If anything I’d agree that Anno’s beliefs seem to have moderated since his younger years, of which his less hostile perspective on America may be an indicator.

- Being friends with Miyazaki doesn’t tell you anything lol. Miyazaki has no issue befriending literal Nazis so long as they both love tanks - not even getting into the weird contradictions in Miyazaki the supposed leftist’s reactionary anti-modernity schtick or troubling romanticism/softballing of imperial Japan, he clearly prizes shared aesthetic interests more than shared ideology in selecting his friends.

Obviously I love (most of) Hideaki Anno’s work, I think he’s a genius, but I also think a lot of his liberal and especially leftist Western fans are kidding themselves about his political leanings. He may not be an outspoken slogan-spouting cliche, but four decades’ worth of circumstantial evidence paint a reasonably clear picture of his sympathies imo. (Keep in mind also, most “apolitical”/“anti-political” people are de facto conservative.)

Do you think Hideaki Anno is right-wing or is it too difficult to tell from his works?

Haha that's a question.

I'll focus on nationalism rather than trying to get into, say, gender politics here, since that's the accusation that most seems to follow Anno around.

Anno's politics are... hard to pin down from his work alone, I think. He's like... a prototypical case of that generation of 'apolitical' otaku that followed after the Anpo generation, with Eva pretty much the definitive statement of the 90s psychological turn. But that said... I can definitely see the argument that there are nationalist themes in some of his works like Gunbuster, though I definitely don't buy every reading in this series (lots of dubious kanji reading). He definitely has that otaku fascination with war machinery and war media (apparently he's a big fan of The Battle for Okinawa and watched it over 100 times), which can easily blend into imperialist ideology.

But there's complications here. For example, the Animekritik series cites the setting of Gunbuster in Okinawa as something formative to the nationalist ideology they are trying to illustrate - in part in relation to the ongoing controversy over American military bases in Okinawa. Anno has at least been on record as saying he's disinterested in Western culture, and I can see the reading of Jung-Freud as an external Other who is shown up by the Japanese girls, somehow simultaneously representing the USSR, Europe and the States. But anti-Americanism in Japan can come in both left and right wing flavours (c.f. Anpo). Communists want the Americans out too! Portraying Okinawa as a military training camp in a Japan-led military coalition certainly comes across as a more nationalist take on that whole matter, but I feel like it's got about the same level of serious nationalist commitment as Doctor Who putting random British people all over space.

When Gainax has played around with nationalist imagery it's usually been in a kind of ironic sendup way - see Ash's writeup about the Aikoku Sentai Dai Nippon controversy, in which Daicon Film staff were disdainful at the accusation that their goofy toku film reflected a genuine nationalist sentiment. While Imaishi takes it further, a lot of Anno's work is also about playfully reappropriating past works. In Anno's case a lot of that is classic tokusatsu, Ultraman in particular, and also Leiji Matsumoto's scifi, notably Space Battleship Yamato, which, well... you know the deal there lol. But it's not so simple to go from that to 'Anno is a nationalist'.

Eva doesn't tend to attract these accusations, but I recall the controversy came back around with Shin Godzilla, though to my mind it's hard to find a straightforwardly nationalist reading of that movie. (It's a film about the experience of the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, and it's critical of Japan's bureaucracy, but equally one where the JSDF repeatedly get their shit handed to them and civilian infrastructure is what actually stops Godzilla - not to mention Godzilla is painted as quite a tragic figure here!) It all feels pretty tenuous.

I haven't seen as many of Anno's live action films as I'd like, so I can't comment as much on the more recent Shin films, Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu etc. And it's always possible for subtler allusions to slip by the anglophone viewer. Still, I don't personally think Anno's post-Gunbuster work is particularly nationalist in outlook. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of him favouring, say, war crime denial, anti-Korean sentiment, remilitarisation, etc etc. - he's definitely not as dubious a figure as someone like Hajime Isayama. But it's not like, anti-nationalist either! It's just kind of hard to read in those terms.

So I lean towards your second option, I'm not convinced he's a nationalist or particularly right wing. He happily associates with Hayao Miyazaki, who's definitely not a right wing guy. But Anno'll also let hilariously cooked stuff like whatever On A Gloomy Night was supposed to be into the Animator Expo. So I don't think he's particularly left wing either, he's no Ikuni! But Anno's fiction is very individual focused, full of psychoanalytic themes and internal conflict. He can vividly portray trauma and complex power dynamics. There's a lot to appreciate in works like Eva from a left-wing angle. I don't really know why this association of nationalism follows him around.

Idk, maybe there's a bunch of interviews I'm missing! Presumably you have a reason for asking this question...

[project-two-five-zero-one]

salmonberry blossoms

[project-two-five-zero-one]

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Ben Shahn     Lower East Side, New York City     1936

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Jewish amulet for a married couple with an inscription in Judeo-Persian, Iran, ca. 1900

[project-two-five-zero-one]

"Jew with a basket", 1887, by Jozef Pankiewicz