Why Netflix Should Be Ashamed of 'Enter The Anime'
Anime is art. There’s no question about it. It literally is art; and some people will never be able to see the full picture.
I would first like to start this off by saying I mean no disrespect to any of the creatives behind the 'Enter The Anime' documentary. I do understand that it is a Netflix Special, and direction can get skewed when your employer is a company as large as Netflix. In fact, I don’t even want to touch on the things said in the documentary; rather I would like to expound on the things it did not do.
In the opening minutes, it’s obvious that Alex Burunova—our director—knows nothing of anime. We know this because it’s explicitly said so. This documentary is meant to show her journey across the medium, to find what anime truly is. This brings us the title, “Enter The Anime.”
Anime is an art form that has not been fully accepted by Western culture. This is not to say that every person in the West needs to start Naruto ASAP, but it’s a fair point to say that many anime fans outside of Japan discover anime. We find anime, and as a person in America, I found it. The same could be said about Burunova. On her quest, she starts by Googling to find her definition of anime. Not too far off of what people would do this day in age.
The first individuals interviewed for this documentary understand their place in the anime world. One even says that he feels more like a guest, as opposed to being an outsider. My gripe is with the way that 'Enter The Anime' handles this information. The creators interviewed do not represent Japanese anime. They should have been examples of how anime has influenced their Western animated shows. Sure, maybe that was the intention behind their interviews, but in the doc, it comes across like they represent the true spirit of anime.
This gives the sense that the documentary only wants to look at anime on the surface level. By this I mean anime art style. This is pretty much the entirety of the documentary. Paired with some strange directorial choices in its editing and “quippy” commentary, 'Enter The Anime' enters nothing. Except it tries to sensationalize anime as this medium that is violent, bloody, and the exact “opposite” of day to day Japanese culture.
It is worth noting there are anime that exist featuring blood and gore, but a lot of the time, that blood and gore goes deeper than just the artwork. 'Enter The Anime' questions how stories of this nature can come from such a reserved society. Rather than actually answering that question, Burunova decides to throw more interviews in the mix. Aside from this doc being a total advertisement for Netflix titles, it does absolutely nothing for the people watching it. A person watching this that knows nothing about anime, will leave after 58 minutes and tell you that anime is as strange as they thought it was.
Burunova even says in an interview with animenewsnetwork that the documentary is targeted at people “who are fresh to the genre.” She also mentions that some long-time fans might not like it because it touches on “basic knowledge.” Basic knowledge about the titles featured on the platform? Or basic knowledge about anime in general? If this documentary took me on a journey where Burunova discovers her anime definition by learning the creative process from manga to adaptation, that would have sufficed. What about the major companies that produce anime? Where was Ghibli? What about Miyazaki and the way many regard him as one of the greatest minds in film and anime alike? Where was the slice of life? What about the different types of anime that exist within the medium? Any of those could go under the umbrella as “common anime knowledge,” but it’s not even touched on.
There are many ways 'Enter The Anime' could have been better. I could go on YouTube and find a video that educated me more about anime than this documentary. It’s like saying all K-Pop is, is just a bunch of hormonal 13 year old girls waiting to touch their favorite idols at the airport. It’s true to some extent, but K-Pop goes so much deeper than what people see on the surface.
I’m disappointed because I was actually excited to see a documentary about one of my favorite things. I started watching anime more frequently because of streaming services like Netflix. It’s clear that Netflix has become a competitor in the anime streaming wars, and they have an impressive catalog of anime under their belt. Not to mention, many of the Netflix original anime is also very well received. It’s just sad to see a company with such a reputation release a documentary that is not accurate with its intention and direction. Which begs the question, how could they have let this be released?
Being as respectively critical as I can be, Netflix is straight up wrong for this one.
Fans and new fans alike deserve something better than what was received. Let’s strip away the mentality that Asian cultures are strange, and let’s tell people why and how they’re different. Let’s show people how manga becomes anime, and how those creators create. Educate me on the way the ending of WWII had an effect on Japanese culture. Tell me about shōnen and magical girls. Then maybe at the end, Netflix can plug in their two cents about how they are bringing anime to the streaming world. Then maybe we can truly “enter the anime.”