Anime 102: Depictions of Humanity
Five anime asking big questions about mankind
Artist Imani Jones has watched Anime and read manga since she was a child. Here are her top picks from this genre, known for monsters and magic, which offers surprising insight into truths about humanity.
Attack on Titan
Attack on Titan's depiction of an Orwellian world is masterful - so is its character and story development. The show (and the manga it’s based on) twists and binds the concepts of "good" and "evil" until everything becomes stained gray. Throughout the series we see that war is a cycle of hatred with no beginning or end, and that revenge only re-starts the cycle.
The semiotics of the show ask huge questions: is war a generational curse of inner hatred? Do we truly make our own futures - or are our journeys predestined, each step we take individually serving something greater than we can know? Is God an alien? Or is this universe more biologically brilliant than we can fathom? Attack on Titan is amazing.
Ranking of Kings
This fantasy series is about a deaf and mute prince on a journey to become a king, and it shows the damage done by society’s regard of disabled people as “pitiful” or “without expectations”. The show demonstrates the importance of acceptance. We see not only how fickle human emotions can be, but how those fickle emotions can become deadly, especially when our generational pain becomes cyclical.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Following two brothers on a military-sponsored journey to restore their bodies through alchemy, this iconic anime muses on energy exchange - both scientifically and interpersonally. Played out in a post-industrial fantasy world where alchemy is a scientific practice, the show begs some esoteric questions: What would it mean for a human to become a God? How does humanity conceptualize “truth” and “sacrifice?” Making a mystical parallel to the real-world dehumanization that is militarization, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood asks what the consequences of this factory-scale sacrifice might be.
I recommend this scene wherein our hero confronts The Truth.
Hunter x Hunter
This long-running anime doesn’t center questions of humanity as one of its main themes. However, I’m citing this particular scene, which compares humanity to the Chimera Ants species we’re fighting.
Death Note
High school student Light Yagami finds a journal with the power to kill anyone whose name he writes in its pages. Using the titular “death note” to eliminate all criminals from society, a task force of detectives (led by the brilliant and mysterious “L”) seek to capture Light. And it only escalates from there.
This brilliant show questions humanity’s relationship to justice, truth, power, and good and evil.
(Editor’s note: this is Independent Study co-creator Pia Marchetti’s favorite anime.)
Follow Imani Jones at @champagne_mani_.