Let’s face it. The overwhelming majority of Western TV and movie productions these days are worthlessly woke. But there still is the East!
Japanese anime is worth consideration, as long as the viewer avoids dubbed soundtracks; Japanese with English subtitles is the best way to enjoy the experience. By media standards, anime is cheap to make, thanks to a low frame rate, relatively crude images, and absence of over-paid stars. Consequently, there is great scope for low-budget creativity and invention. As a result, the best of anime is very good indeed – although sadly most anime falls far short of that target.
One anime which arguably sits on the bubble is “Spy X Family” – 37 approximately half hour episodes – set in a fictionalized Europe with 1950s technology, a decade or so after a devastating war. A fragile uneasy peace currently exists between East and West. The protagonist is a Western spy who lives under cover in the East as a hospital psychiatrist, trying to collect information to prevent war from breaking out again.
The spy is given the mission of investigating the potential war plans of an almost unapproachable Eastern politician. One of the few avenues to make contact may be through the politician’s young second son, who is attending an elite academy. For this mission, the spy will need a family.
He picks up a troublesome 5-year old girl from an orphanage, and then finds a shy city hall worker who is nervous about remaining unmarried in a society where single women are regarded with suspicion by the Secret Police. They agree to a chaste pretend marriage.
The woman does not know that her husband is a spy for the other side. The husband does not know that the woman moonlights as a fearsome contract killer. The little girl knows all of this because she has the ability to read minds – although she has learned to keep quiet about it. These deceptions provide the basis for a whole string of humorous incidents, aided & abetted by a wide range of other interesting characters. The plot wanders around into such areas as illegal high-stakes gambling on underground tennis tournaments. All good fun!
What marks this anime as above average is that various characters at times break into soliloquies on such topics as the nature of war, the purposes of spying, why people choose the lives they do, the difficulties of parenting. It is not Shakespeare, but it is not bad either.
As an aside, the TV series was sufficiently well-received in Japan to spawn a 2023 movie spin-off – “Spy X Family: Code White” – where the pretend family sets out to improve the little girl’s chances of winning a cooking competition at school and stumbles into a vicious military renegade’s plan to spark another war. The bigger movie budget translated into much better visuals, but the soliloquies were axed and the storyline falls short. Many cultures take guilty pleasure in bathroom humor, but did this movie really need an extended psychedelic paean to the Poop God … even if there was a plot hook to hang it on?
Yes, some anime is excellent. Only some!