Audi­ences deserve bet­ter than Netflix’s Enter the Animé

For West­ern audi­ences look­ing to engage more with Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, a doc­u­men­tary about the cre­ators cur­rent­ly work­ing in the ani­mé indus­try may seem like a great addi­tion to the Net­flix cat­a­logue. It’s a shame, then, that Enter the Ani­mé – a doc­u­men­tary aimed at new­com­ers to the genre – has so lit­tle inter­est in the genre itself.

Net­flix has made no secret of its plans to become a home for ani­mé stream­ing, with a host of Net­flix Orig­i­nal series – B: The Begin­ning, Aggret­suko, Dev­il­man Cry­ba­by, and more – look­ing to draw on an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence that is increas­ing­ly well-versed in the genre. Not to men­tion its licens­ing of high-pro­file ani­mé series like Lit­tle Witch Acad­e­mia, Attack on Titan, or the sem­i­nal Neon Gen­e­sis Evangelion.

Even a decade or so ago, Japan­ese ani­mé was very hard to get hold of in West­ern ter­ri­to­ries – as Can­non Busters cre­ator LeSean Thomas puts it in Enter the Ani­mé, any­one watch­ing ani­mé in the ​’80s was prob­a­bly doing so via boot­leg VHS tapes. The fact that so much of it is now eas­i­ly streamed through plat­forms such as Net­flix, Crunchy­roll, or Hulu is cer­tain­ly some­thing to be cel­e­brat­ed, but that doesn’t mean the plat­forms them­selves are doing a good job of spread­ing the word.

Enter the Ani­mé is one of the most half-heart­ed and dis­in­ter­est­ed doc­u­men­taries ever to grace the ser­vice. It opens with its direc­tor, Alexa Buruno­va, admit­ting they knew lit­tle to noth­ing on the top­ic before Net­flix com­mis­sioned them to research it, lit­er­al­ly googling ​“what is ani­mé?” in the documentary’s first few minutes.

But despite the search engines at Burunova’s dis­pos­al, his project nev­er attempts to define its sub­ject mat­ter, or even begin to ques­tion the tokenis­tic way it breezes through the streets of Tokyo, exclaim­ing at a cul­ture it lacks any basic aware­ness of – show­ing shot after shot of pos­ing cos­play­ers while brush­ing off Japan­ese fan cul­ture as ​“crazy”. The first quar­ter of the doc­u­men­tary is also over before a Japan­ese cre­ator even appears onscreen.

There’s no men­tion of ani­mé series that view­ers might have already know, which could serve as an entry point to the dis­cus­sion – say, Drag­on Ball, or Attack on Titan, or Full­met­al Alchemist. It’s only at the end cred­its the rea­son­ing becomes clear: ​“All ani­mé titles cov­ered in the doc­u­men­tary are avail­able and now stream­ing on Net­flix”. But Enter the Ani­mé is actu­al­ly even more selec­tive than that, not both­er­ing to men­tion a sin­gle TV series that isn’t pro­duced by Net­flix itself. (There’s a 10-minute tan­gent on a con­cert per­former who sings the Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion theme song, but the show itself is some­how nev­er named.)

That’s not to put down the out­put of these Net­flix-asso­ci­at­ed cre­ators – includ­ing Can­non Busters’ LeSean Thomas, Castlevania’s Adi Shankar, and B: The Begin­ning pro­duc­er Rui Kuro­ki (who worked on the icon­ic ani­mé sequence in Kill Bill: Vol­ume One). But even those inter­viewed are rou­tine­ly asked irrel­e­vant ques­tions about their pets or favourite foods, rather than how their shows get made. There’s lit­tle inter­est in what makes ani­mé ani­mé, how larg­er West­ern audi­ences are influ­enc­ing the kind of con­tent being cre­at­ed, or the place that US cre­atives have in the industry.

At worst, Enter the Ani­mé is two-fin­gered salute to Net­flix sub­scribers who want­ed to learn more about Japan­ese ani­ma­tion. At best, it’s an insuf­fer­able hol­i­day blog. Both audi­ences and ani­mé cre­ators deserve bet­ter than this – and if Net­flix wants to be a home for ani­mé going for­ward, it needs to pay the genre a lot more attention.