Finding Emotional Honesty in Animation from a World Away

Japanese animation (or anime) is a wildly diverse storytelling medium – one that can produce stories ranging from tender children's fantasies to hard-edged adult science fiction to inspiring sports dramas.

It is perhaps that diversity that makes anime particularly popular among teenagers. There are few spaces in Western popular culture that seem as free to address the maturing emotions, increasing awareness of the world’s complexities, and constant self-exploration that accompany being a teenager. But anime often goes to those places.

This is the first year the Fine and Performing Arts Academy has offered a class focusing on anime as a meaningful pop-cultural and artistic medium. Throughout this semester, we have been watching a variety of works from throughout anime’s history. Works that foreground the emotional complexities of the teenage experience have easily been the most resonant. Films like Evangelion 1.0: You are (not) alone and series like Puella Magi Madoka Magica depict teenage life with a particular rawness – not by using the sensationalized partying and misadventures of Hollywood teens, but rather by using fantasy and science-fiction tropes as a conduit for intimate emotions like loneliness, disillusionment, and even depression.

These works have led to serious conversations in class. We have tackled emotional and complex topics like discrimination, gender roles, and generational trauma. At times, these conversations have revealed starkly differing world-views among students. These discussions haven’t always been easy or comfortable, but they have often felt vital.

Each unit in the class ends with students having a chance to try their own hand at a given genre of anime, with fascinating results. For example, many may recognize Magical Girl anime in the glittery, upbeat style of Sailor Moon, but students have taken the basic setup of “teenage girl gets magical powers” to far more personal places.

Allen Roberts (9th Grade) devised a world where people are only offered magical powers at their loneliest moments – when they’re most likely to ignore the life-threatening strings attached.

Izaiah Castro (9th Grade) told the story of a high schooler who is the only student at the school who doesn’t have magical powers.

Brandon Gaudet (9th Grade) wrote about a girl with the powers of a phoenix who is fighting to save the world from mass extinction.

Dean Reinoso (10th Grade) imagined a world where magical girls are born into noble families and are forced to defend the interests of their king – whether they want to or not.

The real-world parallels of these stories are unmistakable. For me, the way students have embraced such resonant themes has reaffirmed my faith in animation as a medium that can take the everyday and make it fantastical, and can take the elusive and make it vibrant. It also reaffirms something that often teenagers realize, but adults do not: the power of emotional honesty and self-expression.