Anyone else notice this with Japanese anime? Less so with anime produced in collaboration with a Western media company or anime they know will be heavily viewed in the West like Pokemon, but full-on Japanese anime, produced solely in Japan, for Japan. Japanese characters are obviously depicted accurately, white characters are depicted fine too and more often than not are just interchangeable with Japanese characters. But any darker skinned characters… oh god. Between endless stereotypes and straight up weirdness when you have a person of colour on screen, from my experience, if there’s a dark skinned character in an anime, more often than not it’s unwatchable because you’ll smash your TV if you watch it. Seriously, there are anime produced in the 2010s/20s that feel like Disney cartoons from the 30s! For fuck sake sometimes they even depict Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian characters horribly! For a culture that gets super offended if other people use stereotypes of them, they’re horrible at reasonable depictions of other cultures. And for a genre that consistently deals with aliens and spirits and talking animals and magical creatures, those things seem to be depicted as more human than darker skinned actual humans.

So that being said, are there any anime that break this trend? Anyone care to recommend any anime you like that has a major character who is a person of colour, that doesn’t screw it up?

Nothing sexual or suggestive either please, definitely not looking for that kind of anime.

  • loathesome dongeater
    link
    22 years ago

    Yeah it got very anti-capitalist in the middle. After that they kinda just threw that premise into the trash and transcended into godhood which is pretty lame.