Enter the Anime is the latest documentary to show up on my Netflix queue and as an Asian American, who grew up on shows like Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, and One Piece, I was interested in learning more about anime and how it is more and more so, being seen as a legitimate film presence in the West and is even becoming a topic of study.  I was excited to say the least. That is, until the documentary started rolling. From the second it opened, the filmmaker and host, Alex Burunova, admits that she knows nothing about anime (If a documentary's goal is to educate people, why have a host that doesn't know anything about the subject?) and the documentary continues to go on to interview Castlevania's Adi Shankar and Cannon Buster's Lesean Thomas. While I appreciated the documentary's decision to highlight anime's inclusivity, I thought it was odd that within the first 10 minutes of a one-hour documentary, not a single person from the country of anime's origin had even spoke.

But what made it worse was Burunova's ignorant and often racist commentary throughout the whole documentary. She participated in a centuries-old tradition of exoticizing and orientilizing a country she admitted she knew nothing about. (The documentary even seems to poke fun at how little she knows with her failed attempts at Japanese.) Even the shots Burunova chose to show of Japan played into tired tropes of Western understanding of Japan - crowded streets, girls dressed up as maids, Harajuku fashion, and most of all the foreignness of it. I understand that this documentary was one big push for Netflix to promote its own animes and therefore only included animes that it has the rights over or labels as Netflix originals, but damn, did Burunova really have to highlight only anime's more violent storylines? (Even when she included Aggretsuko, she seemed to focus in on the anger of the show rather than its relatability and humor.) For a documentary that claimed to be an introduction to anime, how is there no mention of anime staples like the whole magical girl genre or Studio Ghibli? There was no analysis as well on some of the most popular animes of all time: Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, etc. 

Additionally, it was interesting that in a one-hour documentary (a relatively short time frame to cover a subject as vast as the world of anime), Burunova attempted to cover Tokyo's street fashion and spent time quickly going over lolita fashion and others. Her basic takeaway was that all these sub-cultures existed because of anime instead of looking at it and realizing that maybe anime and fashion were results of the Japanese mindset/culture. It also seems almost irresponsible (and proof that the narrator was incompetent) that she would have short clips on fashion in a documentary about anime without covering cosplay at all.

What came across strongly throughout the whole film was Burunova's obvious lack of knowledge and her distaste for anime, which she viewed as violent, disturbing, etc. She even said during one of her unnecessary monologues (why a documentary needs non-informational monologues is beyond me) that she was starting to regret coming to Japan. What it boils down to is that Netflix just released a one hour commercial for their animes/anime influenced cartoons directed by an ignorant individual under the guise of a documentary. This is whitesplaining at its finest.