Grind Your Teeth

childhood homes (and why we hate them) - after a decade, you return home.

return - a text-based horror game about coming home.

singing from the far side of the hill - about a trans woman, homeless after a bad breakup, who rents a stranger's spare room. it's a decision she comes to regret.

anatomy - Explore a suburban house, collect cassette tapes, study the physiology of domestic architecture.

leave house - leave house

the open house - We at Northtree Real Estate (in partnership with Optix Dynamix Labs) are proud to present our new, state-of-the-art, open house simulator!  Come and take a quick tour of 15615 Hollow Oak Lane, a familiar and comfortable showcase home in one of our premier developments!

what girls do in the dark - This little game is based off one of the greatest fears they had as a teenage girl: showing up late to a stranger's slumber party.

unbecoming - a sonically-textured interactive horror fiction exploring cycles of trauma and unspeakable forces of nature in a mythic rural American landscape.

13 laurel road - an interactive fiction game about the relationships we have with places and reconciling with trauma. You play as a young man named Noah who has been tasked with picking up some things from his cousin’s old house.

domvs - a gothic mystery game in which you rely on your environment to uncover the truth.

flesh, blood, & concrete - you find yourself in a vast, empty apartment complex.

i am still here - a short, unconventional ghost story and vignette reflecting on the end of a long lockdown.

Haha that's a question.

I'll focus on nationalism rather than trying to get into, say, gender politics here, since that's the accusation that most seems to follow Anno around.

Anno's politics are... hard to pin down from his work alone, I think. He's like... a prototypical case of that generation of 'apolitical' otaku that followed after the Anpo generation, with Eva pretty much the definitive statement of the 90s psychological turn. But that said... I can definitely see the argument that there are nationalist themes in some of his works like Gunbuster, though I definitely don't buy every reading in this series (lots of dubious kanji reading). He definitely has that otaku fascination with war machinery and war media (apparently he's a big fan of The Battle for Okinawa and watched it over 100 times), which can easily blend into imperialist ideology.

But there's complications here. For example, the Animekritik series cites the setting of Gunbuster in Okinawa as something formative to the nationalist ideology they are trying to illustrate - in part in relation to the ongoing controversy over American military bases in Okinawa. Anno has at least been on record as saying he's disinterested in Western culture, and I can see the reading of Jung-Freud as an external Other who is shown up by the Japanese girls, somehow simultaneously representing the USSR, Europe and the States. But anti-Americanism in Japan can come in both left and right wing flavours (c.f. Anpo). Communists want the Americans out too! Portraying Okinawa as a military training camp in a Japan-led military coalition certainly comes across as a more nationalist take on that whole matter, but I feel like it's got about the same level of serious nationalist commitment as Doctor Who putting random British people all over space.

When Gainax has played around with nationalist imagery it's usually been in a kind of ironic sendup way - see Ash's writeup about the Aikoku Sentai Dai Nippon controversy, in which Daicon Film staff were disdainful at the accusation that their goofy toku film reflected a genuine nationalist sentiment. While Imaishi takes it further, a lot of Anno's work is also about playfully reappropriating past works. In Anno's case a lot of that is classic tokusatsu, Ultraman in particular, and also Leiji Matsumoto's scifi, notably Space Battleship Yamato, which, well... you know the deal there lol. But it's not so simple to go from that to 'Anno is a nationalist'.

Eva doesn't tend to attract these accusations, but I recall the controversy came back around with Shin Godzilla, though to my mind it's hard to find a straightforwardly nationalist reading of that movie. (It's a film about the experience of the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, and it's critical of Japan's bureaucracy, but equally one where the JSDF repeatedly get their shit handed to them and civilian infrastructure is what actually stops Godzilla - not to mention Godzilla is painted as quite a tragic figure here!) It all feels pretty tenuous.

I haven't seen as many of Anno's live action films as I'd like, so I can't comment as much on the more recent Shin films, Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu etc. And it's always possible for subtler allusions to slip by the anglophone viewer. Still, I don't personally think Anno's post-Gunbuster work is particularly nationalist in outlook. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of him favouring, say, war crime denial, anti-Korean sentiment, remilitarisation, etc etc. - he's definitely not as dubious a figure as someone like Hajime Isayama. But it's not like, anti-nationalist either! It's just kind of hard to read in those terms.

So I lean towards your second option, I'm not convinced he's a nationalist or particularly right wing. He happily associates with Hayao Miyazaki, who's definitely not a right wing guy. But Anno'll also let hilariously cooked stuff like whatever On A Gloomy Night was supposed to be into the Animator Expo. So I don't think he's particularly left wing either, he's no Ikuni! But Anno's fiction is very individual focused, full of psychoanalytic themes and internal conflict. He can vividly portray trauma and complex power dynamics. There's a lot to appreciate in works like Eva from a left-wing angle. I don't really know why this association of nationalism follows him around.

-- I am on the record somewhere as a "liberal Gunbuster" truther, so no surprise here from me, but yeah I think the Gunbuster case tends to be overblown and is imo the source for most of the "right wing" discourse. It's a bit tough for westerners to see the ways Japan sees WW2; apocalyptic in outcome but typical in stakes. Using iconography from Ghengis Khan or Napoleon is fine for us, because while awful human beings it was in that typical "war is always awful" way, it isn't a poisoned well. WW2 is not that for us, but the typical Japanese person is likely to see it through that kind of lens. As such all the Gunbuster homages to the Battle of Okinawa, Japan annexing Hawaii, etc, are all just the touches of the genre of Space Opera and military otaku things. Putting a space lesbian in a steampunk Napoleon uniform a la modern YA books doesn't imply the author endorses the Confederation of the Rhine or anything; and meanwhile Gunbuster's actual setting is UN-on-Steroids international liberalism, it is not apologia for the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The imagery just doesn't carry the same implications. (IMO this perception of WW2 is wrong, Japan was in fact atypically awful? And this is tied up with a whole bunch of cultural-political stuff in Japan. But Anno/Gainax as creators aren't water-carriers for all of that, just downstream of it)

-- Anno is definitely in that post-Anpo "apolitical otaku" generation, but I think if you move a bit past the left-right binary you can find a lot of politics in there. They are in a way "anti-left" in the sense of wanting to remove what they see as overbearing political content from media, but it isn't just so they can play with their toys in peace. Anno has lost faith in politics as a solution to societal problems:

--In Gundam, the main character, Amuro Ray, has a clear enemy and a clear political structure that encourages his growth, but "Eva" doesn't have that. Anno: From a generational point of view, I myself don't have that concept anymore. I don't trust politics or society. I can't create works that adopt what is not there.

(Interview: STUDIO VOICE October 1996)

“…For [my generation, after the political failures of the previous], there was nothing to speak of but what was within the ‘magic box’ (television). It’s pathetic, but we had no other options. I think admitting that is a start.”

(A Dream World That Hasn't Forfeited its Goal, ~August 1996)

And you see more of this whenever he discusses things like the Aum Shinrikyo cult/Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks (which occurred during the airing of Eva); he will see them as case of extreme involution, obsession with the self & disconnected from society; a problem that political orgs are now incapable of fixing or addressing. And otaku are a calmer-but-still-troubled side of that same coin, a response to capital-M Modernity. That is a deeply political stance, right? It just isn't one that lends itself to voting for this or that party.

This was a pretty big ~vibe in the 90's all over, honestly, and at the time I would say it was still pretty left coded? But it had its sources on the right as well (horseshoe theory continuing to bat a hundred), and fell out of favor in the West at least - idk maybe something happened in American in the 2000's to distract from the ennui, couldn't say. It lasted longer in Japan, and I think you can trace an arc from many anime creators being actively political in the 1970's/1980's, to a new gen being intentionally anti-political as its own politics in the 1980's-1990's, to anime being dominated by truly apolitical creators starting in the 2000's. Anno is part of that middle wave. But it is all by degrees of course.

-- Finally; Anno is in his mid-60's, his politics have changed! He definitely doesn't discuss them that much - but like you can't look at Shin Godzilla and say "yeah this guy has no thoughts on the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster", its a film clearly dealing with the bureaucratic limitations of any system being able to "contain" the mess of reality. He didn't have those opinions before because Fukushima hadn't happened. I know this one quote from these rountables Anno did with a bunch of high school students during the production of Kare Kano? Which, btw, were printed with this logo:

"Anno Hideaki X Highschool Boys & Girls" lovely, 10 out of 10, no notes. But anyway, he goes off at one point about the US & Japan and international relations.

Anno: Asia is where it’s at now. We’d best get in good with our neighbors. The previous generation is with America. Those currently in their 50’s typically think in terms of America. In reaction to losing the War to America, they all want to live the American lifestyle. Like all going to Europe, that sort of thing.

And idk I bet that the past 20+ years of declining relations with and rising bellicosity from China has soured him on this! I don't have a money quote, but i'd be shocked if he stands by this off-hand comment from the 90's. People do this a lot, you see an interview with someone, they say something, Miyazaki will tell you Humanity is Doomed or some shit, and that becomes their canon opinion. Which is understandable because it's printed, but maybe they were just shooting the shit, and maybe they believed for ~5 years or something. Maybe they never believed it, who knows right? They are artists, not politicians or academics, so they aren't normally in the business of making their political evolutions robustly explicit. And this generation of creators in Japan loved to run their mouths.

So I think, like many people, you can't say Anno over the course of ~50 years of having opinions on politics, is going to fit on one side or the other that neatly.

I think a lot of JP creators nowadays refuse to be drawn on political subjects in interviews, and interviewers nowadays often edge around political topics even when very relevant to the work, but yeah Anno kind of predates that. Still, we get a pretty scattered picture depending on what gets translated, and of course people can run a mile with even a single poorly translated interview quote (look at what has been said about Gen Urobuchi). And for Anno, I'm not aware of a Starting Point-style compilation of all the interviews and magazine articles he's ever written - I'd love to have one lol. But, accepting that limitation, beyond the general sense of disillusionment towards institutions expressed in some of those quotes, I don't get the impression he's particularly ideological. I think that 'anti-politics' makes sense as a frame, at least for the 90s.

In my personal opinion the key to understanding a lot of the ideological substance of Anno’s work is examining his admiration for Tony Scott’s TOP GUN, which was an admitted inspiration for GUNBUSTER. Scott’s films (and those of his longtime production partner, Jerry Bruckheimer) dealt heavily with the tension between individualism and service to the state, and the genius of TOP GUN is its synthesis of both: the “maverick” Tom Cruise, after struggling against the system, attains his ultimate self-actualization by giving everything to the Navy and finding his place among his comrades-in-arms, fighting America’s wars not for ideology but a subtle cocktail of his own ego and loyalty to the group (his unit, flag, etc.). This “liberal nationalism”, this constantly navigated tension of being both an individual against the system and the loyal agent of its preservation, has been the unifying theme of “apolitical” conservative ideology in America since the Reagan era, which Scott and Bruckheimer more than anyone have crystallized and exported to the world through cinema. Despite Anno’s supposed disdain for the West, once you see the thematic similarities between his work and Scott’s - the romanticism of the police, military and patriotism overlapping with the private psychodrama of individuals within the system struggling to self-actualize - I think a lot falls into place. (Note how much both Scott and Anno despise inefficient bureaucracies and regulations that keep their heroes from getting shit done.)

Other misc. points on which I’d push back against overlooking Anno’s conservative sympathies:

- SHIN GODZILLA is actually a lot less hostile in its portrayal of American influence than much of Japanese pop culture: of course the American military fails to contain Godzilla and brave representatives of the Japanese state need to answer the threat, but the film portrays the Americans more as crude and bumbling than malevolent, and some of them are sympathetic allies. Ultimately it’s the UN, not the US, that threatens to nuke Japan. (!!!) Compare this to basically any anime by Kenji Kamiyama (on the left) or Ichiro Itano (on the right) where American scheming is the heart of all evil and Japanese-American government employees are depicted as sniveling traitors.

- GUNBUSTER’s vision of a reconstituted Japanese empire is not exactly the same as DOCTOR WHO depicting British people all over space - it’d be more like if DOCTOR WHO specifically depicted British people in charge of India, Ireland or Hong Kong in the future. Okinawa and Hawaii aren’t just random locations, they’re places Imperial Japan actively sought to colonize and deployed extreme violence in pursuit of that. So writing a sci-fi future setting where a quasi-imperialist Japan has turned both of these places into Japanese military bases is, uhhh, a pretty distinct statement. If anything I’d agree that Anno’s beliefs seem to have moderated since his younger years, of which his less hostile perspective on America may be an indicator.

- Being friends with Miyazaki doesn’t tell you anything lol. Miyazaki has no issue befriending literal Nazis so long as they both love tanks - not even getting into the weird contradictions in Miyazaki the supposed leftist’s reactionary anti-modernity schtick or troubling romanticism/softballing of imperial Japan, he clearly prizes shared aesthetic interests more than shared ideology in selecting his friends.

Toshiro Mifune, April 1, 1920 – December 24, 1997.