Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Enter the Anime’ on Netflix, a Netflix-produced Documentary About How Great Netflix Anime Is

In case you haven’t noticed how amazing Netflix’s anime content is, Netflix has produced Enter the Anime to tell us how amazing Netflix’s anime content is. “What is anime?” director/narrator Alex Burunova asks at the beginning of the film, and she spends the next hour barely answering the question, and instead uses Netflix’s original and licensed series as examples of how diverse and great the animation genre/style can be.

ENTER THE ANIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Burunova admits to being an anime newbie right off the bat: she knows nothing about the phenomenon, and ambitiously promises to penetrate the heart of the Japanese cultural movement and lure out its essence. She talks about the stark contrast between traditional Japanese stoicism and the wild, taboo-testing creativity of anime, a counter-cultural movement inspired by manga (comic books) that has since enjoyed a massive global cult following. The best way to deeply understand anime is to take a working vacation to Tokyo and eat yummy food and go to karaoke bars, she says, although I’m paraphrasing, because she doesn’t quite use those words.

One of her first interviews is Castlevania showrunner Adi Shankar, and she subsequently spends about 1/58th of the 58-minute documentary profiling his pet poodle, who frankly has jack squat to do with Akira or My Neighbor Totoro or other historically significant anime films. In fact, Burunova never even mentions such influential works, because you can’t watch them on Netflix.

Having established itself as a not-at-all comprehensive analysis of anime history, Enter the Anime continues to tediously profile the makers of a half-dozen or so current Netflix anime series, interspersed with shots of crazy anime-inspired cosplayers and the sushi vending machines and hedgehog cafes Burunova visited during her trip to Japan. Conclusion: from brutally violent adult-oriented anime to cutesy kiddie anime and everything in-between, only one streaming service has such a wide range of anime for hardcore fans and newcomers alike!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Enter the Anime reminds me of movies on broadcast TV — except it’s not really the movies but the things that interrupt them frequently for two-to-five minutes at a time. What are those things called again? Right: COMMERCIALS.

Performance Worth Watching: A person in a giant-headed plushie-suit of Kaoru, a teddy bear character in a Netflix anime series, hangs out in the room while Burunova interviews the show creators. Kaoru remains silent throughout, and therefore is never given an opportunity to be relentlessly self-promotional.

Memorable Dialogue: “Fun fact: Japan uses more paper to produce manga than they do to make toilet paper. Either people in Japan need to up their fiber intake, or that’s a shit-ton of comic books!” Burunova says in voiceover, all but daring us to turn this crap off.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: This doc doesn’t label itself as a marketing device, but after an instance or two of gratuitous namedropping and/or conspicuous logo placement, your bullshit detector will ring a three-alarm fire indicating gratuitous marketing content. It’d be OK if Burunova actually followed through on her thesis statement and conducted a sociological study of the origins of anime, but alas. Maybe this puff piece is interesting if you’re already a Netflix subscriber and fall asleep watching a peripherally related non-anime show and it autoplays and you wake up and groggily ignore Burunova’s irritating edgy-host shtick and decide (insert name of new Netflix anime series here) might be worth watching. Which seems like a longshot. The doc tries so hard to be hip and cool and make us want to stream hip and cool Netflix anime, it goes deep into Poochieville, and has the exact opposite effect.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Enter the Anime is such thinly disguised promotional content, it’s like throwing a twin-sized bedsheet over a nuclear missile and insisting it’s just a firecracker.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Enter The Anime on Netflix