Ask John: What are the Most Controversial and Complex Anime?

Question:
In your opinion, what is the most controversial or complex anime in existence?

Answer:
There’s quite a bit of difference between “controversial” and “complex” as the two characteristics aren’t necessarily related at all. Furthermore, both terms have multiple interpretations, which makes identifying them difficult. To go in order, for an anime to be controversial, it must have caused some degree of controversy. Oddly enough, some of the titles that would immediately come to mind as instant candidates actually have to be excluded from consideration because they simply never did cause any controversy. Furthermore, in practical terms, the most controversial anime ever is almost guaranteed to be the most obvious one. If it’s not been the subject of intense debate and argument, then it’s not controversial, and if it has been the subject of intense debate and argument, the odds are that most people are at least partially familiar with it.

With that qualification in mind, it’s difficult to argue anything beside Neon Genesis Evangelion as being the most controversial anime ever made. During its original Japanese broadcast, it was twice nearly pulled off the air for pushing the boundaries of what was considered, at the time, acceptable for Japanese television broadcast. Its concluding two episodes caused director Hideaki Anno to go on record saying, to the effect, “If you don’t understand it, tough luck.” Only to have him retract his statement a year later by creating the no less tormenting End of Evangelion movie. Beside the controversy that the technical aspects of the animation created, the meaning of the show has been scrutinized and argued for years, further fueling the controversy. And now the recent announcement of a live action Evangelion movie has again fractured fan opinion on the title into schools of wholehearted support and tentative hesitation.

While the content of Evangelion is not as shocking or taboo as the content of series like Berserk, Yakin Byouto, Kite or Ima Soku ni Iru Boku, none of these shows has created nearly the international furor that Evangelion has steadily supported. Ironically, anime like Yakin Byouto and Kite may have more potentially controversial content than Evangelion, but Evangelion has created the most actual controversy.

Complexity, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do with popularity or public reception. Complexity can be interpreted as technical complexity, or the complexity of writing and story development. Some of the most technically complex anime ever created include the films Wings of Honneamise and Metropolis. Wings of Honneamise featured a near mind boggling level of hand drawn detail and realization, including even an original language created especially for the film. Equally ambitions was the Madhouse production of Metropolis, which merged thousands of hand painted cels with thousands of layers of carefully constructed, multi-layered CG rendered backgrounds, most of which were then digitally painted to look like hand drawn animation.

Two of the most complex and richly layered stories in all of anime are the Legend of Galactic Heroes and Mobile Suit Gundam UC Continuity stories. Both are science fiction epics that span hundreds of anime episodes and boast casts of over a hundred different primary characters. It’s tempting to include Five Star Stories, but in a discussion of anime alone, the Five Star Stories movie, while certainly complex, doesn’t begin to hint at the massive scope of the manga, which easily rests as one of the most complicated and complex fantasy stories to ever appear in contemporary Japanese fiction. Legend of the Galactic Heroes simply utilized an astounding number of characters and episodes to carefully detail a stellar war in minute detail. The Gundam series, progressing from the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series, through Zeta Gundam, Double Zeta, 0080, 0083, MS 08th Team, F-91 and V-Gundam introduced multiple generations of characters all continuing a single storyline of family rivalry and political unrest.

We may instinctive want to assume that the most controversial, and most complex anime ever are obscure titles shrouded in mystery and legend, but logic dictates that the titles that excel over all others in any category are the ones that get talked about the most. There are certainly anime titles that have far more shocking and taboo content than Evangelion, but many of these titles are too obscure to actually cause public controversy. There are anime series far longer than either Legend of the Galactic Heroes or the Gundam UC storyline, as well as short anime like Angel’s Egg and Nekojiru-so that are highly complex in levels of thematic development. But the shows longer than Galactic Heroes or Gundam tend to stick to non-convoluted, linear stories with a small number of primary characters, and the shorter works simply aren’t long enough to compete with longer works like Galactic Heroes and Gundam that have more time and characters and story to develop.

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