Spoilers for Chargeman Ken and the 1985 movie Brazil Chargeman Ken is an anime unlike anything I have ever seen in that it comes off as a Brechtian play. It is incredibly good at putting mediocre episodes in between the completely unhinged ones like the pickled ginger that comes with sushi to make you lower your guard again and increase the effect of the next piece and I think that this exact mixture of involuntary contemplation and incredulous stupor is necessary to discover its subtextual message. Even the animation and the music do everything in their power to break the immersion in the Aplot and annoy you as much as possible so you begin to look behind the curtain There is even a liberally used track that canonically makes the listener go insane. As we embark on our journey we are greeted by Ken the ostensible protagonist of the series. He lives a happy life in future Japan with his mom and his dad who is a doctor his little sister and his clumsy robot. Kens paradise is only threatened by an alien race called the Juralians who attempt to supplant humanity by taking over the world. The dastardly Juralians threaten human society in some way Ken transforms desintegrates them using a beam weapon and the day is saved for now. This is the plot of almost every episode and on a surface level the show is a monsteroftheweek action flick where the main appeal is to see what wicked design the Juralians have come up with this episode. But as the episodes go on the whole thing becomes a bit silly like with all the classrooms in Japan being packed into a single building and the alwayssame OP ED and canned transformation sequence starts to hamper your enjoyment of the action and kick the analytic part of your brain into gear. Then there is an episode where the picture that has been established suddenly cracks. A meteor rushes towards the Earth from outer space and instead of cackling gleefully about humanitys impending doom the leader of the Juralians offers his help to deorbit and whittle down the meteor and actually goes through with it Hold on werent they you know bad guys? How reliable is this narrative anymore? The next few episodes are mid slop so you are given some alone time to ponder these questions. Over time socialpolitical elements are introduced especially as the show goes into other problems like food shortages poverty or corruption. But strangely enough even though those issues are known to be systemic they are discussed as though they were brought on by some group of Juralians that has to be eliminated. Even when a more popular boy than him appears at Kens school he is revealed to be a Juralian in disguise. Hold on didnt we hear this somewhere before? Lets look at some of the things the superficially apparent story of this series does: It establishes a cult of tradition. Barring one every episode follows the same blueprint and nothing new of substance can be learned It rejects intellectualism not only in the museum episode but also when it reveals one scientist to be a military security risk and another to be a literal bomb planted by the Juralians Ken acts for actions sake he always transforms and attacks where often further analysis would be wise Everyone who disagrees with the view that the Juralians have to be eliminated is later shown to be a traitor Everything and everyone different is portrayed as suspicious and pertaining to Juralians The story appeals to a disenfranchised middle class as it takes place among a nuclear family that is exposed to constant outside threats There is an obsession with a plot to replace humanity by the Juralians The Juralians are at the same time both too strong and too weak they can easily beat the Armed Forces yet are no match to Kens stun gun Life is permanent warfare: Largescale attacks by Juralians are portrayed to be commonplace and happen all the time despite everyday life going on as if everything was normal There is contempt for the weak as Kens robot Barrican is the butt of constant derision due to his mental and physical disabilities. In general Ken is deeply unserious about mental health he pretends to be an idiot to infiltrate a mental hospital and he praises a man he meets for his inability to cope with modern life after it drove him to attempting suicide Heroism is expected: Ken is a kid who goes to primary school and yet the story hinges on him waging battle piloting vehicles and solving criminal cases Sexism is rampant whenever a woman is the focus of the story she is manipulated or in distress Humanity is portrayed as a monolithic bloc rallying behind Ken absent a few individuals who represent the criminal element or have shit taste The vocabulary of the story is impoverished as there is no place for critical reasoning or meaningful dialogue Though this may appear innocuous at first glance these are in reality the 14 defining characteristics of fascism outlined by Umberto Eco. By fighting against what he believes to be an existential threat Ken is unwittingly though by no means accidentally transformed into the ideal fascist supersoldier battling an increasingly strange and inconherent external enemy to uphold internal stability. Over time Ken shows his growing disrespect for human rights himself every time he fires at Juralian vessels he has to assume contain innocents and hostages. And once this is revealed the future doesnt seem so utopian at all: In the penultimate episode it is shown that every facet of human life hinges on a central computer system that cannot be circumvented and has no backup meaning that whatever instance controls these computers exerts dictatorial even tyrannical power on everyone elses feeble existence. But in a twist that may have gone on to inspire Terry Gilliams similarly eminent classic Brazil the actual governing entities are anonymous the only thing we get to see albeit in excruciating detail is the operation of the immediate executive force be it Brazils allenveloping bureaucracy or Chargeman Kens symbolic and militaristic displays as a fhrer figure. Fittingly this leads to another question both of these works pose to us Brazil more overtly in its biting satire befitting of Monty Pythons animation director Chargeman Ken more subtly in its distinctly circumspect Japanese manner: Who is really to blame for the attacks? Suddenly it makes sense that every classroom in Japan would be in the same building despite the horrifying security implications an actual Juralian attack on this building would entail that despite possessing overwhelming scientific advantages and vastly superior firepower they would go for underhanded convoluted machinations all involving extremely mundane episodes in the life of this one specific boy and that after the complete extermination of the Juralian race during the series finale no attempts are made to explain how this final solution actually solves any of the problems from which Ken or humanity itself were suffering. In contrast to the bland Aplot from which to escape the subtext is brilliant and refreshing: You the viewer are put into the shoes of a fascist believer who slowly through a state of introspective zen masterfully interrupted by sporadic clues and moral wakeup calls manages to free themself from successive layers of delusion about the regime and their own role in it despite everything that was taught and promulgated to them as unquestionable truth on a meta level. Chargeman Ken might just be the antidote to fascism.