Home The Dream Con Anime x Politics Panel Was One of the Summer’s Best

The Dream Con Anime x Politics Panel Was One of the Summer’s Best

While many of Dream Con 2025’s highlights will include things like the charity basketball game, the influencer dodgeball, or unforgettable moments with Megan Thee Stallion, the convention’s panels stand out as some of the most interesting and social parts of the weekend. Hosted by an NYU graduate in International Relations, History, and Jewish Studies, “AnimexPolitics: How Anime Got Political” presented a brief history of anime in politics and engaged a literally overflowing room full of anime fans in a discussion of what kinds of anime feature politics, including some that don’t immediately seem like it.

Putting Politics Into Anime

The panel began with a baseline contention: art is inherently political. To bolster that point, the panelist (whose name I regrettably did not jot down) went through a myriad of popular media as examples of political messaging even in spaces that some consider apolitical, like gaming. Examples outside of anime included Call of Duty, Transformers, Mission Impossible, Superman, and Top Gun. The starting anime example of a political series was one I think a lot of people would have put at the top of a list: Attack on Titan.

©Hajime Isayama,Kodansha/”ATTACK ON TITAN”Production Committee.

She then went on to offer some condensed history about anime making its way out of Japan and around to the rest of the world, explaining “It was created to mimic Disney cartoons. It was faster and easier to illustrate than traditional cartoons. Because Walt Disney poured a lot of money and effort and racism (room laughs) into his cartoonish content. And the Japanese were like, hey, let’s do that, but cheaper. So the biggest feature film animation that Japan did was a feature length film released in April of 1945. This was around four months before Japan surrendered to the Allies. It was commissioned by the Japanese Department of Information, the propaganda unit. And it depicted Japanese sailors as anthropomorphic animals attacking an occupied island that was off the Pacific.”

This film, Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, was supposedly partially inspired by the style of the Disney film Fantasia, and depicts Japanese soldiers conquering the island of Celebes and the surrounding territories, taking over from British rule. An epilogue at the end of the film shows children playing as paratroopers and jumping into a chalk outline of the United States, as if that will be their generations land to conquer.

Moving on to the world of anime post-WWII, the panelist launched a discussion around art and media as a form of soft power, speaking to how lucrative screen animation was for a now struggling Japanese economy and how artforms like One Piece, Marvel, and K-Pop can be used as tools of a nation. “Yes, K-pop is the fastest growing form of soft power, I think, in the 21st century,” she explained. “They represent the United Nations. They perform with soft power. They’re on a global stage. Using their ability to stand, perform, and whatnot to really drive conversations around humanitarian aid and about peace, prosperity.” She pointed to contemporary examples of politics and political positions inspiring characters like Frieza from Dragon Ball, who was created around the time of the Japanese economic bubble and inspired by real estate speculators from the time.

©BIRD STUDIO/SHUEISHA, TOEI ANIMATION Film©1989 TOEI ANIMATION CO., LTD.

“That’s what Frieza was based on. That was using politics and putting that in your show. Because let’s think about it. What does Frieza do? What does he do? He takes over plants and flips them. That’s exactly what he did.”

Audience Debate at Dream Con

One of the best part of this panel was the second half, during which it brought in the audience and involved everyone in a true discussion rather than just a lecture, which is what some similar panels I’ve attended in the past have felt like. After a discussion about the historical context behind different aspects of Attack on Titan, the audience was invited to discuss whether it is the responsibility of mangakas to be careful in how they convey political points and actions in their works. The crowded room shared differing perspectives; some who were artists themselves expressed not wanting to feel restricted in the ways they were allowed to be creative and put things into their art. Some expressed that series like Attack on Titan wouldn’t exist if manga authors were too careful or sensitive in what they included in their works. When asked who in the room came to the panel specifically because of politics-heavy series like Attack on Titan, well over half of the room raised their hands.

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Fans of Avatar: the Last Airbender debated whether Uncle Iroh was a good character and whether he was successfully redeemed over the course of the series. This was an energy-arousing topic and lots of people had strong opinions in either direction, either feeling that war crimes were too much to get redemption for so quickly or, alternatively, feeling that he truly put in the work to correct for the wrongs he had done earlier in life, even earning a sliver of nirvana and becoming something like a Buddha in the series’ spirit world.

Closing Thoughts

This panel was special and I think I’ll hold it as a strong example of how to approach layered anime-related topics for a long time. The mixture of information, historical context, audience interaction, and healthy debate was a pleasure to see. Especially at a convention like Dream Con where the attendees are disproportionately Black, it was nice to see such nuanced conversations around race, imperialism, power dynamics, representation, and international order. Looking toward future years of the convention, I hope I see even more panels like this one.

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