As An Allegory, Studio Trigger’s ‘BNA: Brand New Animal’ Really Sucks

I just finished binge watching the new Netflix anime BNA: Brand New Animal, and it is an exciting Studio Trigger production, full of action and interesting characters. It is also one of the worst allegories for racial inequality and bigotry, burying deep problems under a veneer of a story about prejudice.

To explain what I mean, I will have to use spoilers, but I will not use any plot or story element spoilers until the bottom of this article, after a spoiler warning, and just mild world-building spoilers before then.

The main character is Michiru, a human high school girl in a world that discovered at some point in the recent past that “beastmen” exist. These demihumans, who can appear as fully human or as humanoid animals similar to a werewolf, have been given full human rights but are still treated as a hated, oppressed minority. In response to this, the Japanese government has set up Anima City on an island just off the coast where beastmen and only beastmen can live free of human interaction. Michiru somehow has been turned into a tanuki beastman and flees to Anima City in the first episode.

There Michiru finds that beastmen society is cruel, violent and built around the concept of brutal competition for survival. The city is rife with corruption, organized crime, abject poverty and vast economic inequality, all because — as Michiru is told — the easily angered and competitive nature of the beastmen. Killing or being killed is a part of everyday life, even in the city’s organized (you can’t call them anything like “professional”) sports leagues.

All of this adds up to a very exciting, interesting story, as Michiru tries to figure out what happened to her, and discovers the secrets and mysteries of Anima City and beastmen in general. And the issue of bigotry is plastered all over every episode, with humans as the oppressors and beastmen as the oppressed. Hell, it even touches on gender norms in a wonderful rant by the gym clothes-wearing jock Michiru at one point.

But all of that anti-bigotry rhetoric the story tells us gets washed away by what BNA shows us about oppressed minorities — and it’s about to get ugly and SPOILERY.

According to Brand New Animal, the reason that humans hate beastmen — aside from general xenophobia — is that beastmen are bestial, violent and basically incompetent at self-governance. So the only solution to keep humans safe is to move the beastmen to their own secluded location. Sound familiar? Welcome to the early 19th century and the U.S. government founding of Liberia in West Africa.

As far back as the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson was not only advocating for abolishing slavery (while still owning many slaves), but suggesting that all freed slaves be sent to Africa. Jefferson’s reasoning for this was not some noble repatriation, but that he didn’t want free black people in his white United States. In case you were wondering, his exact words in his own autobiography are: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

So the U.S. government bought some land in West Africa, established a settlement that would become Monrovia, and after thousands of resettled freed slaves died at the hands of the indigenous Africans who really didn’t want the expansionists around, the country of Liberia was founded. All because Jefferson and his ilk thought blacks, by their “nature” and “habit” couldn’t function in the same government as whites.

Just like the beastmen and humans in BNA. And the show gets worse.

The writers of BNA show us that, for the beastmen, all of that is true. They are too bestial by “nature” to function with whites humans. Worse, they not only are by “nature” easily angered and violent, they can, when put under crowded conditions and extreme stress, turn into nearly mindless rage-filled killers that are almost impossible to stop. How does the show deal with this development? Of course, Michiru’s transformed blood can cure beastmen of ever becoming one of those monsters again, making her the classic white human savior.

Not content with this level of bigot apology storytelling, the show triples down. It turns out, a secret cabal of elite beastmen have been running the human world behind the scenes for millennia. Apparently not satisfied with only thematic racism, BNA adds on thematic anti-Semitism too.

You might say I am reading too much into the show, but I am not the most woke person around. Sure, I am an ally as much as any old, white, redneck male can be, but I didn’t have to get out my “woke” shovel and dig for this interpretation. BNA slaps you right in the face with it, if you know anything about U.S. history and black repatriation.

I really enjoyed the surface story of BNA: Brand New Animal. Michiru and Shirou are amazing characters, and Michiru’s relationship with her high school friend Nazuna is one of the most realistic friendships I’ve seen in a Trigger show.

But the xenophobia, bigotry and racism that the show overtly rails against is covertly baked right into the entire world and plot. And for me, that ruins an otherwise solid effort by Trigger.

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