Anime is such a vast and diverse medium that I truly believe it has something for everyone even though a lot of it will struggle to appeal outside the specific subculture that created it. So one recurring theme of this Blog is me as a person who was once a more normal western Nerd with a wide range of interests for a long time before Anime took over my brain appointing myself as an expert recommender. And of course one of my top Western Nerdy interests is J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Now if any long time followers of this blog exist you may think I’ve already covered Tolkien and Lewis like Anime in various ways, but the truth is the prior examples of one or both of them and Anime coming up in the same post were more the other way around if anything. In this post I want to focus on Anime that I think could have appealed to Tolkien and Lewis themselves if they were still around, not merely fans who like their work but also a lot of stuff very unlike them.
So for example while I’ve made a few posts on why Fantasy Anime even at its most Generic and Gamerfied would appeal to someone whose tastes in the Genre were shaped by them more then the slew of GOT wannabes that western “Prestige” television spewed out in the 2010s. I am still not insane enough to think either of them would like a show that’s basically literally about being in a Video Game.
Maquia and Frieren are the top two Fantasy Anime I would truly call Tolkienesque. Maybe Grimoire of Zero and Dawn of The Witch could fit in. Something that actually qualifies as Isekai would have a better shot with Lewis but not most modern Isekai. Lewis and Tolkien’s different views on Allegory would have me recommending something like Princess Tutu or an Ikuhara show to Lewis way before Tolkien. The third Pokémon movie Spell of The Unown might be able to appeal to both.
Also Tolkien's anxieties about Technology and Nature make him a bit of a kindred spirit with Miyazaki but that's not something people needed me to learn about, there's already a YouTube Video Essay on it. I have also already stated that the ending of Nausicaa counts as a Eucatastrophe, also an observation I didn't make on my own.
However I want to remind people that Tolkien was capable of enjoying more kinds of fiction than just the genre he's most well known for writing.
For example I was intrigued when I learned that Tolkien was a fan of Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Now the first Anime that I would recommend to any Clarke fan is the Gundam franchise, the Childhood’s End influence is there right form the original Mobile Suit Gundam, I often feel like I’m the only western fan who notices that the term Newtype itself is basically a Childhood’s End reference. However I feel the best Gundam in many ways including as a Clarke homage is Gundam 00, now 00 like a lot of non UC Gundam Anime in my opinion struggles in its early episodes. I was lucky I caught Gundam 00 randomly in the middle of season 1 on the SciFi channel. (The Witch From Mercury finally avoided this problem by just making its Pilot a remake of Utena’s pilot).
Heck I’m gonna leave Anime for a second to mention how I see a lot of thematic similarities between Tolkien and the works of 19th Century French Novelist Paul Feval. They are most apparent in The Companions of The Treasure the 6th and in my headcanon last Volume of The Blackcoats saga, a Tolkien fan reading it will be reminded of a number of things. Part of it might be how Feval was also a Roman Catholic seemingly specifically to be contrarian (it wasn’t rare in his nation like it was Tolkien but was among those writing serialized novels for newspapers).
Anime that remind me of Paul Feval are also something I’ve already talked about on this blog. But which ones do so in specifically a way that speaks to why I compare Feval to Tolkien? Well I suspect Princess Principal may exist at exactly the right crossroads for that.
Since Tolkien was a Linguist first and foremost he might have been amused by some of those Detective Conan episodes that play on language for a key clue. Like episode 651 which used differences between the Kansai and Kanto dialects of Japanese. Or that subplot from the latter part of the Clash and Red and Black where Conan used a sort of reverse Shiboleth.
Thing is I have no idea if Tolkien ever had any interest in Detective Fiction as a genre. Lewis did make a Sherlock Holmes reference once and I will definitely recommend Detective Conan aka Case Closed to any Holmes fan, it’s a way better modern reimagining then what the BBC and Hollywood have given us in the last 20 years.
Given the interest Tolkien seemed to have in the idea of Cursed objects that kind of Doom their possessor I’m almost inclined to wonder if even Death Note would have an appeal.
Update February 10th: I recently learned about both Tolkien and Lewis being fans of Voyage to Arcturus thanks to the Media Death Cult youtube channel. I'm sure there are a number of Anime you could compare to Arcturus but they aren't on the tip of my tong right now.
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