Does anyone know of a decent leftist anime...

is Iron Blooded Orphans leftist?

Kino no tabi is based and you should watch it

To whoever recommended Akame ga Kill in one of the last threads like this we had, I'll see you lined up against the wall for that. Those are 12 hours of my life I'm NEVER getting back.

What a fucking dumpster fire of a show.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is easily one of my favourite leftist shows.

I mean, it can easily be viewed as very marxist

Ghost in the Shell

Please explain. Seemed to me like weapon porn and excessively metaphorical polit-thriller without any message behind it.
Or did you take away from it that "cops are wolfs and our qt revolutionary girls must beware of them"?

One Piece. The whole story is a proponent of anarchy imho.

Beautifully animated, but shit movie, fam. Aside from snubbing Patlabor's cast for OCs, it's a rehash of a subpar story from the OVA series, itself rehashed from the subpar Appleseed OVA. The same plot was finally done right in GitS:SAC 2nd GIG.

The first Patlabor movie was far better, plus its leftist content revolves around more subtle themes of alienation, consumerism, and environmentalism.

If all you need is fash-bashing, watch Fullmetal Alchemist and Samurai X, though note both shows are more libdem than properly leftist, regardless of many excellent pieces of rhetoric sprinkled throughout. Sadly, while I can think of numerous lib-left anime (and a handful of astonishingly fascist ones, like Crest of the Stars), I can't recall any strongly leftist ones.

Also, if you enjoy politics and history at all, WATCH LOGH. I would describe it as politically nonpartisan, but it incorporates philosophical and aesthetic influences ranging from full tankie, through anarchist and liberal, clear to fascism and monarchism.

Gotta admit I fucking love Sekai no Monshou and Sekai no Senki. Even bought the novels. Oddly enough I never thought too deeply about the politics despite being deep into it when I first started watching the anime. Also a big fan of the Starship Troopers novel which, while not exactly fascist, is blatantly far-right.

Full metal alchemist

Watch Gurren Lagann
Not only is it dialectical as fuck but it's one of the best Anime i have ever seen period

Here's a couple that might not have entirely come up yet. Some of the anti-capitalism is just incidental or an element in a larger spectacle, but it's there and worth looking for all the same.

A lot of the background material for Planetes, and in particular the Space Liberation Front, could easily be considered leftist. They're dealing with issues of poverty, uneven industrialization and economic development, capitalism, exploitation, and the environmental waste inherent to capitalism. It's also kinda dubious about scientific utopianism, which is pretty good.

I'm currently working through Michiko to Hatchin, which is actually fucking fantastic. Beyond some really solid character work so far, it's also set against the backdrop of a Latin American shithole that's "totally not Brazil" where the priests are corrupt, the cops are on the take, the orphanages sell children to the rich, and rampant crime is caused by mass poverty and state neglect. There's also a really beautiful moment in the second episode which contains one of the most satisfying and earth-shattering disruptions of bourgeois normalcy I've ever enjoyed.

Arakawa Under the Bridge has elements of anti-capitalism taken from humorous absurdity by having a guy exemplifying normal wage-slave morality alongside a cast of the weirdest fucking people imaginable. Somehow, his values will always come out as stranger.

Black Lagoon's also strangely in tune with that. They've got a Japanese Red Army veteran working with Palestinian terrorists who are probably badly-disguised PFLP dudes on a plan to topple America that is presented within the series as bizarrely sympathetic. Roberta's also a former FARC militant, which is kinda fun.

Somebody mentioned Stand Alone Complex above. Season 2 of that in particular stands out, as the main pseudo-antagonist is a Che Guevera-style unironic socialist revolutionary whose cause is presented as deeply sympathetic and who is genuinely concerned with liberating an explicitly oppressed people. It's also notably anti-fascist, anti-American in the kind of way that isn't just standard Japanazi stuff, and a lot of the deeper stuff going on in all segments of the franchise about alienation, capitalist distortions of reality, and the inability to look beyond the haze of pseudo-reality to what's really going on are pretty Situationist.

Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis is a somewhat overlooked classic. It's based on an explicitly Socialist film, and a lot of the structural critique shines through. It deals pretty seriously with the problems of a world where labour has been automated, and a good deal of the film revolves around major characters hanging out with radicalized unemployed dudes. The robots themselves are also pretty revolutionary, and the dialectic is definitely afoot in how the plot treats them. Plus there's some good old-style fash bashing, anti-corporate hatred, and really neat animation.

I'd put Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei on here mostly for kicks. It's got some fun digs at the complete stupidities of consumer society, the Marx and Lenin cameos, occasional USSR nostalgia, and explicit Pol Pot callouts can't be entirely accidental. It's not particularly anticapitalist as much as anti-everything including being anti-things, but it's a fun ride and I'd recommend it regardless.

Sky Crawlers is another Mamoru Oshii feature. It's a bit older and kinda klunky, but it's fun nonetheless. Beyond being absurdly fucking steeped in the Camus, it's got some pretty strong content on corporate media and its relation to warfare and the public peace. I can't say any more than that without spoiling everything, but suffice to say that the capitalists have developed an inventive way to keep the masses entertained and the war profits flowing without any actual warfare, and it's not just pusher props. It also just looks and feels really nice.

Gate is, if nothing else, a look into how your average Holla Forums fascist probably views the world. It's a shitty fucking show and the whole thing is Great East Asia War justification propaganda, but it's still interesting. It's some really elemental anime nationalist bullshit on parade.

I actually let most of that slide, assuming typical Japanese cultural insularity, but then when the relationship between the space-based Abh and their planetbound subjects was elaborated on (using a term I forget that was almost literally "greater east asiangalactic co-prosperity sphere") I realized the show was quite a bit more fashie than most.

Also, anyone else reminded of the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za slave shields from Star Control II? Not to mention the Abh sounding very much like the Androsynth.

One of the major themes of Black Lagoon is the complete lack of hope felt by socialists after the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of the characters were former leftists who truly believed in the communist goals of the Eastern Bloc, but ultimately had everything they believed in crumble around them and were powerless to stop it. The show then excellently portrays how they handle their idealism in a world which no longer has any room for it.

I really strongly recommend watching it. No other show that I know of has portrayed the state of the left in the neoliberal era as well as Black Lagoon has.

Mio wants to be a prostitute anyway. Flashing her panties at people like some kind of hooker.

Unlike Mio, Revy is a genuine prostitute who specialises S&M stuff and only changed occupations when she found out she could get money for murdering people.

Revy isn't really meant to be the face of post soviet despair. Her character backstory has a lot more to do with US capitalism and police state.

A much better example from the show that I should have posted is Balalaika. She runs a mafia organization comprised almost entirely of decorated Red Army Afghan war vets. The episode that goes over her backstory really gave me the feels: youtube.com/watch?v=agWy-7XANJ8

Wew lad, didn't think anybody but me remembered that series. I was a fan, though I'm not even sure what the Humankind Empire of Abh even is. They are not far from actual Fully-Automated Luxury Space Gay Communism but they have an expansionistic feudal interstellar empire, so… Yeah.