Prior to watching the latest Netflix thing that everyone is talking about, The Queen’s Gambit, it was pitched to me by several people as “basically an anime.” Half of the time I saw someone talking about it on social media, or heard one of my friends chatting about it, The Queen’s Gambit was placed side-by-side with an anime-style narrative. I even joked about this myself, saying that it was Shion no Ou — a psychological thriller anime series about a girl who plays shogi — with substance-abuse issues.
The Queen’s Gambit isn’t the first live-action television series that has been compared to anime, nor is it the most frequently-referenced piece of media in a side-by-side comparison. In my esports travails, “anime” often becomes a short-cut for a specific type of narrative, usually in reference to a scrappy upstart team or player making their unlikely way through a gauntlet of strong challengers. Elizabeth Harmon, the wide-eyed lead of The Queen’s Gambit, follows a similar narrative, albeit with a lot more nuance, especially when it comes to her being a prodigious woman in a remarkably male-dominated field. (Watch the show. It’s good.) The constant comparisons of The Queen’s Gambit to anime television series also offer a framework for discussing what we mean when we talk about “anime” in the west, why it’s referenced as a narrative framing device when it’s actually a medium, and maybe a bit of pleading on my part to use a different comparison.
Is The Queen’s Gambit anime?
Are esports anime?
Why ask questions with such a seemingly obvious answer?
A precursor to all of the questions posed above is: What is “anime?” If we’re going to be comparing The Queen’s Gambit — or any piece of media — to anime, it would be best to know what anime even is.
This seemingly simple question unfortunately comes with highly-contentious and hotly-debated answers worthy of their own separate and nuanced post. The short, dictionary-definition answer is: hand-drawn and/or computer animation originating from Japan. Domestically in Japan, it can apply to any piece of animation. Outside of Japan, anime is animation from Japan.
Yet, the definition standard — even as combative as discussions around what that standard or definition is can be — isn’t how “anime” is used in the west. There is a subsection of western fandom that can be remarkably strict about anime very specifically being cartoons from Japan, excluding series primarily produced in South Korea, China, any country in Southeast Asia, or even western countries if they’re funding a project or are the studio behind a project. A series like Pop Team Epic or Gal & Dino (pictured above) that are sprawling mixed media projects that use live actors, a variety of stop-motion animation with various objects, and hand-drawn animation may not pass certain viewers’ “anime” bar. Land of the Lustrous also fell into a nebulous category for some, despite having a Japanese animation studio, simply by being completely computer-generated 3-D animation. Similarly, the 2013 rotoscoped Flowers of Evil animation was panned for being ugly and “not anime.”
By contrast, there’s also the question of whether something like A-1 Pictures’ animated MV for American musician and producer Porter Robinson’s song “Shelter” was anime — it was animated by a Japanese studio but was for a western song not a Japanese television production. This specific case was debated at great length on the anime subreddit. For the purpose of this post, anime is animation from Japan, making it a medium.
What we talk about when we talk about anime in the west is all-too-often that aforementioned underdog narrative, commonly found in shounen series. It sometimes involves a robot, definitely involves multiple training arcs or montages, uses animation in “wacky” or “weird” ways, and sometimes has a transformation sequence or two. This definition and reference unfortunately downsizes what can be a wonderfully-creative and diverse medium with a variety of narratives. When people refer to a real-life person’s story as “anime” it’s this same scrappy story with various trials and power-ups found in series like Naruto, Bleach, My Hero Academia, Sailor Moon, Hunter x Hunter, Dragon Ball, Cardcaptor Sakura, and many others. By this narrow narrative definition of anime, something like Hyouka (an odd, pensive, slice-of-life mystery series by Kyoto Animation) wouldn’t be “anime” despite being very Japanese in its story.
The more correct phrasing of “Is The Queen’s Gambit anime? Are esports anime?” would be “Are they this one specific narrative?” This too undermines how multi-faceted and interesting a person’s life or success in a sport can be (and their genuine struggle to reach the top), while also reducing the medium of anime to a specific storytelling structure when it excels with multiple styles and narratives. Although The Queen’s Gambit has similar plotting and a scrappy come-from-behind story (with multiple training “arcs”) the one time it actually reminded me of anime was a cinematic sequence comparing series lead Beth Harmon to one of her rivals, Benny Watts, as they both tear through the U.S. Championship, en route to meeting each other in the finals. Both players are pictured in various squares, resembling a chessboard, while other squares showcase their moves and defeated opponents. This type of visual decision-making is something I see more frequently in anime, but wasn’t what people were referencing when they were comparing the two and recommending the Netflix series to me.
At the end of this rambling post, I’ll leave the reader with a challenge: whenever you see something with something you would consider “anime” by an underdog narrative definition, frame its description differently. Try to convey the nuance of something like The Queen’s Gambit, even if it does follow a similar narrative rise, fall, and eventual triumph of a certain subsection of popular anime series.