What might we learn about The Faerie Queene if we imagine it as Japanese anime?¹ The proposition may seem fanciful, but it allows us to consider Spenser’s poem through a medium that similarly thrives on stylization, seriality, and moral extremity. Although its “distinctive allegorical emblematics could hardly be less suited to the big screen,” animation—and anime in particular—can circumvent many of the artistic and practical challenges of a live-action production. My aim, however, is not so much to propose an adaptation as it is to test what anime might reveal about the structures of allegorical thinking—namely, the “flattening” of allegorical planes into a dense, proliferating symbolic field. With its unique combination of stylistic economy and symbolic intensity, anime can illuminate how Spenser’s allegory moves between the emblematic and the narrative, between the ideal and the grotesque. Anime may enable us, in the end, to look at allegory again, in all its horror and glory.

“Anime” was originally the Japanese abbreviation of the English word “animation,” but the term returned to English as a shorthand for animation produced in Japan, with its distinctive aesthetic and technique.² Its visual style is akin to that of manga, which is the equivalent of comics. The aesthetic roots of manga and anime run deep, certainly to ukiyo-e woodblock prints and possibly as far back as Heian picture-scrolls.³ At the same time, anime is aggressively global in its frames of reference and draws heavily on Western arts and culture. It is manically, overwhelmingly intertextual.⁴ Unlike cartoons in the West, anime is completely mainstream in Japan and is becoming so in the international market. It constitutes a sizeable portion of Japanese studio production—at least half of all releases by the late 1990s (Napier, 16)—and is so varied that just about everyone can find something to their taste. Anime is not merely for children; much of it is decidedly not for children. In its thematic and emotional range, anime resembles cinema. Its narrative structures, however, are more closely linked with television, which combines an episodic format with serial plots. When I imagine The Faerie Queene as anime, I envision not the artistic masterpieces of Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, or Makoto Shinkai,⁵ but the cheaper, serialized medium that is produced in short timeframes and in high volume.

Anime offers an immediately suggestive way to present the fictional surface of The Faerie Queene. Many anime series unfold through quest-driven plots in which protagonists undergo ritualized training, confront increasingly powerful adversaries, and gradually inhabit their destined roles. The Redcrosse Knight’s spiritual growth into St. George’s “mightie armes and siluer shielde,” for instance, is not far removed from the trajectory of Ichigo Kurosaki in Tite Kubo’s Bleach.⁶ Like Redcrosse, Ichigo receives a weapon—zanpakutō (斬魄刀, “soul-cutting sword”)—that he does not yet know how to wield. With the help of unconventional mentor Kisuke Urahara, Ichigo must cultivate the spiritual strength to acquaint himself with the sword’s spirit and unlock its successive forms—essentially, to “[a]dd faith unto [his] force” (FQ I.i.19). The series’ world building is imbued with Buddhist mythology,⁷ and although it cannot be read consistently as an allegory, it provides a helpful analogue: its narrative structure highlights the way characters can move through symbolic identities rather than simply stand for them.

Such resonances have not gone unnoticed. Margaret Christian observes that undergraduate students reading The Faerie Queene “make plot comparisons to anime, Nintendo, fantasy literature in general, and action movies,” responding both to its quest structure and to its graphic violence, from Redcrosse’s backstory as a changeling to gory details such as Orgoglio’s arm being cut off.⁸ In shōnen anime, oriented at young male audiences, spectacular violence of this kind is common. In Bleach, so many characters have had their arms lopped off (most of them later reattached) that it has become a running gag in the fandom. Anime can readily convey the graphic and symbolic wounds that occur in The Faerie Queene: the cleaving of skulls, the spilling of entrails, the crushing of bones, the gushing of blood, and so on. Because anime creates its worlds out of nothing, it can not only accommodate such monstrous entities as Spenser’s Errour, but also incorporate visual symbolism detached from its setting (Suan, 45).

To be clear, I know of no anime that could be considered a full-fledged allegory in the way Spenser would have understood that term. Indeed, allegory may not be an intuitive fit for a distinctly Japanese medium. Japan has no native tradition of allegory conceived as such, and although the practice of allegoresis was well established in classical scholarship,⁹ anime tends to resist it. Whereas Spenser explicitly states in his Letter to Raleigh that his poem is “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit” representing the perfection of twelve moral virtues,¹⁰ the overarching conceit of an anime (if any) is typically not so well defined. Spenser is keen to “direct [our] understanding,” but anime creators’ commentary (if any) sooner misleads than guides our reading of their work.¹¹

There is something distinctly “flat” about animetic allegory. I borrow the term from Thomas Lamarre’s influential theory of anime as an abstract machine, in which the image resists the illusion of depth and instead foregrounds the layered planes of its own construction.¹² For Lamarre, flatness is not a defect but a mode of thinking through technology. I extend this notion to describe the condition of allegory in anime. Both allegory and anime construct “horizontal” networks of narrative repetitions, but whereas traditional allegory aspires to “verticality,” to a structure in which figures point toward a higher abstract meaning, anime operates, for the most part, laterally. Anime may exhibit the symptoms of allegory: it encourages a hermeneutic response through narrative patterning; it gestures toward a symbolic meaning beyond its surface; it floods us with potentially signifying information. Yet anime can still be understood without allegorical interpretation. Its system of signs is unsystematic, and its vectors of signification often dissipate before reaching a discernible target. If we visualize allegory as a hierarchical system of parallel planes,¹³ such as in Dante’s Commedia, with divine truth at the top, in anime that upper plane is incomplete, inconsistent, or missing.

This very flatness, however, renders anime compelling as a medium for contemporary allegory, especially if we treat allegory not as a stratified medieval mode, but as a flexible “function.” I have argued elsewhere that the planes of Spenser’s allegory—and of allegory generally—need not be as rigid or as closed as we traditionally imagine. Rather, its planes can thrive on rhizomatic multiplicity as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.¹⁴ When allegorical planes converge and interpermeate, they appear flatter, but are also denser, compressing into a single “plane of intensity” that vibrates with dynamic energy. In anime, this results in an “exploded view,” in which elements of the visual field appear “arrayed across multiple planes yet in a single plane” (Lamarre, 148). Both on the level of production and on the level of consumption, anime depends on the interplay between apparent flatness and overwhelming informational density. This is what makes anime so powerful as a commercialized medium: by “dehierarchizing” its elements, anime keeps the audience endlessly occupied (Lamarre, 145, 111). Angus Fletcher predicts a similar leveling in “Allegory Without Ideas”: in the contemporary world of “universal corporate advertising,” allegory loses its transcendental plane but retains its authoritarian force through hollow repetition and mindless consumption.¹⁵ That is, it displays the symptoms of allegory, but lacks its accustomed, upwardly tending idealism.

This flattening, this explosion, of allegory’s upper plane does not invalidate the potential of anime as allegory, but rather redefines what allegory can be in a contemporary, globalized medium. The formal features of anime make it a remarkably conducive vehicle for allegory and a surprisingly apt visualization of its mechanics. Classic anime uses not full but limited animation. Animation can imitate live action at 18-24 frames per second (Disney’s standard), but anime makes do with approximately 12, and sometimes as few as 8, frames per second (Lamarre, 64; Wasylak, 428). As a result, animators rely on deft “camera” work (simulated through framing and perspective) to produce a sense of movement.¹⁶ Originally implemented as a cost-saving measure, this technique creates a productive tension between motion and stasis that is similar to the tension between emblem and narrative, between figure and character, in an allegory.¹⁷

The dialogue of anime can be sparse, resulting in characters that appear single-minded, “daemonic,” possessed, as Fletcher describes allegorical agents.¹⁸ Their “spiritual, emotional, or psychological qualities appear inscribed on the surface,” often in an exaggerated, distorted manner (Lamarre, 201). In the anime series So Long, Mr. Despair (Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei), the protagonist is a school teacher named Despair (絶望, zetsubō) who tries repeatedly, and comically, to hang himself (much like Spenser’s Despair). His students, too, are types, to the point that “characters become almost allegories, symbolic elements of the anime’s universe constructed from a surplus of information” (Wasylak, 431). The cast of characters in manga and anime—as in Bleach, for instance—can be extraordinarily large, with numbered rankings and rigid hierarchies, allowing for numerological play. The episodic serialization of anime makes it possible to reuse stock footage, which means the medium thrives on repetition and patterning. All these features demonstrate how allegory functions when stripped of transcendence: gesture without guarantee, symbol without system, a flattened allegory for a flattened world.

Before closing, I turn to Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist [sic], which offers a striking example of how anime can generate an allegorical framework that is morally charged yet ontologically incomplete. Its world is a fully realized fictional universe that borrows concepts from Western alchemy. The two protagonists’ long-absent father and original alchemist is named Van Hohenheim, better known to us as Paracelsus, although he shares little else with the historical person. He has an evil double, a Homunculus, who dubs himself “Father” and uses Philosopher’s Stones (which are composed of millions of human souls) to create seven lesser homunculi to do his bidding in the attempt to attain godlike power. These homunculi, the main antagonists of the series, are named after the seven deadly sins—notably, transliterated from English rather than translated into Japanese (e.g. Pride as Puraido, Greed as Gurīdo).

The procession of Seven Deadly Sins in the House of Pride (FQ I.iv.16–36) is an obvious parallel to the homunculi of Fullmetal Alchemist, but while Arakawa appears to be familiar with Dante, it is highly unlikely she would know Spenser. Whereas the counsellors of Spenser’s Lucifera are emblematic figures, whose attributes and diseased natures are easy to discern, the monstrous homunculi are more fully fleshed out as characters, dynamic, deceptive, and dangerous. They demonstrate the full potential of allegorical figures set in narrative motion, but their horizontal, narrative dimension is much more pronounced than their vertical, figurative one.

The depictions of the homunculi are Western in their iconography, and their demises (with the exception of Greed, who has a more complex story arc) are so allegorically appropriate that they might well have come from Spenser’s pen. Lust is a busty femme fatale with extendable killer claws, and is destroyed by fire. Gluttony is rotund, dim-witted, and childlike, driven by insatiable and indiscriminate hunger, and has a whole pocket dimension inside him—a result of Father’s failed experiment to open a gateway to a spiritual realm. He is ultimately reabsorbed by Father, the devourer devoured.

Sloth is a lumbering hulk of a creature with one blank, pupilless eye. Endowed with superhuman strength and surprising speed, he does much of the mindless grunt work, all the while grumbling, Mendokusai (面倒くさい, “What a pain…”)—a catchphrase not unlike Ignaro’s “he could not tell” (FQ I.viii.32–34) in that it encapsulates the character’s nature. Sloth is not idleness or laziness but, rather, acedia: a spiritual torpor, an existential apathy. When he meets his end, his last words are apt: “So this is death…What a pain.” This outcome is tautological in the same way as when Disdain disdains (FQ II.vii.41) and Despair despairs (FQ I.ix.54). It epitomizes Sloth as sloth and halts his narrative.¹⁹

Envy appears as a green-haired, androgynous adolescent. True to envy’s desire to be like its object, he is a shapeshifter and impersonator. His real form, however, is that of an enormous green beast composed of writhing, agonized faces—the souls that comprise his philosopher’s stone. Like Lust, Envy is weakened through repeated burning, but with a horrifying focus on his eyeballs, the organs through which the sin enters the psyche. In Renaissance art, envy is often depicted with snakes crawling out of its eyes.²⁰ Sure enough, once his power is depleted, Envy is reduced to a tiny, green, reptilian creature, squeaky and pathetic. For all his disdain for humans, and his humiliation at being defeated by them, Envy envies them, envies their resilience and capacity for connection. His secret envy exposed, the creature pulls out and crushes the remainder of its philosopher’s stone, killing itself out of envy.

Wrath acts as the authoritarian leader of the military state in which the main action takes place. His public identity is “King Bradley,” but his official title is “Fuhrer,” and he bears a resemblance to Joseph Stalin, with dark, graying, slicked-back hair and a thick moustache. Unlike Spenser’s uncontrolled Wrath, who has “no gouernement” of his hands, Wrath is an epitome of discipline and stoic restraint, concealing his cold fury and proceeding with genocidal ruthlessness. His death, after a fierce battle, is dignified, with no outward rage and no regret. Pride, Father’s first and most powerful homunculus—and the first sin—poses as King Bradley’s sweet little son. His true form is shadowy, amorphous and tendrilled, full of glaring eyes and toothy mouths, capable of infiltrating, enveloping, and swallowing everything in its path. In defeat, Pride reverts to the innocent and humble form of a fetus or premature infant, who is taken in to be raised anew by humans.

What I mean to suggest through this catalogue is not simply that anime has the imaginative potential to carry Spenser’s allegory, but that Spenserian allegory equips us to understand the aesthetic and moral universe of anime. I hope, eventually, to develop a broader theory of anime as an allegorical medium, one that responds and corresponds to the contemporary world of global flattening and social stratification, symbolic identities and ideological violence. Spenser’s practice reminds us that allegory need not ascend to a higher plane to do its work. Instead, it can help us trace how meaning forms and reforms across the crowded surfaces of our media, offering, if not transcendence, then a way to stay oriented amid the endless proliferation of signs.