What do you get when you cross Japanese anime tropes and the American “Christmas Special fever”? A one-shot anime that is far from perfect but charming anyway. What is this anime, you ask?
It’s called Attack of the Christmas Kaiju!
No, wait, that’s not right. Merry Attack on Titan?
How the Witch Stole Christmas?
American Stereotypes and Where to Find Them?
The Toy That Saved Christmas?
Sorcery in the Big Apple?
Oh, that’s it! Sorcery in the Big City! Which isn’t nearly as precise as any of the preceding alternatives.
When the daughter of a New York police officer returns to the Big Apple, after having spent her adult life in Japan and now a police officer herself, she is concerned that she might find it hard to settle in. Luckily she has her living teddy bear, Apple, to talk to and keep her company on Christmas Eve. But when a Christmas party-obsessed sorceress brings toys and Christmas decorations around the city to life, causing mayhem and threatening the lives of New York’s citizens and apparently abducting Apple, it seems that our heroine and her new NYPD partner have no choice but to stop her. Will they be able to remind her of the true meaning of Christmas… I mean, tell her about the Reason for the Season… I mean, save New York in time for Christmas?
And did I really just write “Christmas party-obsessed sorceress”? There’s an anime for everything.
Go watch it and come back. I’ll wait. From here on out, there are spoilers.
A Political Interpretation
One could perhaps read a mild political thread in this tale. Akari presents herself as a pretty standard Japanese person, culturally at least. Emma, by contrast, seems to deliberately embody a collection of stereotypes about Americans and American police. She’s a donut-loving (understatement?) cop with a blunt and borderline rude exterior, but with a heart of gold and sympathy that can well up into overflowing emotions at the drop of a hat.
The sorceress Liberty could be interpreted as an embodiment of the collective American national spirit, as seen by non-Americans: She doesn’t intend to cause harm—she really has the best interests of everyone in mind, is truly democratic—she’s just astonishingly blind to how her actions destroy and threaten the very lives she wants to benefit. (Her name Liberty seems pretty deliberate as an allusion to the American ideal, possibly even to the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of Americanism.) The consequences are disastrous even for Americans.
Liberty’s power leaves others in awe, but also resentful and aghast by turns, akin to international perceptions of America’s might. And when she accidentally raises a monster to life, it threatens the city and even she is unable to stop it single-handedly: The rampaging kaiju looks for all the world like a creature from a Godzilla film. When we recall that the original Godzilla symbolized nuclear disaster, it’s not hard to read Liberty and her kaiju as a portrayal of how the American use of atomic weapons in World War II—on Japan, no less—resulted in something that threatens America herself: the specter of nuclear disaster. And when Liberty tells Apple that “we” created the monster, Apple’s shock mirrors a non-American’s surprise at the US’s perceived unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for her actions.
The political moral seems to be that American nationalism, if unchecked, causes more harm than good; and that the solution requires cooperation between America and other countries. America’s own salvation, in other words, will come when she and other countries can truly treat each other as equals. And here there is an unsettling question mark, as even at the end Liberty doesn’t seem to get that she has caused problems or done anything wrong.
An Ethical Interpretation
There’s another dimension to the story that the political analogy doesn’t completely capture, however. In Sorcery in the Big City, Akari explicitly contrasts what we might call “big picture” and “detailed picture” views of people and situations. The big picture is important, but if you don’t also have the detailed, close-up picture, you’re missing something critical. Akari says that she had to view Emma up close to get to know who she really is beyond her forbidding exterior. There’s also a beautiful contrast between the “big picture” threat of the kaiju flying over the darkened city, after absorbing all of its electricity, and the close-up view of all of the ordinary citizens helping each other in the face of disaster. Their faces are peaceful, even joyful—even as the monster continues to grow more powerful and threatening.
If Akari and Emma come through this experience to represent the importance of individual humans acting in a very local setting, Liberty is the opposite. Her name itself is an ideal, an abstraction, and a symbol. She also portrays this psychologically: Liberty rarely speaks of individuals when talking about her motives. She consistently uses the word “everyone”, as in, she wants everyone to enjoy Christmas. Absent is any awareness of what the actual individuals she’s affecting think and want. In other words, Liberty has good values but only sees the big picture, not the details. She doesn’t see the individual human faces surrounding her, only a vast, monolithic “everyone”—and she assumes, disastrously, that she knows exactly what “everyone” wants and needs.
Ethically, Liberty might as well be any power that tries to enact good values without taking into account the human individual. Whether it be a totalitarian regime, a liberal democracy, or a city board, enacting policies without considering the good of the human individual is doomed to disaster, even if done from the best of values and intentions. Liberty, in her big picture myopia, cannot defeat Christmaszilla until Akari—who can see the individuals as well—join her. And vice-versa—the individual Akari cannot bring down the enemy without Liberty. Put simply, power and right knowledge of the human person are both needed. Power alone goes astray and spells disaster; right knowledge alone is literally power-less.
There is a hopeful note here at the end, in this view, as when all is said and done Liberty finally begins talking about human individuals, specifically one man who helped her as a child and made Christmas meaningful to her. Maybe she’s finally beginning to see the human person again.
A Theological Interpretation
If we have accounted for the roles of Liberty and Akari in all this, what are we to make of Apple? She too has a necessary role in the fight, first against Liberty, then against the Christmas Kaiju.
I would posit that Apple represents grace. She is always present with Akari, though usually in a hidden way; she always is by her side comforting and consoling her. Her superpowers are unintentionally activated by Liberty—a good result mysteriously drawn from Liberty’s otherwise total disaster. And when Apple stops the semi-truck right before it hits Akari, Akari is literally saved by her. When her superpowers are no longer needed, Apple just as mysteriously goes back to being the secret support as a teddy bear that she was before. Like Apple, grace is usually hidden, a comfort and a consolation, salvific, appearing without our intent, and taking a particular form only as long as needed.
What’s interesting in the final fight with the kaiju is that Apple, too, cannot defeat the creature alone. She is an essential part of the team, but she also needs the team. God can and does bring good out of evil through his grace, and continuously offers his grace at all times; but he chooses to make human cooperation an essential part of his plan of salvation. Grace does not bring about results unless someone accepts and responds to it.
These are my initial readings of this one-off anime. Thank you for reading all the way to the end! I hope you enjoyed it and Sorcery in the Big City! Have a good one!
I have to watch this!! I’d never heard of it before!