Ask Lemmygrad

Anime:

Hayao Miyazaki is a marxist, and almost all his works have some marxist undertone. Castle in the Sky (1986) is probably the best one. Its central theme is workers' struggle. Miyazaki stated that it was inspired by the coal miner strikes in UK at the time.

The Leader (2019) is a Chinese anime depicting Karl Marx's life. Pretty good!

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009-2010): Every storyline basically boils down to how capitalism tries to hypocritically justify itself to wash away the horrific consequences of greed. This is the original story, redone to remove fillers and be closer to the manga. Generally considered the superior version to the 2003-2004 series.

Non-anime cartoons and animations:

A Bug's Life (1998): Ants resisting imperialism from outside and the oppressing upper classes from inside.

The Mystery Of The Third Planet (1981): Considered to be one of the best animated films of all time. Produced in the Soviet Union. Has a lot of positive themes about accepting others, respecting nature, working together. Not explicitly marxist in nature, but will leave you feeling warm. Has a kick-ass soundtrack. Try to find the original Russian version.

Chicken Run (2000): Chickens organizing an escape from their farm. While it tries to spoof The Great Escape, it can also act as a tale of revolution of the workers against the bourgeois.

Live-action:

Snow-Piercer: both the movie and series are meant to depict a worker revolt.

Parasite (2019): same creator as snow-piercer. I won't say anything about it, except that it's excellent.

The Young Karl Marx (2017): the early life of Karl Marx leading up to the writing of the communist manifesto.

Andor (2022): It's a Disney Star Wars series, but it's actually quite excellent. Its an antifascist masterpiece to the core.

Starship Troopers (1997): based on the fascist-loving book by Heinlein, director Neuemeier turns it into a satirizing exposition of fascism. Its main theme is how the regime will fill you with ideal notions about its greatness, take you in to serve it, then spit you out when it has sucked the life out of you.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Depressing, but watching this will fire up the revolutionary in you.

I know that... it might have been bilibili or something that did a literal "Marx" anime. I downloaded it but gonna look it up... here it is (The Leader)

hysteria is probably full of landmines because of when it was made but they got away with this banger segment on the russian revolution so maybe it's not super libbed out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZbho6AsBOc

Not anime but the Berlin comic book is pretty great

Because you said fun stuff, I'll give a mention to something that's non-Marxist, but seems relatively harmless in terms of ideology influence: comedy sketch channel Chris and Jack on Youtube. Mostly they seem to inhabit that nebulous area of comedy where it's hard to pin it to any sort of specific ideological goals and is more just goofing around with various premises. Of course, everything has some kind of ideology behind it, conscious or otherwise, but point being, I find it relatively easy to enjoy their stuff without worrying too much about it being a backwards influence.

I gotta recommend One Piece, my all time favorite. It's about goofy 'pirates' who sail from island to island liberating them from fascists or stopping attempted coups, or fighting the CIA. The biggest problem in the one piece world is that everything was built to support a ruling class of disgusting inbred billionaires who do things like take slaves. There is a literal revolutionary army named "the revolutionaries" lead by a guy based on Che (he looks like che, his boat was named after che's boat) who's main goal is to destroy that billionaire ruling class.

The beginning of the show (like first 4 arcs) are more about introducing characters, but every arc after is about the above. The tone is like if Tom & Jerry had a plot. Despite how it might appear it's not like a typical power scaling battle shonen, the fights are not the main point, though later on they do end up emphasizing fights a lot (in the anime, the manga is better at keeping fights secondary).

The show isn't without issue though. It portrays trans, gender fluid, and queer people in a very mean way. They're all still part of the 'good guys' but a lot will be drawn as like hairy men wearing dresses. There are better portrayals like one inspired by tim curry or one inspired by Jim carry (with the best voice actor ever if you watch it subbed). This issue gets a lot better later on though. This story has been going for 25 years, in the last 5 years or so it's gotten much much better.

Another issue is it's portrayal of women. Almost every prominent woman looks the same. They have the same-ish face and exact same body. They're frequently scantily clad. No matter how important they are to the story, no matter how well fleshed out their characters are or how heartbreaking their story is, the author will still find a way to make them dress in underwear or something. I realize a lot of this was because of his editors. It doesn't become a problem till later on when he gets editor after editor pushing him to draw them as scantily clad as possible. The author has warned other authors that the publisher is full of perverts. The anime makes things more gratuitous than the manga.

I do recommend reading it over watching it due to pacing and artwork though. They are remaking the anime right now even though the anime is still ongoing. The remake is supposed to address the pacing and art.

if you need fun stuff, that doesn't need to be marxist in content (just keep out of overtly fascist content) ...don't try to isolate of good fun by being a purist

Adventure time

edit; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBHouBDjqsc&t=1s&ab_channel=BenKraus