Stop Reading Fascism Into Symmetry

'Buddy,' the animated film from Production Designer Anna Kathleen, has drawn a headline accusing it of pervasive fascist imagery — in talking trains, puppet characters. The visual world a giant orange unicorn rampages through. The claim rests on aesthetic analysis: certain design choices are formally similar to aesthetics associated with authoritarian regimes. But this argument skips a crucial step, one that matters far beyond animation criticism.

Calling a design choice 'fascist' because it employs symmetry, monumentality, or geometric order conflates formal vocabulary with political ideology. It works only if you assume fascism owns those visual forms. It doesn't. Symmetry appears in cathedrals built five centuries before Mussolini, in modernist corporate headquarters designed by socialists, in children's playgrounds and public swimming pools with zero political intentionality. Order and scale are tools. Every architect, animator, and designer in history has reached for them to make something legible, imposing, or navigable.

The real problem is that animation criticism has borrowed the language of design analysis without interrogating what that language actually claims. When Anna Kathleen discusses her thematic choices and aesthetic decisions, she is describing problem-solving: how do you make a world cohere visually, how do you guide the eye, how do you establish hierarchy and scale? Those are craft questions. A production designer working in 2026 is not secretly embedding fascist politics into a film about a deranged puppet because she used parallel lines and proportion.

Yet the headline treats identification as proof. It assumes that spotting formal similarities between a design and authoritarian aesthetics is equivalent to proving intent. Is a category error. The critic has mistaken observation for argument. This move — finding a visual vocabulary and retroactively assigning it political meaning. Runs through animation discourse constantly. It feels rigorous. It produces readable criticism. It accomplishes almost nothing except make the critic sound like they have decoded a secret message.

If you work in any visual field, you have probably felt this weight: the pressure to justify every choice not as a solution to a formal problem but as a statement of values. The antidote is to stay honest about what you can actually know from looking at something. Kathleen's design choices tell you what she chose to prioritize: clarity, visual interest, a coherent aesthetic. They don't tell you her politics unless she tells you directly. Even then you're hearing about her intent, not reading it off the image.