As someone who has long thought friendship is undervalued in fiction relative to romances and rivalries, I enjoyed this. Have you seen the recent TV show One Piece? Admittedly it's a Western remake of a manga, but it constantly pushes friendship as its core theme. To the point that I kept watching despite how silly it is.
A recent(ish) anime with strong themes of friendship is Beastars. I'd say it goes way beyond that and depicts several types of deep male-male bonds. One of the central relationships, which even overshadows the main love story in the end, could be described as some form of platonic love. On the surface, the depicted world is very bizarre to the point of being nonsensical. But it works as a metaphor and a vessel for exploring some of the darker and deeper aspects of human psychology. I'm not an anime buff by any stretch, but I absolutely loved this one.
Also, children's animated series very frequently have themes of friendship, building trust, and working together, for obvious reasons. For example Avatar (the last airbender, not the blue cats). Hollywood may be intellectually bankrupt, but storytelling in general is alive and well.
Part of the trouble is that our society has moved toward assuming that every close emotional bond is sexual (or, perhaps, either sexual or parental). If we see Sam and Frodo deeply attached to each other during their long, hard journey into Mordor, we may suspect it of having a sexual subtext that the author surely never imagined and one have rejected; some readers may even wish to interpret it that way because they find it appealing to imagine themselves in such a situation. Likewise with the bond between Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia, or that between Kirk and Spock, which gave us an entire genre of fanfic. This sort of thinking is what gives us the coinage "bromance" and the plots of a huge fraction of fanfic, "slash." And once you're aware of slash it's hard not to see it as an option. That effect may be, as it were, pre-empting the interpretation of strong emotional bonds as (nonsexual) friendship.
As someone who has long thought friendship is undervalued in fiction relative to romances and rivalries, I enjoyed this. Have you seen the recent TV show One Piece? Admittedly it's a Western remake of a manga, but it constantly pushes friendship as its core theme. To the point that I kept watching despite how silly it is.
A recent(ish) anime with strong themes of friendship is Beastars. I'd say it goes way beyond that and depicts several types of deep male-male bonds. One of the central relationships, which even overshadows the main love story in the end, could be described as some form of platonic love. On the surface, the depicted world is very bizarre to the point of being nonsensical. But it works as a metaphor and a vessel for exploring some of the darker and deeper aspects of human psychology. I'm not an anime buff by any stretch, but I absolutely loved this one.
Also, children's animated series very frequently have themes of friendship, building trust, and working together, for obvious reasons. For example Avatar (the last airbender, not the blue cats). Hollywood may be intellectually bankrupt, but storytelling in general is alive and well.
Part of the trouble is that our society has moved toward assuming that every close emotional bond is sexual (or, perhaps, either sexual or parental). If we see Sam and Frodo deeply attached to each other during their long, hard journey into Mordor, we may suspect it of having a sexual subtext that the author surely never imagined and one have rejected; some readers may even wish to interpret it that way because they find it appealing to imagine themselves in such a situation. Likewise with the bond between Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia, or that between Kirk and Spock, which gave us an entire genre of fanfic. This sort of thinking is what gives us the coinage "bromance" and the plots of a huge fraction of fanfic, "slash." And once you're aware of slash it's hard not to see it as an option. That effect may be, as it were, pre-empting the interpretation of strong emotional bonds as (nonsexual) friendship.