Animation provides artists with the capacity to present a world entirely their own. The medium is chalk-full of fantastical depictions of earth, space, war, poverty, decadence, history, and the future . As purported by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the “aura” has historically incensed much of art as a means of establishing a magical foundation for “the cult”. Modernity, however, signaled a mechanization of culture and culture production— leaving little mobility for artists to imbue their work with such aura. In our post-9/11 world—dominated by US hegemony—art has carried on with its particular mechanized role. Animation, however, presents vast, vivid worlds which have been disarmed by the genre’s infantilization and, as a consequence, provided room for artists to meaningfully grapple with the contradiction between the cultic aura and modernity’s mechanization. In this paper, I aim to investigate how we can understand animation as a medium that can uniquely wrestle with art’s hegemonic demand and counter-hegemonic potential by surveying changing depictions of the Orient and its broader context in animated television series and films. One Piece (1999-present) presents the desert country of Alabasta, inching closer and closer to civil war primarily sparked by water scarcity which is revealed to be the manufacturing of a major warlord. Code Geass (2006) presents a world within which the primary force influencing all things is British imperialism, as the series critically interrogates the ways in which such historic international domination serves to underdevelop and present sites such as the Orient to be backwards. The progression of the Avatar world from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008) and Avatar: The Legend of Korra (2012-2014) depicts a process of global modernization, which necessarily carries implications for changing representations of the Middle East and the rest of the Global South as they advance towards industrialization. Young Justice (2010-present)—particularly the third season—looks at the Middle East as a site of decontextualized violence, one which we understand to be mired in war and poverty although the root is never particularly investigated. By extending Benjamin’s analysis of art in 1930s Nazi Germany to the present, I intend to investigate how animation has served to revive the aura through potentially counter-hegemonic imagery and storytelling while simultaneously clinging to the mechanization of culture by adhering to the foundations of orientalism in its ever-transforming depictions and de/contextualization of the Orient in various world-building projects.