Ive got a few points to make in response to your comments above, but for the sake of clarity Im just going to roughly summarise what I believe your main point to be. Youre saying that the series features a lot of internal monologues, these monologues arent being depicted in a visually interesting manner and therefore youre questioning why experiencing this story through the medium of anime as composed to some other format. My thoughts on your points are as follows:
- I think the earlier episodes, especially the 1st episode, were better directed and as a result of this better direction all these aforementioned internal monologues were more interesting. There was not only more going on visually, but aurally as well, to suture the audience into these characters and give us the same experiences they were having. I think thats the show is at its best when youre uncomfortably close to these people.
- There are lots of other visual techniques I feel like the series could be using to tackle this material such as: symbolic imagery, colour/lighting choices, expressionistic mise-en-scene, extremely subjective cinematography, fanciful visions imaged inside the minds of characters the possibilities are endless. But the direction seems to want to remain fairly grounded in the real world and so instead you have stuff like plain text on the screen as in your above screenshot, which isnt really very interesting. I think that you can only really get away with stuff like that if your name is Hideki Anno.
- Even with the somewhat restrained nature of the direction I still find myself interested in these scenes and therefore there is some merit in having them depicted in this fashion, even if its clear the show could do more.
So I had some thoughts written out, but I just decided to read the equivalent manga chapter just to educate myself and here's a couple of pages:
The intertitles are actually anime original, so that's the director presumably trying to "spice things up" visually (maybe he's an Anno fan
), but I think the manga version of this scene is - at least for me - more palatable than the anime version.
So,
Fleabag is on my mind because I just watched it recently, but this is how they introduce the main character in the very first episode:
(NSFW I guess?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klnudgr6R1A
In essence, they're the same. But the slight change from simple omniscient narration to having the character address the audience directly is more than enough to make Fleabag interesting to me. The effect is the same, in that you're getting into the head of a character by being confronted with their thoughts, but Fleabag describing the awkwardness of her sexual encounter to me is more interesting than Akane explaining her thoughts as she has sex with the most milquetoast man in Japan. It's like the show doesn't trust that I understand that she finds him dull.
Perhaps I can forgive the manga because I can read the chapter in a couple of minutes instead of the 5-10 minutes or so the anime devotes to it. There's also the fact that there's no voice acting to carry tone, so maybe having her explain that she's bored is necessary - it might be an interesting experiment to remove all the text bubbles and ask random people if they understand what is happening in the scene without any of the narration.
My issue also stems from essentially seeing the same technique repeated three times with the three different stories from this episode (born from 2 chapters of the manga). It made the narration feel even more transparent in terms of not feeling like the director trusts me to be able to read the characters without a full explanation from them.
I totally understand what the manga is going for, and by association, I can understand what the anime and live action show is going for as well. I just think they could have tried to push it a little further to make the experience of watching the shows more than just watching a voiced/animated version of the manga.
I think theres probably a number of factors that go into the shows depiction of sex, but I would have to guess that the key ones are:
- Avoiding any imagery that objectifies the characters through revealing imagery of camerawork. The show never feels like its exploiting the characters, even though were experiencing very intimate moments with them.
- You probably dont want to get very explicit when youre depicting characters of this age engaging in sexual activity.
- If a scene causes the intended response in a viewer, then is it really necessary to me more explicit anyway? Do you understand what the characters were feeling in that moment and what it meant for them? If so, then arguably the scene has done its job.
- Cultural norms regarding the depiction of sex.
I think my feelings about this come from how they animate the kissing:
Someone had to draw those individual lines of spit on the tongues, so it's not like they didn't give this any thought. lol
Of course, this is also how a lot of the kissing is depicted in the
manga, so maybe it's more of a problem that I have with source material than anything else.
I mean, on the one hand it's trying to invoke sexual imagery by allowing us access to something that's supposed to be intimate - particularly since every character seems to love shoving tongues into mouths - but on the other hand it's also relatively tame outside of the kissing... so it just feels like an odd dichotomy.