T w e n t y S i d e d

If a woman is taking a bath, it’s so that the plot can show her getting walked in on / being murdered / being spied on. If someone eats, they do it to show us what sort of person they are. A puffy, addled cop will eat doughnuts. A corrupt rich man will eat something decadent and gross to the average middle – class viewer. The slobby fat guy will eat fast food. If someone lays down to sleep, it’s because they are about to be attacked or have a nightmare. If a family eats, it’s so they can have a conversation that serves the plot. We rarely see what they are eating. We certainly never see close-ups of the food.

Now, all of this is perfectly reasonable. Western writers have learned that everything needs to serve the plot and character development. If a character has to do something mundane, then it needs to tell us about them or advance the plot, otherwise you’re just wasting screen time, right?

But anime seems to have a different take on this. Sometimes they show us people doing these things just for the sake of showing us how much they are (or are not) enjoying themselves. When a meal happens on-screen, we get closeups of the food, and of the character’s reaction to it. We know what they are having and how they feel about it. Then they eat some of it, and we get a reaction shot: How does it taste, do they like it, how does the cook (if they are around) feel about the reaction? We are shown all of this before the characters get down to the business of having real dialog. Sometimes this serves the plot, but sometimes it’s just there to show us how happy everyone is.

Sometimes we see a character go to bed, stretch and comment on how tired they are, and remark to themselves about how comfortable their bed it. Then it cuts to the next day. As an American viewer I used to get confused by this. What was that scene for? Am I missing something?

Sometimes we’ll have a scene where someone takes a bath, and nothing happens except that they were having a hard day and feel much better now. This could have been revealed by dialog later, but the writers often show this on-screen anyway. The point seems to be to allow the audience to enjoy this stuff vicariously. The writers don’t want us to know that the food is good, the bath is warm, or the bed is soft and relaxing, they want us to experience this along with the character.

This sort of thing is most common in romantic comedies. Ai Yori Aoshi is like this. Everything between the first few episodes and the last disc is just a buffet of slice-of-life moments, little joys and pleasures, and lighthearted comedy based on mostly mundane events. A Little Snow Fairy, Sugar did this as well. Many times the scene would linger on as the characters talked about getting a waffle, what flavor they wanted, how it tasted, and how they should share.

After getting used to it, I’ve really come to enjoy this aspect of %anime. It’s unexpected and different. It’s unhurried. It only works when we really care about the characters, though. Nothing is more tiresome or laborous than a show that drags on showing uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it really works.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.