Forum - View topicINTEREST: Sonny Boy Director Shingo Natsume Explains Why The Anime Has No Monologues
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Anime was a mistake
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Kinda sad that in the anime industry, someone has to make a statement as to why they strived to not create utter garbage.
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings
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For anime-originals this is ideal and pretty manageable, but for those with a pre-existing source, especially light novels, this is far more difficult to do while still managing to capture the essence of the story and characters. With a truly expert director and staff, as well as a stable production, you can still manage to communicate what a character is generally thinking in the novel with concise dialogue and intricate expression (or even just flashy directing so that the monologues are at least better at keeping your attention) without having to resort to just copy-pasting their monologues from book to anime, but without all of that, it's way more challenging (and in many cases you're better off just reading the original).
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Touma55
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100% this! Adaptions can be pretty tricky and you really need someone in charge who knows their stuff to pull them off really well. |
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KitKat1721
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The whole interview is fascinating, love when Funimation (or any licensing company) gets to post these longer-format deep dives.
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earl.m
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Did anyone ever figure out who "Aki Sensei" actually was? My guess is that spoiler[it was Hoshi, who Radjani stated learned to alter his appearance]. It explains how Aki-Sensei knew Tsubasa's secret, and Yamabiko's experiences demonstrated that traversing different worlds permitted the equivalent of time travel.
My only issue: that would also be necessary to explain "the principal", spoiler[who lest we forget was only seen communicating with Hoshi and Aki-Sensei. So, Hoshi went back in time to manipulate both his former selves - i.e. by convincing Hoshi that he was god - into getting everyone - including himself - to give up on the idea of returning home, to kill "war" and who knows what else. It appears that Hoshi was fine with this so long as he got to be in charge.] Although we know from Asakaze that spoiler[everyone ultimately got sick of Hoshi's leadership and abandoned them.] That was pretty much the only thing about the show that I couldn't figure out. Anyone else have any theories? |
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DRosencraft
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Like any tool, if you try to rely on it for everything, it will end up being used where it doesn't really apply. Monologues at times are a useful and generally necessary tool for conveying elements of a story and/or its characters. This is especially true for anime, where you don't have actors who can "just do a better job showing emotion" or when you don't have the time in your story it would take to have a bunch of characters and/or events tease out what could be stated and moved past in a much shorter time. But, as said, you do this too much and you end up being mostly monologue and little else. Leave out the monologue and don't replace it with all those other elements, and all you're doing is lazily creating a mystery and telling the audience to guess what's really goin on and calling it being "artistic" or "deep" when you just couldn't be bothered to work in the other elements needed for your story.
What Shingo is saying isn't anything I don't think anyone else already knows. The story Shingo had to work with, the time and costs associated with creating the story this way, lent itself to this option. Would anything have been lost by including a monologue or two? I personally don't think so, but It wasn't my story to direct. At the end of the day, it's an art form, and it's the director's job to do the most they can with what they're given to work with in terms of a story. This worked out well for him in this case. |
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2368 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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Monologues are purely a method for novels and playacting; film and tv are a completely different medium that relies more upon the visual effect. It's one of the reasons why David Lynch's 1984 Dune failed in the adaptation: by not utilizing the medium in full effect. I bet even Shakespeare would have 86'ed most his monologues had he been born in the modern era. Granted I can't even begin to describe an inaudible To Be Or Not To Be, but the thought keeps me up at night.
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OreoDoublestuff
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I feel anime is something of an exception to your rule. You're very right that movies and TV tend not to lend themselves to monologue because they adopt a more naturalistic style to promote immersion. Anime, for a number of reasons, has a more consciously artificial presentation. Take the tableau, where characters all pause for visual effect, as a dramatic staple that anime uses all the time. Kill La Kill is basically 40% tableau by volume, it would have been a much different show without them. Monologues though, are just way harder to do right and stand out more. Kill La Kill is in a genre that lends itself to monologues and the writers make excellent use of them. Closer, maybe (I've not seen Sonny Boy, though now I'd like to) might be FLCL; I really don't think we would have known exactly what kind of person Naota, our protagonist, is without his adolescent rambling. So, again, I feel like anime as a medium is just more theatrical to begin with and can take monologues better than other televisual media. But it is nice that Natsume decided to go without them, because yeah, lately they've been getting irritating. |
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DRosencraft
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Yes. It has to be remembered that different mediums require different approaches. As mentioned, anime tend to have a more frenetic pace because moments of non-movement stand out more as something of emphasis. The effort it would take to animate all the minor movements and expressions that a live actor displays just standing around means that anime often leaves these elements out in favor of dialogue. These things, like how fidgety a person is, how shifty their eyes are, how hard they're breathing, etc, we catch on to with an actor on screen and can be used to subtly convey information about that character and their state of mind. In anime you'll only get that if they are really emphasizing it. Movies typically have a much narrower story they hope to tell, so spending a minute or two just letting characters silently move about to convey story is doable. A weekly anime counterintuitively tends to have more sprawling narratives trying to compress a lot more information into a number of chunks. The same "empty" moments every episode, despite how much they may end up conveying, is likely to feel like it's bogged down and dragging or wasting time. |
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