Blue Eye Samurai’s sex scenes required as much consideration as the fights
For the team behind Blue Eye Samurai, there was no debate on whether to depict graphic acts of intimacy, even if it meant courting discourse. For all its high-impact fight sequences and blood-soaked melodrama, the show was ultimately about survival in 17th-century Japan, and for women of Edo Japan, that involved sex.
Related
Blue Eye Samurai’s eight-episode first season follows a warrior named Mizu who poses as a man to make it in a male-dominated world — specifically, the economic underbelly of ammunition and prostitution trade, where her current target makes out like a bandit. But threaded throughout the series are glimpses into other lives, from a brothel owner who caters to any fetish in order to keep men under her thumb to a wayward samurai whose thirst for revenge distracts from the pleasures right in front of him. Sexual encounters become yet another venue for exploring the layered human experiences of the era, and a quick way to convey that this animated series is unlike any other Western animated series on television. For director Jane Wu, whose background is in action design and martial arts but who spent a season working on Game of Thrones, getting these graphic scenes right meant choreographing the sex with as much intention as a piercing samurai showdown.
“[Creators Michael Green and Amber Noizumi] were really great about writing these adult scenes, these sensitive scenes, so beautifully that my job was just to render them, but render them with just as much sensitivity,” Wu tells Polygon. “We always want to make sure that these sex/bedroom scenes have a point of view. When you give them a point of view, it doesn’t become gratuitous. And a lot of these points of view are from women’s points of view.”
Creati
Read more on polygon.com
