Blue Eye Samurai’s sex scenes were designed like the big fights

For the team behind it Blue-eyed samurai, there was no debate about whether explicit acts of intimacy should be depicted, even if it meant courtship was taking place. For all its impressive fight sequences and blood-soaked melodrama, the show was ultimately about survival in 17th-century Japan, and for women from Edo Japan, that involved sex.

Blue-eyed samuraiThe eight-episode first season follows a warrior named Mizu who pretends to be a man to make it in a male-dominated world – specifically the economic underbelly of the munitions and prostitution trade, where her current target poses as a bandit. But throughout the series there are glimpses into other lives, from a brothel owner who turns to every fetish to keep men under his 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 time, and a quick way to convey that this animated series is unlike any other Western animated series on television. For director Jane Wu, who has a background in action design and martial arts, but she worked on it for a season Game of Thronesgetting these graphic scenes right meant choreographing the sex with as much intention as a piercing samurai confrontation.

“(Creators Michael Green and Amber Noizumi) were really great at writing these adult scenes, these sensitive scenes, so beautiful that my job was just to portray them, but to portray them with equal sensitivity,” Wu tells Polygon. “We always want to make sure that these sex/bedroom scenes have a point of view. If you give them a point of view, it doesn’t become unnecessary. And many of these views come from women’s perspectives.”

Creating that point of view, and the continued clash of delicacy and brutality, began with a vision for the overall design of Blue-eyed samurai. She found a breakthrough in her youth: memories of watching bunraku, the classic Japanese puppet theater known for its bold lines, subtle movements and the occasional serious expression. Through animation, Wu and her team from French studio Blue Spirit were able to capture the ‘creepy’ quality of the puppets in both design and movement, while still maintaining a grounded sense of reality. When Noizumi and Green decided to write bunraku dolls in the fifth episode, the whole experience came full circle.

“That was so meta,” says Wu, “because we were already doing puppetry within the animation.”

The wizardry of Wu’s animated puppetry shines through in the various fighting styles seen in Season 1. While Mizu is perhaps the most ruthless assassin in Japan, she has never been formally trained, giving her swordsmanship a dexterity that easily translates through the bunraku-inspired approach. But it is also key to the sex scenes, where the audience must feel touch and warmth from what can often be a distant medium. This is where an action choreographer’s mind helped Wu.

Image: Netflix

In episode 2, Akemi, a princess whose father hopes to marry her off for power, sneaks into the bedroom with her true love, Taigan, a swordsman recently defeated by Mizu. Taigan spirals after his defeat, his continued life a fate worse than death. To bring him out of the depression, out of love and desperation for her own life, Akemi puts him down, explains that there is no shame in being attacked, and then strips naked. Her monologue continues as the two have sex for the first time. “Hit your knife,” she says to Taigan as they get closer. Although wooing him makes her own life more stable, for Akemi it is still an act of passion. But a quick shot of Akemi staring into the mirror when it’s all over quietly speaks to the complexity of using her body in this way.

Unlike most movies or television shows that go straight from romantic initiation to post-coital chat, Blue-eyed samurai follows the couple without interruption. After the two climaxes, the drama continues to unfold, with Akemi rolling off Taigan, reorienting himself, and then waiting for a response to the more pressing matter of Taigan’s meltdown. The swordsman, to her surprise, admits that she is right about his shame: there is no point. But now he wants to track down Mizu for a real challenge.

Akemi continues to bend sex and men’s desperation to her will. It’s not the most obvious echo of Mizu’s own quest, but it’s there, and certainly intentional.

“Akemi and Mizu are the opposite sides of what women can be,” Wu says. “Sex was Akemi’s weapon. That’s all she could use. Mizu uses her knives and her katanas and stuff. So (the sex scenes) are just a way for us to show you the diversity of what women at that time used to get what they needed.

Blue-eyed samurai season 1 is now on Netflix.