femmenietzsche:

One of the best things about anime is that it’s often unafraid to go for broke emotionally, by which I don’t just mean that the emotions are pushed to heightened extremes, although that’s obviously part of it. But the main thing is that in anime reality is made to mirror the emotional state of the characters. Take one of the standard anime ending types, the psychosexual apocalypse (like in Evangelion). In a psychosexual apocalypse everything that can be wrong is wrong. Not only is the main character alone and needy and having a complete mental breakdown, all of their friends are being brutally murdered plus the bad guys are about to win plus the universe is about to end plus it’s all due to a the protagonist’s innermost thoughts being projected onto the rest of the world. The emotions of the main character (which hopefully are grounded in something more relatable and down to earth) match the rest of the story in a quite literal way. It may/should also make sense within the plot, but that’s secondary. And it’s not just downer endings. Over the top physical destruction/mayhem can reflect feelings of dominance or righteous anger, for instance.

You seem to get less of that in Western media. (Perhaps because it’s harder to do in live action than in animation and there’s just not that much adult Western animation?) I can think of counterexamples. In Antichrist, the world very much matches the deteriorating relationship between the characters, on a somewhat smaller scale. (Which is fine. The anime examples I gave were very obvious, but that isn’t strictly necessary.) And at the very least in any decent film the music, cinematography, etc. will match the emotions of the characters. But mostly Western media doesn’t bend the reality of its worldbuilding to reach greater emotional heights. (Surreal psychological films like Antichrist being the main exception I can think of.) You might place a lonely character in a small town for some additional resonance, but that’s about it. In a superhero movie, the world may be about to end, but the heroes remain quippy right until the very end. In a straight drama the characters may reach tremendous highs or piteous lows, but the world itself is a static given. Neither of those are bad, of course, they just leave a gap which the emotional maximalism of anime fills.