WARNING: The following article contains minor spoilers for the first two episodes of Komi Can't Communicate, currently streaming on Netflix.
Komi Can't Communicate debuted on Netflix worldwide this October. The slice of life comedy-drama tells the story of Shoko Komi, a girl with social anxiety, and Hitohito Tadano, a boy determined to help her make 100 friends. Its incredibly fluid animation brings Komi's world and her subtle interactions to life.
In animation, every frame requires conscious decision-making, and not much happens by accident. When anime experiments with its format and presentation, then, there is usually a reason why. Komi Can't Communicate takes advantage of this by deploying the use of various aspect ratios.
The opening seconds of Episode 2, "It's Just a Childhood Friend. Plus More.," are presented in a pillarboxed format, which means that bars on either side of the screen give the image a more square-like appearance. This gives the opening scenes the appearance of an earlier television anime, from the time when television screens were produced with a "4:3" ratio as opposed to the modern standard of "16:9." The question is, why did OLM make this choice?
The scene depicts a boy playfully putting his arm around his friend's neck in the foreground, and two girls talking in the background. A train hurtles past behind them. The scene cuts away to the windows of the train, each one stylistically presenting a scene from the previous episode. During this sequence, vertical text appears on either side of the screen. Spoken by a narrator, this text reminds the audience of Komi's situation: her social anxiety prevents her from making friends, but she still wants to. On a mechanical level, the pillarbox format allows for these manga-esque subtitles. The series frequently uses such manga touches, such as narrated callouts identifying Komi's feelings when they are not apparent to the audience.
The train passes by, revealing Komi standing alone. This is likely to create a contrast between the friends' relationships and Komi's loneliness. The cherry blossom petals blowing in the wind link this to an important anime theme: nostalgia. The annual bloom of the cherry blossom tree makes people reminisce about previous years' cherry blossoms. Komi isn't just missing out on friendship: she's missing out on memories of friendship in the future. It's possible that the pillarbox format could also exist to heighten the feeling of nostalgia in the audience's minds by reminding them of anime gone by.
Another reason for this aspect ratio might be to emphasize the vertical, as opposed to the horizontal, scale of the scene. At the end of the pillarbox scene, Komi looks up as the barriers to the crossing rise and takes a step forward. The perspective is positioned behind and below Komi, emphasizing the height of the sky above her. This could symbolize the scale of the task ahead of her more effectively than the scene might have done in a wider aspect ratio.
This is not the only moment in the episode that manipulates the screen's aspect ratio. When Tadano confronts childhood friend Najimi Osana about why they refuse to hang out with Komi, they recall an encounter from when Osana and Komi were young children. The scene is presented in a letterboxed format, making it resemble a theatrical movie. Some of the humor from this scene comes from what could be described as Osana's overreaction to Komi's apparent dismissal of them. Osana's face fades melodramatically over the scene, and they go on to say, "I was in bed for a week from the shock." The usage of letterboxing here could be to imply that, for someone as good at making friends as Osana, being seemingly ignored was as dramatic as the events of a movie.
The letterboxing returns when Tadano finally convinces Osana to walk with Komi, watching them from a distance. The scene is shown twice, first with the so-called "Najimi cam" and then with the "Tadano cam." The main purpose of the letterboxing in this scene is a convenient shorthand: white for Osana's perspective and black for Tadano's. another reason behind the letterboxing in this scene might be to parody how surprisingly high the stakes have become. The fact that the walk is shown twice from Osana and Tadano's perspectives also makes the relatively small-scale encounter feel like a tense thriller. This heightened tension makes it easier for the audience to feel how stressful the walk must be for Komi, the only person whose direct perspective is not shown.
Komi Can't Communicate overlays its already outstanding visuals with various stylistic touches such as video game pixel art and typographic onomatopoeia. Its experiments with aspect ratios are another, a subtler example of OLM's creativity in communicating Komi's story.
