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There is a scene in the third episode of Sunnyone of this summer’s most talked-about sci-fi thrillers, in which the main character Suzie – played by a fabulously styled Rashida Jones – gives a brief summary of her recent woes and revelations from her comfortable, bubbly yellow Togo sofa: “Apparently I made my lifestyle possible through robot sex and murder,” she says, sipping a cocktail from a curved-stemmed martini glass. “Well, at least it’s a really nice lifestyle,” says her friend Mixxy, as she climbs from the couch to a cartoonish, tubular, red Moustache Bold model from 2009 and strokes the frame: “I would kill someone like a robot just for that chair.”
Every episode of Sunny comes with a Saul Bass-inspired title credits that serves as a shorthand: This is Japan, sometime in the future, but a place that also looks like a past that never really existed.
Suzie’s husband and son apparently died in a plane crash and she recently received Sunny, a “homebot” from her late husband’s company. Intrigue and secrets unfold episode by episode, but it’s the style as much as the story that draws you in. Cocktail bars glow ruby red, grocery stores are cold dark blue.
As a fan of Japanese design, I am thrilled at how perfectly Sunny captures the anachronisms of a culture so strongly associated with innovation without veering into cliché. I have spent fantastic days in the design studios of Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, observing the machinations of some of their specialist departments, only to be driven back to my hotel in a taxi by an elderly man who relied on a printed guidebook with a set of maps and a magnifying glass, in a car decorated with sofa covers.
Sunny is set in Kyoto, not Tokyo, which is significant. It could easily have fit into the neon labyrinths of Shinjuku or the high-rises of the modern capital. Rashida Jones’ character could have mourned and dissolved in an apartment like Cate Blanchett’s in Tokyo, surrounded by Tadao Ando’s modernism. Tar — but instead, every frame is full of domestic warmth, shadows, and primary colors. It rails against the AI that is an integral part of the plot.
Suzie’s house is spacious but understated. The wooden lattices, patterned floor, shoji screens and interior garden mark it as fundamentally traditional – all codes of architecture still rooted in the rise of the 12th century samurai class, when houses became places for ceremonial social occasions and required appropriately demarcated spaces.
Each technology is judiciously combined and stripped down from what we have in reality today. Phones are simple devices that allow one to communicate by voice rather than text, and when Suzie scrolls through online content in bed, the screen has the visual quality of a paper screen. The translation earbuds that Suzie uses daily to communicate will surely be available soon in our own reality, and are discreet – in Japan, where high-tech can be considered vulgar, it is often made either Kawaii (childish and super cute) or completely hidden. If you stay in a luxury Ryokanyou may find the television hidden under a shroud of beautiful embroidery.
The use of primary color blocking in Sunny’s The set design is impressive, as is the noir-style lighting. An opening scene has red-soaked backlighting as a robot commits a murder. Blood splatters on a padded panel. The lighting balance is adjusted to show that the blood is definitely red, but the fabric is a sunny yellow. The Japanese consider yellow to be a sacred representation of nature and life, but the shades of color in Japan can be inscrutable to outsiders. There is an exhaustive list of dentoshokuthe individual shades of color. White is de facto a wedding color in the West, but historically it is a mourning color in Japan. The yellow that appears on certain tabletops and in the bloodstained fabrics in Sunny is a youthful, childlike yellow color. It was chosen to make a flashy impression.
It’s also mentioned in a flashback when Suzie is saying goodbye to her seemingly doomed husband at the airport, muttering “yellow” as she looks at his shoes. There’s something so chic about the blood on that fabric, so… Kvadrat. Elsewhere, there’s an incredible green carpet in the vast expanse of the 1960s Kyoto International Conference Center, which plays the role of the ImaTech headquarters from which the homebots originate. The building itself is remarkable – a brutalist take on traditional temples with sloped walls. That green is even more striking: an overtly retro 1950s hue. So quintessentially Japanese.
A view of Suzie’s house in Sunnyit is impossible not to exoticize something that is so far removed from our crude Western blueprints. Shoji The lattice patterns – with church-style stained glass windows – and the abundance of fine wood seem like an impossible luxury. But the reality, as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki documented in his 1933 essay on cults,Praise of the Shadowis that it is doable. We just didn’t care about it. We are obsessed with exaggerated decoration and bright lights, while the architectural aspects in Sunny are pretty much the entire facility.
“The beauty of a Japanese room depends on the different shadows,” writes Tanizaki. “Westerners are amazed by the simplicity of Japanese rooms, seeing nothing more than ashen walls without any decoration… Of course, the Japanese room has its picture niche, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers are not decorations; they give depth to the shadows.”
Provide better – and less – lighting. Enjoy the scent of Tatami mats Mats and sakura Wood. Of course, you can also get a yellow sofa.
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