Never Like the First Time! chronicles the first sexual experiences of four individuals. All images © 2006 Filmtecknarna.

I was 15 when I lost my virginity. My partner in the meat dance was Sheri Gagnon, a girl from the nearby Uplands air force base.

The first attempt failed. We were upstairs at my friend, Steve Leggett’s house. I couldn’t cope with the pressure of knowing other guys were around. The turtle, so to speak, wouldn’t come out of his shell. Meat dance aborted.

The second attempt was at the comfortable confines of my parent’s place. Mom and Pops were at work during the day, leaving me plenty of time to do the dirty deed comfortably and calmly.

Being self-conscious about my body, we got undressed in the slightly darkened room. I don’t remember much else. We probably kissed. I bet she gave me a blowjob cause she gave me lots of them. Beyond that I just remember flopping down on her. After struggling to find my way in, Sheri eventually grabbed hold of my cock and guided it home. Then I just lay there. Seriously. I figured it was like an amusement park ride or a pinball machine. You drop your quarter in and stuff happens.

Well, that’s about it. After about 4-5 minutes of lying atop Sheri, we agreed that was enough.

Jonas Odell.

Never Like the First Time!, the latest film by Swedish animator extraordinaire Jonas Odell, re-creates the first sexual experiences of four people. While the first two stories convey relatively common sexual initiation experiences (man gets laid at a party, woman recounts the slow, sensual build up to the eventual let down of the big moment), the last two are at once shocking, sad, beautiful and poignant. In the third segment, told using only black-and-white with rotoscope, a woman suggests that her first time might have been when she blacked out and was possibly raped at a strange man’s house. However, she’s not even sure. She just remembers waking up naked, feeling sore all over. In the film’s final episode, an elderly man recounts his first time. As Odell recreates the man’s vivid memories with a collage of cut-out images taken from vintage advertisements, the man’s voice become increasingly excited and passionate. His words carry him deeper into his memories and to a happier time and place that he had temporarily lost, but clearly not forgotten. In that single moment, the man rediscovers life’s beauty and simplicity.

“The idea for the film,” explains Odell, “came after having made Family and Friends. I thought it was interesting to do that kind of episodic film, where you put several stories on the same subject next to each other. I had the idea that I wanted to let several people tell their story of the same event in their lives, and put these stories next to each other. I think there is something really interesting about putting several stories on the same subject next to each other. You get a result that is more than just the sum of the different parts.”

Odell considered different ideas for the subject of the film, but came back to first sexual experiences “because it is that kind of experience that is sort of a milestone in people’s lives (at least until they’ve done it). Between August and October 2002, Odell’s colleague, Benjamin Wolff, conducted 30 interviews with an assortment of friends and strangers. “I listened to the interviews,” says Odell, “and tried to find a way to tell each story on film, and then had him go back to a number of the people asking questions that were in line with what I had in mind for each story. I then edited the interviews. Each was about 1-2 hours and I edited them down to 3.5 minutes. This was the most interesting part of the process, seeing I haven’t worked with documentary material before. It was a challenge to build a narrative in the edit, and still be true to what I felt they were trying to say.”