Creator & Director: Kazuya Tsurumaki
Writer: Yōji Enokido
Studio: Gainax, Production I.G
Finished first watch: 28/03/2021
Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for FLCL
Ratings:
I watched FLCL because I thought it was regarded as a classic (although looking it up now, it's currently ranked #502 on MyAnimeList, so not too sure about that) but after watching it, I'd probably call it a very niche cult classic. It definitely isn't like most things you'll watch but probably isn't what most people would actually want to watch. It's not to my liking but there's tons of very obvious quality in it and with regard to the main thing I don't like about it, the incredibly vague and nonsensical story, you could probably spend all day picking and trying to decode, which is probably what people like about it (and I will probably read other people doing that once I've written this).
The main thing about FLCL for me is its overall feel, which is noisy, messy, and erratic. Through the entire show, there is constant, heavy rock music playing. That includes during dialogue, which just creates this horrible, muddy sensation in my brain - especially when the rock music includes vocals! It also just doesn't have the normal rhythm and flow of most TV/movies you'll watch; no exposition and development, things happen, people pop up, you're in different locations, it's all hapening, no real explanation. This isn't helped by the absolutely rapid dialogue, which is difficult enough to follow audibly but becomes genuinely impossible to keep up with when reading subs. I had to pause and rewind it multiple times in each episode. This was made even worse by all the footnotes to explain the constant cultural references. It'd be incredibly unfair to hold those two points against the show but I just accept that I am not the show's target audience, don't speak its language natively and am unfamiliar with the culture it's set in and as such, I didn't have a great experience watching it.
That said, it was nice to see nods of appreciation to the things I was able to recognise, like Evangelion, Lupin III, and, for some reason, South Park. It really paid its respects to animation that came before it.
The chaos and craziness does, however, translate very well into the visuals. You're still left with the same sense of absolute confusion and disbelief as to what is happeneing but it's so visually pleasing, that it becomes a happy confusion. So for example, a huge, inoccuous bump growing out of someone's head doesn't make much sense but the embarassment and discomfort of the character are incredibly clear, as is the sheer ridiculous size of the bump. I'm tempted to use a word like 'imagery' to describe some scenes, despite this being a literally visual medium, because what you see on screen is somewhat abstract but does its job of communicating feelings, sensations and situations perfectly, like the poems in those GCSE anthologies supposedly did. So that's a win for storytelling but as mentioned, there isn't much story to tell.
Through the very short 6 episodes, events and characters appear with no real explanation. To an extent, I'm happy with no explanation of how these things happen, e.g. how a robot appears out of a bump on someone's head, but what I'm not content with is a lack of explanation or even basic reasoning for the events of the series even happening. For example, why does this housekeeper appear? What is this supposed to mean for the main characters? Are these events real or are they a metaphor? And hy itroduce this space patrol organisation? Are they serious or not? It's generally, just quite incoherent.
Something that's more of a positive (not a huge one, mind) is the characters. The characters are somewhat complex and the series does a job of capturing the pseudo-complexity of teenaged angst. A few of them are slight cop-outs, like the Dad, but others do things that don't make sense but do make you want to understand them, like Mamimi - I thought she was really interesting the whole way through.
A positive that is definitely much stronger is the animation. It was phenomenal throughout. It's all done at quite a low framerate (guessing it's on 2s) and they showcase absolutely perfectly just how to make the most of that. The movement is fluid, because the really understand which kinds of movements can be reflected well and at eactly the right speed. If you broke it down, it would probably be a great example of why animation should be considered as a whole and no single frame can be good or ba in isolation. There are also some cuts where the view pans a full 360 degrees around the characters and they legitimately all jaw-dropping and it's almost unbelieavable that it's all done by hand. Lastly, I'll say that I really enjoyed how FLCL was allowed to just flitter in between genres whenever it fanced, meaning they could show off lots of different art styles and types of actions. All instances had really great, very strong poses too, which were distict but never broke the overall style/design.
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| Easily the pick of the bunch for those rotating shots. Unbelievably well executed. |
Not sure if FLCL was a manga before it was an anime (although I strongly doubt it) but I did like how the early animation also incorporated comic panels and really played around with them as a storytelling mechanism. To be completely fair, with all the quirky things like this (which I still think made it hard to follow), they got their full use out of them nice and quickly, then moved on. They definitely didn't rinse anything until it became stale.
I don't really know what I epected when I sat down to watch FLCL but it isn't what I expected in the slightest. It might be worth watching if you're really interested in alternative styles in animation or maybe if you really do love broody, edgy exporations of unexplained feelings. But for me, it was only just about worth the time it took to watch its 6 episodes. Also I didn't like the music, which a lot of people seem keen on. 5/10.
