FLCL

This review was comissioned by @zenos14


There is a blurry patch in my memory covering most of my thirteenth year. I remember it, but it's like looking through a distorted window, and half of what I recall feels like it can't possibly be what really happened.

Puberty always gives one a sense of heightened reality, but for me there were other factors playing into it. My family moved to the almost exact opposite side of the world that year, and the culture clash hit at the exact same time as the child-teenager transition. Everything suddenly had so much more depth, mystery, and menace to it, and yet at the same time life felt terminally boring and restrictive. Every person seemed like a caricature of something more normal, myself included. I know now that I'm genderqueer, and almost certainly somewhere on the autistic spectrum as well, but at the time I had no idea and neither did anyone in my support system.

To clarify, this isn't a "woe is me" monologue. Rather, I'm trying to explain the degree to which I was in an altered state of consciousness for that period of my life. More than being unpleasant, it was just insanely weird. Looking back, it almost feels like there was this other, bizarre world that reached out and overlapped with my own for a few months, and though I'm glad to be rid of it there was also something compelling about it. A juvenile, feverish madness of potential that I don't think I'll ever be able to make contact with again.

But it never came anywhere fucking near FLCL.

Maybe if I'd been going through all that and also doing hard drugs, I *might* have gotten something like the FLCL experience. Might have. Big maybe.

FLCL, pronounced "Foolie Coolie" for some reason, is a 2000-2001 anime original miniseries from Gainax. There have been spin-offs and sequels in various media, but the original was this six-episode anime series. The best short description I can give of it is "imagine some family friendly coming of age story a la Bruce Coville or Norton Juster got knocked up by a Gorillaz music video, and then they put the baby up for adoption and it ended up being raised by Scot Pilgrim vs. the World, who moved to Japan and often hired Neon Genesis Evangelion as a babysitter." Just the most deranged interpretive art depiction of someone undergoing male puberty in modern urban society ever, mashing elements that seem to be written about middle schoolers and elements that seem to be written BY middle schoolers together and then exaggerating them beyond all proportionality, sense, or reason.


Sixth grader Nandaba Naota lives a life surrounded by examples of failed or absent masculinity on one hand, and bewildering, otherized femininity on the other. Naota's father used to be an editor for a sucessful magazine, but since the loss of his wife he's regressed into a pitiful otaku manchild and moved with Naota back into his own elderly father's house where he pretends to help run the family business but mostly just does cringy and creepy otaku things. The grandfather, meanwhile, says and does little, his personality consisting entirely of being low-key grumpy, bitter and resentful of his son (and by extension his grandson) and legacy. Naota's older brother, who never appears onscreen but is talked about constantly, is an inimitable overachiever who finished high school early and then went overseas to be a professional baseball player. The women in Naota's life, on the other hand, include a neurotic cartoon character of a teacher, a stonily impersonal straight-laced classmate, and his brother's ex-girlfriend who rubs up against him inappropriately while pining for his older brother and also happens to be a serial arsonist.

One day, while Naota is doing homework outside and being uncomfortably accompanied by his brother's creepy firebug ex, puberty suddenly hits him like a motorcycle being driven by an alien bounty hunter.

From that moment until the end of the series, Naota's already-pretty-surreal world is turned into one giant reality malfunction.

You know that thing that a lot of metaphor-for-adolescence stories do, where there's something on the male protagonist's body that he desperately wants to hide that's obviously an erection metaphor? Okay. You know that other thing that those stories do, where a character has some kind of facial disfigurement that points toward acne, voice cracking, etc? Well, FLCL takes the economical approach, and has the motorbike impact cause Naota to start sprouting erection-like growths out of his forehead.

And then has these forehead-boners burst open so that giant robots can pull themselves out of his head and start wreaking havoc.

Meanwhile, the vespa-riding humanoid who inflicted this fate on him, a woman who uses a bunch of permutations of "Harahara" as aliases, sticks around and proves to be almost as big of a problem as the forehead-robots. With seeming reality-warping powers - including the ability to replace people like police, teachers, and medical professionals with badly-cosplaying versions of herself - she proceeds to stalk Naota through his hometown, simultaneously tormenting, abusing, and then randomly giving friendly or even motherly advice of highly variable wisdom, to him. At any given moment, she's as likely to be mocking Naota in front of his peers, giving him a shoulder to cry on, trying to make out with him, or beating him unconscious with her electric guitar that also has a chainsword and machinegun built into it. She's like a cross between Rick Sanchez and the Cat In The Hat, only in the body of a pink-haired girl with fashion sense and accessories that you would have thought were really cool for a little while when you were 14.

Unfortunately, she's also the only one who has any idea how to contend with the forehead-robots. Even more unfortunately, she somehow convince Naota's dad and grandfather to let her move into their house as a live-in housekeeper who never does any housekeeping. Where she sleeps in his brother's empty bunk in the same room as him. And then starts having sex with his dad.

And then, after that, things start getting weird.

...

I don't want to get too tied up in the nonsensical plot though, because, well, it's nonsense. "I have to know what happens next" is not the draw for FLCL. The draw is almost everything besides that.

Like, visually, this whole thing is an excuse for Gainax's animation team to put as much effort into as many different things as they felt like without having to worry themselves about things like "tone" or "consistency" or "visual cohesion." Like, take these three screenshots from within same few minutes of the same episode:

Later on, we have extended dream sequences apropos of little to nothing, the characters suddenly having a scene as actors talking about what it was like filming the latest episode of FLCL in their changing trailer, and one scene where everyone's voices have their pitch raised and the animation turns into faux-South Park. And also the gory, detailed, high-framerate fights between nightmarish biomechanoids by twilight, running the gamut between shots like this:

and shots like this:

The voicework is also great, if necessarily less schizophrenic for everyone besides Hara. Everyone, even the characters with only a few lines, are so extra in such different ways from one another that you can tell who they are and what they're all about with just a few words. Music is more forgettable, aside from the licensed songs that get used for certain sequences.

The most memorable (and memetic, from what I gather) example of the latter concerns the fight scenes involving Naota and a robot they dub Canti. Canti was the first construct to rip itself out of Naota's cranial dickpimples and start causing trouble, but Hara was able to actually reprogram this one to take orders from them after beating it up with her guitar-chainsaw. When they're in real trouble against a really big robomonster, Canti forcibly absorbs Naota into its body and enters a superpowered fight mode in which it can defeat robots many times its own size. It's ambiguous if Naota is actually piloting Canti during these bits, or just being used as fuel by it. In either case, this always plays when they do it.

After every such battle, Canti acts like its sick to its nonexistent stomach, flashes an image of a toilet paper roll on its TV screen face, and then defecates a machine oil-covered Naota.

Aside from the audiovisual experience, parts like this really *get* what it felt like to be at that age. How you could feel simultaneously so high on your own supply with newfound strength and understanding, and also so dirty, disgusting, and pathetic without skipping a beat. It gets even more extra-concentrated with its mixture of pride and disgust when you remember that Canti is only here in the first place because it popped out of one of Naota's forehead boners.

...

There's plenty more to talk about in this six episode miniseries. I could chuckle about the plot McGuffin being housed inside an alien facility "hidden" on Earth that looks like a giant factory clothes iron in the middle of Naota's city that inexplicably arouses zero suspicion. Or about the other aliens trying to steal that McGuffin before Hara can steal it being led by a jilted ex-lover/victim of hers who never managed to grow passed her the way Naota ultimately does, who wears giant fake eyebrows because he thinks it makes him look more manly. Or the part where Hara has an extended airborne fight against one of the giant robots while Silver Surfer-ing around on her guitar and wearing a playboy bunny outfit (credit to the artists for making this look embarrassing on her rather than titillating, even though they do play her for titillation when appropriate in some other scenes) for no given reason.

Apparently that last one is also a reference to a previous Gainax work too, but regardless.

There are six episodes packed to the brim with things to chuckle at, admire the animation of, or stare at in stunned incomprehension. Thing is, a lot of them rely on the animation to really have their impact. I could spend multiple posts listing whacky things off, but unlike with, for instance, GI Joe, the gags are sufficiently visual that a text description would be unable to communicate what makes them work. So, I'll just center the rest of this review on what I think the important underlying elements are.

...

Really, the ingredient that most makes FLCL come together is Hara.

In the nonsensical scifi plot (which ultimately turns out to involve a superpowerful alien demon thing imprisoned on Earth and being sought out by various entities who want to harness its power), Hara is mentor, unreliable ally, and (ultimately) main antagonist all at once. The way she's characterized, with her chaotic visuals, her sanity-defying powers, and her actual character writing, hits the spot perfectly for what she represents. She's superficially "cool" with her battle-guitar and motorbike. She's disgusting and dirty, always picking her nose in public (sometimes with her feet), drooling, and wriggling around on the floor. Sometimes, alternating with the dirtiness, she's sexy and alluring, either in a superficially glamorous way or in a gross inappropriate way. She throws temper tantrums and has violent outbursts like a toddler, and plots and schemes like an especially cynical adult. She's all the worst elements of childhood without innocence and adulthood without maturity mashed into one, she's taking over Naota's life, and he can't get rid of her.

And yet, despite her lack of likable traits, Hara has a weird kind of charm that's hard to describe. A charm that Naota feels just as much as the audience does. At the end of the series, during the final battle to stop Hara from getting the demon lord's power, Naota frees himself from this ongoing struggle not by striking her down like he was about to, but by telling her that despite everything, he loves her.

Staying his hand, despite him currently having access to all of the demon's power due to plot nonsense, is what ends it all. He accepts her instead of trying to deny or destroy her, and forsakes the power that they'd been struggling over. This results in the imprisoned entity being freed, and departing from the Earth in the form of a great phoenix. Spreading its wings like a baseball player flying off to America, taking with it all the factors that caused the forehead-robots and related problems.

With her target gone, Hara departs the planet as well. It's far from a tearful goodbye, but it's a sombre one. There's a strange sense of loss to it, even though she did nothing but make his life miserable while she was around.

Like I said in the intro. There was another world that overlapped with mine, for a little while. A terrible world, but one thrumming with unknown power and wild potential. There were mental states I will never be able to experience again now that it's gone. My puberty had outside factors that made it more extreme than most people's, but I think it was more a difference of degree than of kind.

And, that's what FLCL is really about.

Being in that state. Evoking and trying to recall that surreal perspective that no one ever gets more than a few months of at most. When it felt like you could do anything, even though you couldn't even get your own body or emotions to do what you wanted. When it really did feel like the world you knew might rip away like a bandaid to reveal a young adult fantasy adventure at any moment, even though you knew that was stupid. If I felt the shadow of another world pass overhead when I was 13, then FLCL is a look at that world launching a military invasion of our own and subjugating us under the jackboot of a pink-haired imperial governor.

FLCL does have a message, what with the self-acceptance and rejection of superficial power as a salve for insecurity. That part of growing up is acknowledging that you aren't special, that everyone else is just as important as you are and vice versa, and that there's nothing wrong with that. But I think the message is less important than the vibe. It's about the experience of being a certain way. Nostalgia for something that's locked away in the memory and can never be experienced the way it originally was again. Putting it in these words might be elevating the work a little too high, considering how much lowbrow comedy and "lolrandom" filler it contains, but those aspects are necessary for what FLCL is trying to do. It's harkening back to a lowbrow, randomly nonsensical state of being.

I wonder, also, how applicable FLCL is across gender lines. A lot of it is very specifically about undergoing a teenaged male puberty, and not having undergone a teenaged female puberty I can't attest to how much of it still applies to the AFAB experience. But then, at the same time...I couldn't help but wonder about Naota making peace with a female representation of his own transformation. Part of Hara's femininity is just about bringing to life a presumed-hetero pubescent boys fascination and insecurity toward sex, but I feel like it isn't just that. Hara's femininity, and her sometimes seductive behavior toward men...well, I'll give you an example. In the episode where Naota finds out that Hara is fucking his dad, there's a moment where he's asked if he's jealous of his father. There's a meaningful pause here, that doesn't seem to be simply teasing a "yes" answer. Like it might be curiosity about the flip side, at least in part, that's on Naota's mind.

I don't think a queer reading of FLCL was intended, especially going by what else I've heard about Gainax. But I do think it might merit one regardless. Maybe some non-juvenile aspects of Hara - either her attraction to men, her femininity, or both - might turn up again once Naota is mature enough to recognize and process them for what they are.

...

If there's one place where I feel like FLCL could have gone further, it's with the subplot surrounding Naota's stony classmate, Ninamori Eri. She's introduced to the story as another flavor of the unknowable alien feminine, but in the middle of the series she briefly becomes a secondary protagonist, with her own internal world, her own sordid family situation, and her own struggles with puberty and too-high aspirations.

There's one point where Eri even briefly gets infected by the robot-summoning-forehead-boner effect, and Naota and Canti have to fight someone else's rampaging forehead-biomech for once. It seemed like the series was building her up to be important to the climax, but then it mostly just forgets about her. I guess Naota defeating her forehead-monster is meant to represent him cutting through the fake mystique and realizing that girls and boys really aren't that different or hard for each other to understand after all, but it still feels like this subplot is missing a resolution. The coda mentions Eri and Naota remaining friends throughout high school, but again, feels like there was a big missing piece in between.

FLCL mostly does a good job at filling its screentime, but it dragged in a few places, and I think those bits of it could have been better spent doing more with Eri.

...

Overall, FLCL isn't something I'd want to rewatch too often, and it's not something I'd feel comfortable recommending to everyone. But it is something I might rewatch at least parts of every once in a while, and I'd recommend it pretty strongly to the right kind of person.

One of the right kinds of people I'd recommend it to, totally aside from the preteen nostalgia and the acknowledgement that that time many of us would rather pretend didn't happen really DID happen and that we're not alone in it, is animation geeks. Because holy shit, the visual experimentation. It wouldn't even need a plot or characters at all for me to rec it as an artshow.