The Genre: Science Fiction/Comedy

The Format: 12 episodes @ 26mins each, across 4 DVDs

The plot: Produced by GAINAX (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and animated by Production I.G. (Ghost in the Shell), FLCL takes animation to yet another level. Get ready for this shocking, funny, and right out freaky show about adolescence, expectations and alien intrigue. Naota wants to be normal. But with a talented brother leaving Japan for the US to play baseball, everyone now looks at him a bit differently. His brother's girlfriend is acting strange and now there's an even stranger girl hitting on him. Literally. With a bass guitar. Oh, did I mention the robots that keep springing from his head?

Sometimes something comes along that completely blows your mind. Something so life shattering that you have to completely re-evaluate who you are and what you’re about. This has happened several times to me- when I saw the first Star Wars film, when I read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and when I first saw Akira for example.

Now seeing as it says “FLCL” up the top there and this is sat in the review sections, I’m sure you’ve already guessed that FLCL had a similar sort of effect on me. However, what’s really interesting is that pretty much all of the others were ka-boom type events. They happened in a relatively short period of time, but had a lasting effect on me.

FLCL's effect on me was a lot more strung out. It sort of crept up on me and shouted “Boo!” when I was least expecting it. I’ll try to explain-

Even though I’m an anime fan I don’t really follow what’s going on in the anime world very closely. This is mainly because I have a life, but also because I’m a very lazy bastard. As such, when the first FLCL disk was released in America a while back I was almost totally unaware of what it was all about. However, I read a few reviews and figured I’d purchase the first disk.

This all took a while, obviously, but you’ll appreciate what I’m saying about the impact it had when you consider this- I rarely watch any DVD more than once. I’m writing this review having watched FLCL through at least 7 times. That’s a lot of viewings by anyone’s standards, and a hell of a lot by mine.

Of course, part of the reason I’ve seen it so many times is that it’s quite confusing. On my first run through I honestly didn’t know what was going on half the time, and I wasn’t that much the wiser when I’d watched the dub. However, the joy of this series is that repeated viewings bear much fruit. Things that you thought you understood, turn out to not be what you thought they were and you realise the confusing bits are actually quite simple.

It’s also best to abandon any ideas of logical hidden meanings. The Japanese tend to pack their images with lots of hidden meanings, which are often slightly wrong in the head, but that’s not true so much here. Instead there are a lot of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did this” bits in FLCL, and I think that’s why I love it so much.

There’s a real sense of reckless abandon and sheer joy at just having fun with stuff that really comes across very well. You don’t often get that in anime. I mean sure, you get fun and frivolous, but it more often than not comes across in a slightly cynical and calculating fashion. In fact the last anime I watched where they were clearly just having a lot of fun was all Project A-KO, which is not the most recent of releases.

I mean how many anime do you know that feature a desiccated dad and a pet that eats cars?

Exactly.

Another particular highlight in FLCL is the music as, with the notable exception of Yoko Kano, anime music is mostly dross and uninspired. The FLCL soundtrack really isn’t like that at all. It features what I assume are a clutch of J-pop bands and I was really very tempted to not only buy the soundtrack album, but to get some more stuff by these bands.

The best thing about FLCL, though, is the innovation. There are all sorts of things in this anime that I’ve never seen before. I won’t go into too many details as they’ll just spoil the fun, but the classic bit is the section where it suddenly leaps into manga style. You’ll see what I mean if you watch it.

So after all this glowing praise is there anything wrong with FLCL? Well there are a couple of little niggles I have. The first is that the characters do tend to talk extremely quickly, which makes the subtitles very difficult to read. Also, despite the huge booklet insert and the commentary etc, there are only two half-hour episodes per disk- not what I’d really call value for money. But then, this is an OAV, so that’s not really that surprising.

So not much wrong with it at all then. Blimey.

The Summary: Weird, stunning, non-sensical and funny, things don’t get much more betterer than this.

The Score: 5/5

The Pictures:

(click for larger versions)