Anime: FLCL

[coraa]

FLCL

This... I don't even think I can summarize it. It's so...

I'll try! This is me, trying to summarize FLCL:

Naota lives a normal life in a normal town before Haruko Haruhara shows up. (No, that's not true. Naota's eleven or twelve and is perpetually hit on by Mamimi, the high-school-age girlfriend his brother left behind when he—the brother—left for the United States to play baseball, which isn't exactly normal. And his town is dominated by the giant, smoke-spewing, iron-shaped Medical Mechanica factory. But we'll go with 'normal' for now, at least comparatively.) Then Haruko shows up on her motorbike thingy and whacks him in the head with a guitar, either to cause robots to pop out of his head or to prevent robots from popping out of his head, it isn't clear. Haruko may also be an alien; at least, that's what she claims she is. The first robot that pops out of Naota's head may also be a god; at least, that's what Mamimi believes. There's also Naota's father, who is crazy and possibly dead, and Commander Amarao, whose eyebrows are made of seaweed, and... you know, fuck it, this series is impossible to summarize.

If it wasn't clear from the summary, this is a deeply surreal anime. It's sort of reminiscent of the kind of art film where 'making sense' isn't a first priority or even a second or third priority. jmpava called it "what happens when Gainax lets go of any constraints or attempts at narrative cohesion," and if you're familiar with the TVTrope for the Gainax Ending, you'll know what that means.

This is a whole six-episode miniseries of Gainax Ending. It's Gainax Beginning, Gainax Middle, and Gainax Ending.

That doesn't mean it's bad. I was entertained from start to finish! It's interesting and comprehensible from minute to minute; it's just that if you step back and try to take any chunk of it longer than about ten minutes as a coherent narrative, it's not going to work. It's not so much that it falls apart as that it twists around and bites you.

It's absolutely bizarre.

But it's also entertaining, and it's only six half-hour episodes long. I think it's worth spending an afternoon on. As long as you consider it as sort of a hybrid between indie film, drinking game, and The End of Evangelion, that is.

(It's pronounced "Fooly Cooly." There's a vague stab at describing why it's called "FLCL" early in the anime, but like most such things in this series, the rationale is trodden on by elephants and then forgotten about.)

(Countdown to someone showing up to tell me that the series made perfect sense to them in five, four, three....)

EDIT: As is often the case, the TVTropes page for FLCL says what I wanted to say, but better. Although it is TVTropes, so don't go in without spelunking gear.

Comments

[kaigou]

You get major internets points for even trying to explain the plot of FLCL. I can't recall ever even trying, figuring it was kinda losing proposition from the get-go. The closest I ever heard was the introduction a classmate gave me when telling me to watch it: "there's a boy who lives in a factory town and spends way too much time with his older brother's ex-girlfriend, then one day he's heading home and this girl on a Vespa appears from out of nowhere and slams him over the head with a neon-yellow Rickenbacker bass, which makes a robot grow out of his forehead. And then it starts to get weird."

Here from the animanga newsletter

[pseudo_tsuga]

It does have a plot! I even used to know it. But from what I recall, it involves things like intergalactic Pirate Kings who use guitars in battle so really, it doesn't make any more sense. I found out about it because I bought it as a graduation present for my brother. It also introduced me to the pillows, which is now my favorite band.

Ah, Fooly Cooly.

[aliseadae]

My friend says that after 28 times, it had started to make sense. Maybe. I, on the other hand, have only seen 1-4 (my friends tended to watch it late at night when I preferred to get sleep) and have yet to see 5 and 6 or the whole thing for the second time that it apparently takes for it to make any bit of sense. It is entertaining, though and the credits song (Ride on Shooting Star by the Pillows) gets stuck in my head occasionally.

[marvinalone.livejournal.com]

I have nothing much to add, except that FLCL is one of my favorites.
If Excel Saga is white noise, FLCL is scrambled porn on a pay-TV channel you didn't pay for.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

I may have watched FLCL too many times, to figure this out, but I'd argue there's a narrative buried beneath the insanity and all the unreliable narrators. Haruko comes to Earth to bash Naoto's head in with a guitar to make him into a kind of gateway. She wants the power of the Pirate King, which seems to be pretty impressive judging from the last episode. Medical Meccanica imprisoned him, or something, so that's why she needs Naoto's head. There's a lot of other stuff that happens, which all makes a bizarre kind of sense in the right light—I can attempt to explain if you're curious.