FLCL

jpn Furi Kuri, aka Fooly Cooly. 2000. OAV. (6 X 30 min.) Science fiction/comedy/romance. dir Kazuya Tsuramaki (original concept), others. scr Yoji Enokido. des Hiromasa Ogura, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. -jd

A hyperkinetic, avant-garde explosion of adolescent angst, masturbatory fantasy, and women from outer space, produced by the creators of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

In a small Japanese town in the middle of nowhere, a medical factory shaped like a huge steam iron looms over the landscape, puffing clouds of smoke at the same time each day. “Nothing amazing happens here,” says Naota Nandaba, a boy on the cusp of puberty. “Everything is ordinary.” This doesn’t seem quite true. For starters, Naota’s best friend is Mamimi Samejima, an older girl who likes to hang out with him by the river, playing handheld video games and practicing baseball swings. Mamimi used to date Naota’s big brother, who has left for the United States to pursue a career as a baseball player. Abandoned by her boyfriend, she has made Naota the target of constant sexual teasing, knowing that he’s too young to do anything about it.

This unusual routine is disrupted by the arrival of Haruko Haruhara, a flamboyant pink-haired girl who runs Naota over with her yellow Vespa scooter and then whacks him in the head with a bass guitar. The accident leaves Naota with a mysterious protuberance on his forehead that looks like a horn. He covers it with a bandage and goes to school as usual, but rumors about the “Vespa girl” are already circulating, and Naota begins seeing the mysterious Haruko everywhere, even at home, where his father has hired Haruko on as a housekeeper. Stomping out of the house, Naota suffers an odd fit, and a humanoid robot with a TV screen for a face pops out of his forehead and commences a pyrotechnic battle with a hand-shaped enemy mecha. Haruko drives up and clobbers the robot with her guitar, and then the robot moves into Naota’s house as well. “Nothing amazing,” indeed.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this weirdness, the outlines of a plot emerge. Haruko claims to be a space alien searching for an extraterrestrial outlaw called the Pirate King, and she is opposed to the schemes of Medical Mechanica, whose steam-iron-shaped factory symbolizes the company’s goal of ironing out the wrinkles of independent thought. Naota has more pressing problems, though—understanding his strange new feelings toward the women in his life, dealing with the bewildering variety of objects that keep bursting out of his head, and working up the courage to swing his baseball bat like a man.

FLCL is remarkable above all else for its stylistic experimentation. The series offers a constant barrage of animated spectacle, surrealistic imagery, and virtuoso trickery. Normally sensitively shaded and realistic-looking, the animation goes wild at seemingly random moments, turning into sketchy drawings or distorting everything beyond recognition. Hospital buildings warp and bounce. Extreme perspective is used when Haruko first appears—her face is pushed into a fisheye closeup, and then her entire body is shown from dramatic ant’s eye view. When Naota is first hit by Haruko’s guitar, he flattens out to a cutout, and flutters to the ground like a piece of paper.

The character designs also swing back and forth between realism and exaggeration. Na­ota is the very picture of a bored preteen, with a dour expression, shapeless jacket, and knee-length shorts. He slouches like he’s hiding, and wears something different on his head in every episode, from an “X” of bandages to a changing parade of hats. Haruko is confident and exotic, with gold eyes, pink hair, and a manic expression. She dresses like a ’60s British Mod, with white boots and back-slung bass guitar. Mamimi practically oozes kittenish sexuality with her impossibly short skirt, half-closed eyes, and a cigarette dangling from her pouty lips.

The background paintings of the town of Mabase are beautiful and based on real locations, as seen in the live-action footage shown in the ending credits. Lighting for different times of day is especially well done. When Naota and Mamimi meet under the bridge, it’s always late afternoon, with slanting golden sunlight. At night, scenes take on lurid, washed-out tones from the sodium vapor streetlights. The closing song, “Ride On Shooting Star” by The Pillows, is at once catchy, energetic, and nonsensical, encapsulating the mood of the show rather perfectly.

It’s hard to know how to characterize a show like FLCL. At first glance it appears almost devoid of plot or continuity, mostly concerned with geeky in-jokes, playful animation, and surrealist visuals. It’s nominally a science fiction story about an alien outlaw who comes to Earth, but on another, more important level, it’s a psychological drama about a young boy’s awakening to adolescence. Like many works from Studio Gainax, it’s packed with references to other anime and otaku (fannish) subjects, but FLCL adds the unique twist of acknowledging the thinly veiled sexual implications of “Gundam hammers” and the like, and wallows in their rich possibilities for innuendo. Even mundane subjects like medicine and baseball become titillating and lurid; early on, Haruko dresses up as a naughty nurse to play doctor with Naota, and the first episode begins with Mamimi providing some rather suggestive batting advice. “Legs spread,” she says. “Hit, hit, hit!” The themes of adolescent awakening and sexual energy are expressed so clearly and broadly that they cease to be subtext and become simply text.

When we first meet him, Naota has a whole list of things he doesn’t like, won’t allow, or doesn’t do. He doesn’t like sour drinks or spicy curry. He carries a baseball bat that he never swings. The upper bunk bed in his bedroom belongs to his absent brother and is thus off-limits. But Haruko ignores all of this, ignores all of his protests and barriers. She crowds him, pushes into his life, serves up spicy curry, offers him things he would never have tried otherwise, and teaches him to swing his bat for the first time. Mamimi, too, had been reluctant to leave her own comfort zones, but when Naota’s attentions turn toward Haruko, Mamimi has to learn how to get by without this safety valve. Her turbulent emotions begin to express themselves through cultish obsession and a growing tendency towards pyromania.

The constant variation in the animation style, while technically impressive, can often seem rather random. Chuck Jones–style zaniness appears out of nowhere, with extreme perspective and rubbery transformations. The experimentation reaches its peak in episode 5, which parodies everything from Lupin the 3rd to South Park; war games are fought with guns, complete with sound effects, and whole stretches of the episode are spent on frantic chase scenes with speed lines and ridiculous squash and stretch effects. It’s unclear at times whether FLCL is meant to be taken as parody, serious reality, or a hallucination created by Naota’s fevered prepubescent mind, but as a portrait of adolescence, it’s inspired.

Haruko’s initial appearance is the series’ first indication of real craziness. After running over Naota with her scooter on a freeway overpass, Haruko rushes to his side, calls him “Taro” (not his name), and then kisses him while Mamimi watches in gape-mouthed slow motion. An abrupt cutaway to a screening room shows all three characters sprawled across theater seats, complaining about how hard it is to film a slow motion effect, because you have to hold your breath for the whole time. (A big “X” appears onscreen to let us know that this is, in fact, not true.) Then the visual switches back to the scene on the overpass, wherein Haruko whacks Naota in the head with her guitar just as he begins to come around, then upends him by his ankles and shakes the change out of his pockets.

The first episode includes an animated manga sequence in which a series of black-and-white comic-book pages, complete with dialogue balloons and sound effects, are used to illustrate Naota’s father and grandfather grilling him mercilessly about whether or not he and Haruka are getting “fooly cooly” with each other. While the show’s cryptic title is never clearly explained, this sequence leaves no doubt that it’s something dirty.

There’s a beautifully animated sequence in episode 2 where Mamimi, walking among the burned-out ruins of the old school at sunset, spots the robot rising up from the roof of the building surrounded by flying crows and golden light, flying up into the air. The fluorescent tube mounted on his back looks like a halo over his head, and Mamimi, shown in gobsmacked fish-eye close-up, mistakes him for a god.

In an insane crash sequence in episode 3, Haruko’s scooter, having caused a multicar pileup on the freeway (the cars and vans are still tumbling behind her like balls in a lottery machine), screeches toward Naota and his classmate, an attractive girl named Eri Ninamori. The tumbling scooter hits Naota and sends him careening toward Ninamori, face first, the animation spinning around his bulleting trajectory in 3D. As his face rockets toward hers, lips aligned as if to kiss her, the animation changes to a pink-and-purple color scheme to underline the romantic aura.

Creator and director Kazuya Tsuramaki also directed Evangelion: Rebirth and was a key animator or animation director on Otaku no Video, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and His and Her Circumstances. Scriptwriter Yoji Enokido also wrote for Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sailor Moon S, and Sailor Moon SuperS. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto created the characters for Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and The Wings of Honneamise. Key animator and ending credits supervisor Masayuki was also the character designer for Macross Plus.

The series made its initial U.S. TV debut on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim in August 2003 and was very enthusiastically received. FLCL has made regular reappearances on the Adult Swim block ever since.

The first line of the series, Mamimi’s “Legs spread,” is a reference to the classic anime Ashita no Joe. Although Mamimi is discussing baseball, the original lines she’s quoting are actually about boxing.

In explaining the “fooly cooly” concept during the first episode’s manga sequence, Naota’s father employs a barrage of anime references, including several mentions of Mobile Suit Gundam. The father’s otaku tendencies are further illustrated when Naota complains about his father using the robot outdoors for chores where everyone can see it, which serves as a springboard for a lecture about family and social structure, and how “everyone’s buying Initial D nowadays, and robot Detective K. . . . ” Naota wearily explains to Mamimi, “He wrote a whole book on the deep mysteries of Eva” (Neon Genesis Evangelion).

The DVD extras explain many of the show’s other in-jokes, including the director’s theory on left-handed people.

The manga adaptation, illustrated by Hajime Ueda and released in English by Tokyopop, has a completely different art style than the manga sequences featured in the animation.

violence Mostly slapstick violence throughout, and over-the-top cartoon gunplay in episode 5. nudity Only modest male nudity in a bathing scene, but the sexual innuendo is relentless and the show isn’t really suitable for preteens. Teenagers, however, will probably love it.