welve-year-old Naota Nandaba, the star of Gainax's FLCL (also commonly known as Fooly Cooly), perpetually complains that nothing ever happens in his town. Even when a strange organization called Medical Mechanica erects what looks like a giant iron on one end of town, complete
with clouds of steam that periodically spew from its base. Even when a series of arsons cuts holes in the city. Even when a maniacal young woman on a Vespa scooter runs over him, smacks him in the head with what seems to be a gas-powered electric guitar, and then claims to be an alien, a Galaxy Patrol Officer.
Naota may simply be depressed and hostile because his older brother, who seems to hold an idealized place in his memory, has left Japan and gone to America to play baseball. Naota's also apparently uncertain about how to handle Mamimi, a reserved 17-year-old girl who had some sort of relationship with Naota's brother. She now hangs around Naota, sometimes aggressively flirting with him, sometimes simply turning up at his grade school, much to his embarrassment. Their relationship is strange, uncomfortable and imbalanced even before the Vespa girl, Haruko Haruhara, appears and attaches herself to Naota's household. The spot on his forehead where she smacked him with her guitar has formed a horrible-looking, unnatural square lump that protrudes like a horn, and Haruko, who seems to have mistaken Naota for someone else, apparently wants to keep an eye on him. So she signs on as the family housekeeper and moves in with the family.
Before long, a series of flabbergasting events throw all the characters into a tailspin. The square horn on Naota's head erupts, spewing out a pair of robots, which promptly begin fighting. One defeats the other, and Haruko immediately shows up to hit the victorious robot with her guitar, whereupon it changes color and character, and is next seen as a sort of clumsy domestic in Naota's house. Later, it dons wings and a halo, and the increasingly melancholy Mamimi proclaims it to be a god. Meanwhile, Naota is sprouting another huge lump on his head.
Never a dull—or easily explained—moment
Combine the grave, bittersweet, children-growing-old-too-fast tragedies of Now And Then, Here And There, the fresh character designs and leaps between forlorn introspection and manic comedy that characterized NieA Under 7 and the reckless, unpredictable energy of Excel Saga, and you'll get something sort of vaguely in the ballpark of FLCL, though you still won't really have any idea what it looks like. Not that FLCL has a consistent look: its visual style changes radically and often.
FLCL director Kazuya Tsurumaki made a number of unusual choices when assembling this six-episode original video animation. The background music, rather than the usual J-pop, is all provided by a veteran Japanese alternative-rock band called The Pillows, which gives the series a sedate, adult feel, and makes certain fantastic-looking scenes seem very much like well-realized rock videos. Tsurumaki also wanted to avoid traditional Japanese-robot designs; Canti, the gawky robot that ends up as Naota's family's errand boy, looks more akin to a character out of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards than a figure from the likes of Gundam. Tsurumaki dodged a lot of common anime cliches in creating FLCL, and the result is something uniquely weird and capricious that has to be seen, and even then may not be believed.
Still, it's a beautiful-looking series. The default animation style is spectacular, with deep texturing, a muted palette and phenomenal detail. The scene that leads Mamimi to believe Canti is a god is staggeringly pretty, and begs for repeated watching. So does the rest of the series; these two episodes are dense, fast-paced, complex and full of hairpin turns, and the digital animation lends itself to wild stylistic tricks, like a black-and-white sequence that zips around a manga page, bringing individual characters briefly to life, and a mobile-POV sequence possibly inspired by The Matrix. But Synch-Point's highly professional packaging encourages repeated viewing: The disc's dub track is generally excellent, and an actual original director's commentary track (in Japanese with subtitles) keys viewers in to a few critical plot points. With both a strong sub and a
strong dub, viewers can go back and watch the disc in a number of modes and possibly get a handle on FLCL's rambunctious, intense story before the next eagerly anticipated installment arrives.
FLCL comes with another neat bonus: a booklet that includes the manga sequence animated in the first series, plus translation notes, explanations of puns and other hard-to-follow jokes, and translated short essays from Tsurumaki, screenwriter Yoji Enokido and several others. The sheer attention to detail and extras that went into this disc promises great things to come if Synch-Point is going to hold to this kind of standard.
— Tasha
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