I tried watching FLCL back when it was still new, but I couldn’t get more than an episode or two through it without giving up. I tried multiple times, but I could not be compelled to stick to it.
Well, I finally did it. But I can’t say I’m terribly satisfied by the accomplishment. I wouldn’t normally write a longish review about an anime I watched. Eventually I plan to have a page on this site with a list of all the anime I’ve watched (starting in 2020), with only Tweet-length reviews, but I thought my low regard for FLCL deserved a little more explanation considering the show’s hype. This post will be filled with spoilers.
After I completed the last episode, I went off in search of some articles about the series to help formulate some thoughts on it. I ran across the Wikipedia entry and took note of this passage:
Director Kazuya Tsurumaki responded to criticism of FLCL, stating “comprehension should not be an important factor in FLCL“.
“FLCL” Wikipedia entry
Comprehension should not be an important factor in FLCL. What? Sounded like a pretentious load of crap. It’s true though.
What I’ve come to realize, only after finishing the show, is that when you watch FLCL, you should not be wasting your time and effort trying to make sense of the story or the dialog. They are both distractions.
The trick to understanding FLCL is that you have to boil away the story and the dialog to reach the meat. FLCL is not an action sci-fi story about Vespa-riding aliens, robots, guitar weapons, or any other nonsense. It’s not even about sex. It’s a character-driven story about growing up (or not), getting hurt, feeling empty, loneliness/abandonment, and not being able to accept reality. This is not just a journey traveled by Naota, but every prominent and semi-prominent character in the show.
You cannot take FLCL at face value. I think 90% of the crazy, random stuff that happens in the show is just a meta-statement from the creators making the point that whatever’s going on basically doesn’t matter. What matters is why a character is motivated to act the way they do in a moment, but the actual action is largely irrelevant. What matters is the underlying reason why a character says what they say, but not what they actually say.
Haruko is a terrible person. She uses people and doesn’t take ownership of the damage she causes. She enjoys the power she’s gained through physical maturity to seduce men with her sexuality, but she lacks the emotional maturity to either accept or understand the consequences of those actions. She is selfish, rude, inconsiderate, sociopathic. And she will probably always be these things. Her chase of Atomsk is really just her endless and futile pursuit of mastery over her life. But no one can master their lives. Atomsk isn’t even presented as a person, just a vaguely anthropomorphized concept of power.
Mamimi is like a lesser Haruko in some respects. She feels abandoned by Tasuku, Naota’s older brother that left Japan for America, so she is using Naota to fill the void his older brother left in her. She deliberately intimidates him with her sexuality. Unlike the real Tasuku, who has given her up for some American girl, Mamimi can control Naota, and enjoy feeling wanted. But beyond Tasuku, Mamimi is aimless and doesn’t know what she wants from her life. Only in the end does she realize that she doesn’t need to use Naota as a crutch, so she moves on and finds a purpose.
Naota is obviously a kid going through puberty, but there’s more to him than that. His behavior in the beginning of the show is a big act, where he pretends to be more in control and mature than he really is. By the end, he has dropped his guard and allowed himself to be more authentic with his emotions. He evolved past merely imitating maturity and allowed himself to be vulnerable.
I think Eri was the most interesting of the characters in the show, because her development essentially runs in parallel to Naota without most of the crazy elements. She begins the show wearing a front of apathy toward her parents, whether they divorce or stay together, or have any interest in her life, but she fixes the casting of the school play to make her the lead so that her parents would see her. She has a crush on Naota, but has to suffer as he ignores her advances and obsesses over two older girls that are simply toying with him. By the end, she comes to terms with her problems and Naota is finally positioned to notice her the way he should have all along.
These are just some of the main characters. Naota’s father and Lieutenant Kitsurubami have stories of immaturity or bitterness that intertwine with Haruko in interesting ways, but like the emotional complexities and relationship dynamics of all the other characters, these things are completely overshadowed by the over-the-top, random zaniness of the show.
And I think that’s the weakness of FLCL. It presents itself as something that it is not (a sci-fi action), and it forces you to take notice of things that don’t matter (the apparent story, the content of the dialog). Why the obfuscation?
In many ways, FLCL’s very similar to Evangelion, which makes sense in that both involved Gainax/Anno Hideaki. You can strip away all of the religious symbology, the robots, and apocalyptic stuff and see that it’s similarly a story that explores suffering and various dimensions of human existence. Evangelion’s superficial top layer was just much more logical, cohesive, and conveyed a better story. It’s like how an early Pixar film offers something that children can enjoy, but also some deeper layers to mentally stimulate the parents too. FLCL is just slightly less pretentious Cat Soup.