Surrealism With A Banging Soundtrack

Back in the early 2000s, something weird and wonderful happened. Gainax and Production I.G made FLCL. A genuinely mad anime that is still as fresh over two decades later.

The story itself is almost irrelevant relative to how it is delivered. However, the broad strokes are that Naota lives in the supposedly boring city of Mabase. Until the day he is run over by Haruko Haruhara on a Vespa, and a robot emerges from a lump on his forehead.

Haruko is an alien and is chasing something enormously powerful and equally mysterious, and Naota and the robot Canti clearly have something to do with it.

I remember watching FLCL when it was first released over twenty years ago. I was still at university and was amazed at how strange and funny this anime was.

It was also intended as the “second wave” of Gainax, with it being created and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki. Working his way up the ranks, Tsurumaki definitely made his mark with the original FLCL.

This is because, in the many years since, we’ve had various follow-ons to the story, which are interesting, but I still feel the “first season” is the best by far and really meant as something standalone.

What makes FLCL special is that it breaks up how anime is parsed. You have sections drawn as manga, or done in different styles, with some just genuinely surreal humor thrown in just for fun.

To be honest, much of the “zany” anime we have these days owes much of its structure and delivery to the original FLCL, and going back and watching this again only helped to remind me how far ahead of its time FLCL really was.

As for this release, it’s pretty barebones. The transfer is good, but not super pristine. I think this is because of the original masters being done digitally at a lower resolution, and the upscale is a bit off as a result.

Don’t get me wrong, this is way better than the DVD versions, and it’s also handily all on one disc.

The audio is great, though, and my lifelong love of The Pillows is still very much in effect after all these years. Even having seen them live in Nagoya decades ago, hearing their songs again in the anime that introduced the band to me in the first place is rather lovely.

Overall, FLCL is a seminal anime that showed the shift that Gainax was taking, and in turn, where the follow-on studios, such as Khara and Trigger, would end up. It’s hard to believe that this anime is over twenty years old, because it still seems so fresh and funny,

FLCL Season 1 is available on Blu-ray from the Crunchyroll online store for $31.98.

Disclosure: Crunchyroll sent me this Blu-ray for the purposes of this review.

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