| FLCL(2000-2001) aka Fooly Cooly, Furi Kuri (フリクリ) 6 EP |
KAIBA(2008) 12 EP |
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| FLCL Review |
Kaiba OST - Planet (laughing version) |
[Kaiba][OP] Never |
FLCL(2000-2001) aka Fooly Cooly, Furi Kuri, (フリクリ) 6 EP
D: Kazuya Tsurumaki
W: Yoji Enokido
8.066 ANN
8.1 Myanime
8.3 IMDB
External references for FLCL
Wonderful tribute to FLCL - Will open in new page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test
https://wall.alphacoders.com/big.php?i=47700
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“Be afraid! Be very afraid. FLCL may be the greatest cult flick ever made. If you were Barton Fink, this is the hat basket. Great rock sound track by The Pillows, coupled with day-glo crazy, eye-splitting, frenetic, computer game animation moving at warp speed way, way beyond C. Will twist the panties of your mind into Gordian nots of astronomical proportions, and thats just for starters. If your mind is stuck in neutral, FLCL will hit you in the face with a Rickenbacker guitar as you watch all logic and proportion disappear in the rear-view mirror. Yellow Submarine just nibbles at the edges of insanity. FLCL swallows it whole without even chewing (and being your mother's little helper, she always warned you against doing that). FLCL is like running naked through Bedlam, stomping on all the She-bows as you pass, and Oh, did I say its a wild trip?
Highly recommended for those prepared to be initiated into the higher mysteries, otherwise could possibly initiate a mental disease or too.”
-May 2016 by former Pywackett Productions employee
The Pillows are a Japanese alternative rock band formed in 1989. The group has released 21 studio albums, several EPs and compilations, and over 35 singles. Outside Japan, they are best known as the group responsible for the soundtrack to the FLCL OVA series.More at Wikipedia
Origin:Hokkaidō, Japan
Genres:Alternative rock, indie rock
Years active:1989–present
“Does FLCL make any sense at all?” is a question that one could ask of any work of art, and since when, does a work of art need to make sense? “Stop making Sense”, The Talking Heads.
Art is about your feels, not about your head. In answer to the question, the artist behind FLCL said,
“Director Kazuya Tsurumaki responded to criticism of FLCL, stating "comprehension should not be an important factor in FLCL." “ Wikipedia[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLCL
Twelve(12) year old, Naota Nandaba is hanging out with pretty, older girl, Mamimi Samejima, who definitely wants to make like the three toed Aardvark with poor Naota who cannot understand where she is coming from, when out of the blue, on a dark and stormy night, in rides a cute, older alien, Haruko Haruhara on her yellow Vespa Scooter, carrying a blue left-handed Rickenbacker 4001 bass. After running over poor, innocent Naota, she then bashes him with the aforementioned blue, left-handed Rickenbacker 4001 bass, smack across the forehead, leaving one wildly gyrating bump which promply morphs into a portal from which giant robots enter our world.
This is actually all you need to know about FLCL, because comprehension beyond this point, is pointless, resistance is futile. Continue watching FLCL, and the anime will do the same trip to your head, and at night, giant robots will issue forth.
This is a warning. Protect your head, because your feels will eat it alive.
To be fair, FLCL feels like going through puberty all over again.
Haruko is one of the great characters in Anime, and Naota falls in love, but Haruko
is so “all over the map” that her feels are never all that clear. But we do see her
kissing him in bed, and hugging him to her chest so her feels towards Naota are positive in some sense, and you might even say that she loves him. Haruko is Naota’s Beatrice who will be his guardian angel, helping him through the very difficult time of puberty, a guide that many will wish that they might have had to help them through the confusion of puberty feels.
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Kaiba(2008) 12 EP
D: Masaaki Yuasa
W: Masaaki Yuasa + 4 others
8.329 ANN
8.2 Myanime
8.3 IMDB
Interesting review of Kaiba:
https://aminoapps.com/c/anime/page/blog/kaiba-quick-thoughts/dxtb_umDv8d2YgK2GeMJb8REwWzaMj
https://aminoapps.com/c/anime/page/blog/the-surreality-of-kaiba/ZZtB_uBj3RXrLDXp2141XbGNX580W
On the other hand, we have Kaiba(2008) which in artistic terms, is radically like and unlike FLCL!
Kaiba is an anime series directed by Masaaki Yuasa that made its debut on WOWOW Satellite Network in Spring 2008. A sci-fi love story, the series was produced by Madhouse. The series received critical acclaim as an Excellence Prize for animation at the 2008 Japan Media Arts Festival.More at Wikipedia
Where FLCL is straight-lined, frenetic, Electric, cool-aide acid trip; Kaiba is laid-back, mellow, decipherable, head-work, which is comprehensible, if not immediately.
Painted in a cartoonish, burlesque, and buffoonish style in extremis, combine Astro-boy + Yellow Submarine + FLCL + Gaudi + “Do androids dream of electric sheep”, then add a trope of 1940’s animation, Tex Avery, Fritz Lang, Tom and Jerry. Then hang on for the ride of your life like a Marmot flashing on Broadway with your samwitch(sic) on the top of Mount Lassen!!!
Kaiba is a world where memories are uploaded into chips and transferred from one body to another, instantaneously. And with memories so accessible, bad memories can be excised, and good, pleasant memories implanted which leads to a world disconnected from memory and reality.
One can actually freeze-frame a person, and climb into their minds, walking around the stacks of their memories, reading them.
Underneath the crazy cartoons, is a very real tragic story being told, of murder, vengeance, and betrayal; who is who? and what is what?, and “My god, what have I done!?”
The animation style is unlike anything in Anime today, and characters, objects are in a constant state of morphing into other characters and objects. The animation style even steps into childish, kindergarten types of drawing.
“Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!” - Hamlet
Kaiba plays like that! It is a Classic tragedy, almost Greek, which appears like kiddy-fare or a Tom & Jerry cartoon, starts like Hamlet, transitions through King Lear, and ends in the approximate territory of Romeo and Juliet.
Because Kaiba is ultimately a love story!
Kaiba (カイバ ) or Warp (ワープ ) loves Neiro (ネイロ ) whose image he wears in a locket around his neck, but his memories have been played, and he does not know who she is.
Neiro (ネイロ) loves Kaiba (カイバ ) but she seeks to kill him because her memories have been played, and she is now a terrorist in service to the “one-mind society”.
They meet in the bodies of opposite genders, Kaiba/Warp in the body of cute, kawaii girl Chroniko (クロニコ Kuroniko) and Neiro in the body of the muscle-bound man with no hands.
https://pm1.narvii.com/6100/f23abca814b5f402a73cd38f1b75cb62646a92ad_hq.jpg
The story then says clearly that love has a memory all its own, which cannot be altered or extracted.
Will love prove more powerful than memory?
Be aware, fully aware, that both FLCL and Kaiba have extensive and obvious sexual scenes, and plot threads, which some might find highly offensive.
But anyone who would love both FLCL and Kaiba, and see both through to their ends,
cannot not possibly have a closed mind. It would have been blown out long before “The End”.
For all their pertinent insanities, both FLCL and Kaiba are about love. Naota falls in love with Haruko but it might not be requited at least in Naota’s sense; and Kaiba and Neiro love each other, but don’t know it.
Both FLCL and Kaiba are highly recommended with substantial reservations.
If you have reached this point in reading this review, then you might be that unique individual who will fall in love with both FLCL and Kaiba.
'Nuf said! Watch both of them.
These be mind benders!
Folcwine P. Pywackett
