Alright, let’s get to this. FLCL. Fooly Cooly. One of the original “but what is it all about?” anime icons of my generation, as well as just one of the defining cartoons of my generation in general. A show that lit up American screens back in the early ‘00s, standing alongside Cowboy Bebop and, uh, Inuyasha as the shows we stayed up Way Too Late for. And beyond its critical moment in western fandom, FLCL is both a terrific show in its own right and a monument to one of anime’s greatest studios. A story of adolescence so timeless and resonant that it’s inspired a hotly anticipated pair of sequels nearly two decades after its original release. FLCL is still vibrant and alive within fandom, and without it, I’m not sure I’d be writing about cartoons today.

FLCL was one of my own very first anime, first viewed in disjointed, entrancing snippets on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim partner block. After an hour of bawdy American comedies from eleven to twelve at night, I’d be introduced to thrilling Japanese cartoons that expanded my frame of not just what cartoons, but what stories altogether could accomplish. Adult Swim only aired on weeknights, so it was only during summer vacation, when family trips left me alone with a TV and no curfew at all, that I’d able to watch these shows. These limitations gave shows like FLCL a sense of mythic, almost illicit import; of course, it didn’t hurt that these shows, and FLCL in particular, were goddamn masterpieces.

FLCL is a unique production within anime. Even its very production committee is unique; funded through a combination of studio Gainax, Production I.G., and King Records, FLCL’s only economic constraint was to represent its own central creatives voices as winningly as possible. Its director Kazuya Tsurumaki had just come off collaborating with Hideaki Anno on Evangelion and replacing him on His and Her Circumstances, while its writer Yoji Enokido had already contributed to Revolutionary Girl Utena, and would go on to provide stories for copious other iconic productions. Tsurumaki and Enokido’s voices are clear in FLCL’s final product, but on top of them, the production was blessed with a Gainax at the height of their powers, stuffed with expressive animators contributing to a production whose brief running time enabled basically no artistic compromises. Even future anime stars like Hiroyuki Imaishi made significant marks here, like Imaishi’s contribution of the show’s hyperactive manga-panel segues.

Primed for breakthrough greatness by its temporal moment and buoyed by countless creative all-timers, FLCL certainly had all the benefits necessary to be the defining show of its moment – but of course, it was the show itself that had to make the hard sell. Fortunately, FLCL itself is not just great, it is great in nearly every way an anime tends to be great. FLCL is simultaneously proudly farcical, grounded in universal human emotions, and whip-smart. It is deeply sensitive and utterly bombastic, often at the same time. If you like anime for its wild excess, FLCL has your back. If you like anime for its thoughtful, melancholy character work, there’s plenty of that too. FLCL truly had the reach to be everything to everyone.

Describing FLCL in an aesthetic sense is an almost impossible undertaking. The show’s expressive character designs come courtesy of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, whose contributions to this, Evangelion, and Diebuster made his style almost synonymous with Gainax’s golden age. Kazuya Tsurumaki’s ability to set a scene is impeccable, and carries on both the sensitivity to character perspective and ear for tonal unease that he likely developed while working under Anno. It cannot be overstated what an impressive feat FLCL’s tonal cohesion is. In spite of possessing a consistent series of giddy comic interludes and centering on a plot that’s driven by absurd science fiction contrivances, the show possesses such great tonal confidence, and illustrates its characters and narrative through such natural, understated storytelling, that disbelief remains consistently suspended throughout. And beyond its reliable design variables, FLCL is also incredibly diverse in its aesthetic leanings; scenes hold tight on realistic closeups for melancholic effect, or explode in design-warping excess for energy and comedy. There are visual references to Lupin III and Gainax’s Daicon shorts and friggin’ South Park, and yet the show still remains remarkably holistic in its sullen, romantic, adolescent tone. Personally, I think a great deal of that effect can be attributed to The Pillows.

Choosing to have one band contribute the entirety of FLCL’s soundtrack was a risky and unusual choice, but it paid off in spades. The Pillows’ jangling garage rock is a perfect fit for FLCL’s adolescent tone, and even within their genre, tracks like Funny Bunny, Carnival, Bran-new Lovesong, and Little Busters demonstrate the tonal and emotional range necessary to enliven all of FLCL’s diverse moods. Do you like when a show erupts into an insert song for a big climactic moment? What if the entire soundtrack was terrific insert songs, and every single episode contained several different such peak moments? Naota swinging the bat, Mamimi smoking on the bridge, basically the entire finale… FLCL is composed of iconic moment after iconic moment, all livened by The Pillows’ wonderful noises, all coming together to evoke a full symphony of dirtbag teenagerdom.

Alright, all that and we still haven’t really gotten to what FLCL is about. FLCL is about Naota Nandaba – a twelve-year-old boy on the edge of adolescence, living in a town where he’s bored out of his skull. Like most kids his age, Naota is standing on the borderline of a childhood behind him and an adulthood before him, wondering who he is now and who he might become. Naota gripes that “nothing amazing happens” in his town of Mabase, but the anger he projects towards his town is clearly echoing a fear he holds about himself – that Naota the boy is not amazing, and possibly never will be. Stuck in the shadow of his baseball star brother, a boy whose sports career was so successful he actually left for America, Naota can’t help but see his own life so far as an utter disappointment. Naota is the ideal shiftless almost-teen – plagued by insecurities he pushes outwards as bravado, uncertain of who he should even try to be, mostly just trying to act cool.

While Naota is the archetypal grumpy teen, his quasi-friend Mamimi is something significantly more unusual. Mamimi used to either date or almost date Naota’s brother, and with him gone, her sense of self has suffered terribly as well. Her emphasis on physical contact, self-destructive tendencies, utter lack of an available family, and dalliances with arson all paint her as a genuine delinquent, someone so untethered from the usual teenage track that they’ve become unmoored from society altogether. To Naota, staying with Mamimi means both staying in contact with his brother and, in his own way, eclipsing him – entering a dangerous world of adults that Mamimi seems to represent. But Naota’s ideas about adulthood are based on juvenile misconceptions, and Mamimi refuses to be an object in his narrative. She is her own mess entirely.

Mamimi’s genuine self-destructiveness and delinquency make her fairly unique within anime, and are one of the many things that make FLCL feel so sharp and realistic in spite of its absurd turns. Her arson isn’t treated as an unserious quirk or a damning character flaw; it’s a dangerous behavior pattern she’s fallen into for clear and understandable reasons, reasons that are likely beyond Naota’s comprehension. This is Naota’s story, so we see Mamimi mostly refracted through his perspective, but it’s clear enough even in reflection how much Naota’s brother meant to her, and how little this world seems to care for her at all. Even Naota only confesses with her to catch up to his brother, and scampers off to another girl the moment he’s turned down. Naota’s final confessions might be anthemic, but they’re still false; he’s just a little kid, standing in the wreckage as the world happens around him.

FLCL’s third star similarly embodies this dichotomy of burning personal rage and utter powerlessness. Ninamori was always my favorite character in FLCL, despite her appearances being fairly limited outside of her focus episode. Like Mamimi, Ninamori’s pain and restlessness at her family’s very public breakdown feels far sharper than most shows; there’s an ugliness to her story that makes it utterly real, and the ways she uses her limited power to push for a closeness with Naota feels clumsily genuine. Many anime treat adolescent romance as something graceful, ethereal, and beautiful; for Naota, Mamimi, and Ninamori, it’s always awkward and uncomfortable and gross. Of the three, Ninamori was the one I always related to; her sarcasm, her strong front, and the fact that her intellectual aura was built on empty glasses frames. FLCL does in six episodes what many shows fail in twenty-six; in Ninamori, they sketch a character who feels as real in thirty minutes as most characters fail to in a season.

And of course, there’s Haruka. Haruka is less an active character than an elemental force in FLCL; she is Conflict, she is Discord, she was the first crush of a million American kids staying up way too late. To Naota, Haruka is Mamimi times a million, an alluring icon of mature adulthood who simultaneously assures him that growing up doesn’t mean giving up your weirdness. Haruka actually drives the “plot” of FLCL – she’s an alien here to break out Atomsk, some sort of space pirate who’s been trapped by industry titan Medical Mechanica. To do that, she creates a portal in Naota’s head, out of which pop out antagonistic robots for her to fight. Eventually, we learn that Medical Mechanica is planning to “smooth the folds of the planet” with their giant iron… but in the moment, even the other characters don’t really seem to care about the nitty-gritty mechanics of this scifi narrative’s half-baked plot. As it turns out, FLCL was also one of the first shows that taught me “plot is details.” So what is FLCL actually about?

Well, all that other stuff. Naota’s head-portal is a clear metaphor for angry puberty, sometimes bubbling up like an unwanted pimple, sometimes erupting like an unfortunately timed erection. FLCL was likely many young anime fans’ first “actually it’s about this” experience, and as those go, the show provides a clear and robust metaphor for the physical and mental perils of adolescence. Naota’s preference for sweet drinks over sour stuff implies a childish sensibility; his efforts to move to sour and pulpy drinks reflect his desire to rush to adulthood purely by embracing its trappings. But growing up is not a journey you can fast-forward, however you try.

Commander Amarao seemingly exists purely to embody Naota’s attempts to reach a false adulthood, representing a kid who never truly grew up. It’s no accident that Amarao is the one portrayed as a South Park child, or that his pleas to Haruka center on things like “I’m an adult now, I do my own taxes and everything.” Amarao’s ostentatious fake eyebrows are a perfect metaphor for his goal – they are the appearance of adulthood pasted on like a sticker, ostensibly designed to block Naota’s portal and the ugliness of puberty it contains. But we all have to let the ugliness through the portal – whatever the embarrassing result, fighting through the perils of puberty and adolescence is a major part of growing up. FLCL is defiantly anti-pretension, and Commander Amarao is pretension incarnate.

FLCL isn’t a complete journey, of course. After all, who can truly say they’ve “grown up?” Naota starts out aimless and immature and selfish, and he doesn’t really mature out of those things – he just grows up enough to know he has to mature, that there’s a real and worthwhile journey ahead of him, that “nothing amazing happens here” is a call to action, not a sigh of defeat. Standing in the wreckage of Haruka’s wild adventures, he realizes he’s just a boy, and the world is much larger than he imagined. Though FLCL’s “something amazing” is painted in strokes as grand and apocalyptic as the end of the world, the ultimate argument is “you’re wrong, Naota. Something amazing is always happening somewhere, if you’re willing to seek it.” And so he rises to his feet, shouldering his guitar, outlined against the broken, beautiful world he has found. That moment is anime itself to me – personal truth as world-shattering revelation, our most deeply held feelings given the grandeur they deserve

Huddled under the covers in a fold-out bed in an unfamiliar house, that moment spoke to me like nothing else. FLCL finds beauty in every moment; motoring along the floodbanks as a song chimes in your head, sweating in your bunk bed as your crush leans in too close, playing your guitar or smoking a last cigarette or idly reflecting on what has been and might yet be. FLCL helped push me down this unsteady path, and still speaks to the kid in my soul, staring with wide-eyed wonder at all the beauty of the world. However much you grow up, and FLCL does believe you do have to grow up, it also believes you must never forget your Haruka – must always stand resolute, embracing the world as it is while dreaming of fantasies beyond. That mixture of grounded humanity and willful idealism stays with me yet, and rises every time I hear that Ride on Shooting Star riff. As long as you still seek it, the adventure never ends.

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