Nothing amazing ever happens in this sequel. Every second we spend watching it is like a whole lifetime of dying slowly.
Hyperbole aside, I'll just be upfront: I didn't want this to happen. For years I was happy and confident that FLCL was seemingly sequel-proof. It's a perfect little character piece that crystallizes its particular time and place, celebrates all the excess and id-groping of the anime medium, and does it with heart and literacy. Nothing about it needed any elaboration. You can just ignore bad sequels, yeah, but they somehow make the original less "special." I wanted FLCL to stay special. Leave it alone.
Naturally, they
...
didn't. I worked up some extremely cautious optimism and gave it a shot, anyway.
You can count me among the disappointed. Maybe Progressive isn't FOR us--the original was for older millennials who inherited the sensibilities of gen X, this one is apparently for younger millennials/gen Z. Re-using the throwback 90s alt-rock of The Pillows doesn't exactly scream "2010s zeitgeist," but ok, let's go with that. Well, Progressive does at least perfectly capture the soullessness and creative bankruptcy of this decade.
It's important to note that Studio I.G stated they planned to use young, somewhat inexperienced animators in order to capture the same kind of creative spontaneity as the first FLCL. Basically, trying to recapture lightning in a bottle--because that always works out, right? In the original, the approach was similarly improvisational, but it served a purpose: testing out then-new digital animation methods. Here though, it's just amateur-fetishism. The result is complete inconsistency--one episode looks like it could be any generic sterile looking moe SoL from this year, the next episode's brimming with off-the-wall animation and nice, hand-drawn looking linework. You can't really say Progressive looks good or bad, because it looks good and bad in about equal measure.
Working on a FLCL sequel should be an artist's dream--you can come up with all kinds of fucked up, evocative imagery and find crazy ways to work it into the plot and make it thematically relevant. The original nailed "magic realism with sci-fi overtones," maybe play around with some new genre combinations in this one. There's infinite possibilities besides just having robots come out of people's heads, right?
Nah. We get more robots coming out of people's heads, more phallic imagery, and more blabbing about "overflowing." Mamimi used that word at one point in the original to express how she felt in a dramatic scene with her limited vocabulary, but sure, let's have everyone use it now. Because ideas are hard. It's kinda sad seeing a show that gave so little of a fuck about what anyone expected being reduced to some kind of rote brand recognition checklist.
This might be contentious, but FLCL was never weird for the sake of it. It annihilated any border between highbrow and lowbrow, it was anarchistic, freewheeling, and almost felt like a 3 hour music video--but, it made sense as a story on an intuitive level because the creators grasped the basics of visual storytelling. The weirdness was there to give a visual logic to the convoluted web of sci-fi meta-narrative floating over the more central coming-of-age story, not to obfuscate things. There was always an emotional throughline in the craziness that kept you invested in the confusion.
Here, the pittance of novel ideas that weren't just stolen from the original take the opposite approach: the weirdness is weird for the sake of it in that generic "duuuude, LSD" sort of way that dumb people tend to falsely attribute to the first FLCL. In the original, you might have had a hard time explaining to a friend why Mamimi was walking a giant car-eating robot-dog like a pet in that one scene, but it made sense in the context of things. In Progressive, when that one side character is spinning around on the viking boat ride and some mechanical thing comes out of another mechanical thing and starts shooting missiles on a green vine thing, you're just as confused as your friend. The crazy shit is no longer there to accentuate the intimate character moments, it's there to REPLACE the character moments and to distract you from the fact you don't care about anything that's happening.
I remember all the theories about this sequel floating around online based on concept art and some animation snippets, and the interesting thing is nobody really got anything right. Not because Progressive defies expectations, but because it completely falls in line with them. Does that make any sense? It's the kind of stuff you'd never successfully predict because it's just too stupid and too obvious. You can imagine the writers sitting around in a boardroom coming up with this stuff a week before deadline, it's so on-the-nose.
"The original had a vintage vespa, so this one..."
"A vintage car."
"So we all know Haruko was this unpredictable manic pixie girl who used her sexuality as weapon to get what she wants. How do we quickly re-establish that here?"
"Uhh... I dunno... maybe, she can force high school students to watch porn on a laptop like some kind of escaped sex offender."
I'm serious, that happens. It's so dumb. Then she spends the next couple episodes barely connected to the plot, standing around and making the Dreamworks face as if to say "I'M HARUKO! Remember my memorable personality from the surprise hit OVA FLCL 15 years ago? I'll be relevant to the story by the 4th episode, I promise!"
In the original, Haruko was an awful, manipulative person, but she was oddly endearing, and you understood Naota's attachment to her. Conversely, you eventually got the sense she started feeling guilty over how she was using him. Not guilty enough to stop using him, but still, it felt like an actual human relationship, full of conflicting motives and ambiguity. There's nothing like that here. Watching Progressive, you just scratch your head and wonder "why are these kids still hanging around this creepy rapey hag who just ends up molesting and/or attacking them every episode?" Way to take one of the most alluring, dangerous, ALIVE characters in anime history and make her boring and washed up. Fuck.
I'd be fine with Haruko being recast as more of a typical antagonist if they remembered to fill that void with something, but the new characters have no soul. I know, "soul" is one of those buzzwords, it's hard to explain, but if you've seen the original you know what I mean. Naota and Mamimi had chemistry and felt like real people. They had flaws, but they weren't defined by those flaws; Naota was an angsty little ball of self-consciousness listlessly drifting through adolescence, but had a range of expression beyond just ennui. Mamimi was probably meant to either be slightly mentally retarded or somewhere on the spectrum, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way--she was like some weird wayward girl on the fringes of society you might have actually known at some point in your life. She had serious issues that the show convincingly sold to the audience--unlike a certain someone I'll get to in a moment--but again, there was more to her character than just brooding. She had an emotional range, and in the middle of that range she had her own unique "normal."
In Progressive, we're stuck with a fanfic.net self-insert "quirky" sadgirl protagonist with no apparent motivations, interests, goals or ability to make facial expressions. She has no genuine problems and looks like she could be a fashion model, but for some reason she's apparently drowning in nondescript existential malaise. The obligatory thematic undercurrent of her budding sexuality is wrapped up in miscellaneous gore/mallgoth imagery--she grins in her sleep as she dreams of zombies and dismembered corpses, etc. Because she's so QUIRKY and LITERALLY ME IRL XD :3. If you were worried that adult swim money might pressure the staff into pandering to Western sensibilities, your fears were 100% justified. This is the exact sort of fashionable fake depression bullshit that has no place anywhere outside tumblr.
I'm not saying you can't have a compelling character arc about depression or working through teen angst, I'm just saying it's all about execution. Again, just look at Mamimi in the original--her thousand yard stare, the way she tried to fill the holes in her life with countercultural debris and occult hocus-pocus, her freudian transference obsession with the name "Takkun"... She felt real. Hidomi is no Mamimi. Hell, Hidomi isn't even as interesting as Ninamori, and Ninamori was a side character who had one episode devoted to her before sinking into the background.
The less said about Jinyu, the better. She has zero personality and she looks like someone hit the randomizer in some shitty fighting game character create mode. Her voice actress stinks up the dub with the most hammy, melodramatic delivery in the show, but I can't really blame her because she didn't have much to work with voicing this bland cipher of a character. I can imagine the English audio director trying to explain Jinyu's personality to the VA in the recording booth: "she's, um... cool? And strong? And she's, uhh... uh... she wears pointy anime glasses?"
No good characters = no good character dynamics. That all-important adolescent romance angle falls flat because late in the plot, you still don't really get what Hidomi and Ide see in each other. They're both boring alphas (as much as Hidomi tries to pass herself off as some sort of maladjusted loner), they never really crack each other's shells, and they just don't have any "moments." I guess he likes her cuz she's a hot chick, and I guess she likes him cuz he's a hot guy...? Compelling stuff, right?
The first FLCL could convey so much more than that with visuals alone. Remember that part near the end when Naota and Haruko are riding on the vespa, smiling and talking about nothing in particular? No dialogue, just some song by The Pillows jangling away as their mouths flap--it's a casual but intimate conversation that we're not invited into, emphasizing how close they became. Remember Ninamori silently judging them the next day as she notices them slumming in a cardboard box? You can't have a great show that's only 6 episodes long without this kind of natural synthesis of visuals and story; everything from framing to body language communicating story and characterization.
To give you an idea of how Progressive stacks up, as soon as Jinyu first appears, she shoves the symbolic value of Hidomi's headphones down our throats in a clunky monologue. Later on, Ide--initially portrayed as this carefree class clown type character--has his "sad" backstory infodumped on us by a side character in about 10 seconds. At first I wasn't sure if it was for real or some kind of parody/meta-commentary, it was so badly done. The storytelling doesn't get much less mechanical and prosaic as it goes on.
The pacing is just baffling. How do you make a 6 episode absurdist comedy action sci-fi boring? Notice how every episode's structure is the same: we get a dream sequence intro to fill the "experimental" animation quota, then 90% of the episode is just there to set up climax. Then after the big explodey climax, we're left to assume that our questions will be answered in the next episode (they usually aren't). Rinse and repeat until ep 6.
I gotta touch on the visuals. The first FLCL was an early digital production that proved you can capture the expressiveness of well done cel animation in a digital medium. Even its color palette is more tasteful than anything coming out these days. Early digital resolution quibbles aside, it looked amazing--I didn't expect a post-Gainax "FLCL" to look as good, but I didn't expect it to be a total mess either. The female character designs could be cribbed from any interchangeable slice-of-life anime from the past few years. Everything in the first half of the show lacks shading and looks cheap. Besides a few animation bumps here and there, the action is floaty and stiff with no sense of weight or kinetic energy, thanks to a combination of poor directing and a surprising amount of studio outsourcing. The characters frequently jerk around with no in-between frames during serious action scenes, almost like those intentionally bad looking comedy budget-saving scenes in Kill La Kill--except it's not stylized or meant to be funny here. It's just bad.
The original FLCL was crammed full of fluid, stylish animation the whole way through and hidden single frame gags that served no practical purpose other than the animators having fun, since you have to pause to see them... and most of the time, this new one can't even be bothered to animate facial expressions and basic movement.
Admittedly halfway through the show, after the nth visual director switch, something happens: it starts looking... kinda good! The animation suddenly recaptures some of that sketchy, dynamic bounciness that was glaringly absent in the first three episodes; characters actually move around for the sake of it like actual humans in expository scenes; the action scenes are suddenly fluid and full of lovingly rendered mechanical gore; even the character designs are massively improved as the artists jump off those hideous early episodes' models and start imitating that classy old Gainax look. Hidomi gets an actual nose that's not just a thin line (for god sake Japan, give your fucking character designs noses again), Haruko starts looking like Haruko again, etc. It doesn't last long--they cheap out on the last episode--but give whoever directed that 5th ep a raise.
To reiterate, Progressive is a mess, and not in some inspired jam session sort of way--it seems to be a victim of budgeting and the production grind. It's like the full first half the show had to be sacrificed to make a couple episodes look good.
Anyway, a brief upswing in visuals can't make up for terrible writing and extremely formulaic episode structures. Progressive just doesn't have the humanity of the original, and you can't hide that with emotionally manipulative tactics like recycling "Runner's High" and "The Last Dinosaur." In fact, it just highlights how empty this show is when those familiar chords that used to make you feel like you were breathing sunshine suddenly evoke absolutely nothing.
When has American money getting mixed up in anime production ever led to anything you can praise without a dozen asterisks attached? By all accounts, adult swim brute forced this thing into existence, and the joylessness of much of the production process is palpable. Those Japanese tweets by some animators floating around complaining about having to deal with "stupid foreign companies" gave me a bad feeling from the getgo.
There's a resentment toward the audience permeating the whole thing. Occasionally they break the fourth wall and patronize the viewer with not-so-subtle lines about how you eventually have to "throw away your old junk" (read: "we're gonna shit all over this beloved intellectual property and you better not whine about it, you manchildren"). Art is a process of constant creative renewal--if something disappoints you, go create something yourself and do it better. That's the healthy approach, I know. But it's not the job of a mediocre cashgrab sequel to tell us that.
The first stage of grief is denial, so expect lots of faint praise for a while. Disappointment takes a while to sink in, I think. Maybe it's a kind of light Stockholm syndrome, like, we know this is what we're permanently stuck with, so we better try to enjoy it, right? I'll just be honest and say it: FLCL Progressive is bad. It could have been worse, and there's about half a decent show's worth of ideas floating around in the ether, but it just doesn't come together. It probably won't be remembered as some kind of legendary blunder, but on the other hand, it probably won't be remembered at all.
Jul 8, 2018
FLCL Progressive
(Anime)
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Nothing amazing ever happens in this sequel. Every second we spend watching it is like a whole lifetime of dying slowly.
Hyperbole aside, I'll just be upfront: I didn't want this to happen. For years I was happy and confident that FLCL was seemingly sequel-proof. It's a perfect little character piece that crystallizes its particular time and place, celebrates all the excess and id-groping of the anime medium, and does it with heart and literacy. Nothing about it needed any elaboration. You can just ignore bad sequels, yeah, but they somehow make the original less "special." I wanted FLCL to stay special. Leave it alone. Naturally, they ... |
