Kei's Anime Reviews

FLCL Episode 2

"Fire Starter"

For being almost complete indecipherable, FLCL is surprisingly entertaining. It does character development well, in non obvious ways (a fresh change for an anime series). On the other hand, the plot is really fragmented, and stuff is just hard to follow. Maybe if you could slow everything down 50% it'd be easier to figure out what's going on.

But that's definitely not the fun of whats' going on here.

From one point of view, though, this show doesn't really succeed on some levels. Most obviously is the fact is whether or not it is really telling a story? Sure some things happen, but we don't really know where anything's going. A lot of glitz and flash is thrown on top of it to try and cover it up, and that aspect of the show is pretty much all that's carrying it forward. There is a lot of it though.

Also, some of the animation in this episode is so over the top and exaggerated that it ceased being appealing to me. I'm kind of boring like that, really liking very standard anime looks over weird ones. I do, however, like the use of color in FLCL. It's a little washed out, but in general, there's a whole bunch of colors you don't usually see.

It's kind of hard to put a finger on exactly what I think about this show. It's pure insanity animated, which is cool, but on the other hand, you spend so much of it trying to figure out what the heck is going on--which is cool--but somewhat distracting. Is there really something going on here? Or is it just a stream-of-consciousness trip?

Rating: B

Posted by Kei at January 28, 2004 12:02 AM