Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven Fooly Cooly (or FLCL, or Furi Kuri, depending on who you ask) is touted as what happens when an anime studio decides to let its hair down. Because, you see, when you get paid to draw cartoons about pink-haired half-naked pinup models with ginormous hoodly-hoos fighting shadow ninjas from their planet-eating laserbots (also with ginormous hoodly-hoos), you need to blow off some steam once in a while. This is the most normal thing that happens in the whole series. I heard that, in Japan, they have these stress relief parlors where you go in, pay fifty dollars (yen, whatever), and they let you break stuff with a baseball bat for an hour. Lamps, vases, garden gnomes... it's supposed to be really theraputic. But noooo, that isn't good enough for the frothing lunatics at Gainax, the same satanic sadists that brought us Ebichu. No, they had to inflict this upon the world. Fooly Cooly is six episodes of... of... well, it's of something in any case. Like it or lump it, Fooly Cooly leaves you wishing you had a giant spatula with which to scrape your jaw up off the ground. Characters: I'm going to come clean right now and admit that I don't know any of the characters' names. This is partially because they're all goofy Japanese names, and partially because it seems like every character has a pet name for every other character, so they never get called the same thing twice. For the purposes of this review, I'll be referring to the main character as Lumpy Boy, the insane guitar-weilding psycho as Vespa Girl, and the arsonist girlfriend character as Floopy McFatlips. (There's also a robot who I call TV Head, but we'll get to him later.) "You see son, there comes a time in every boy's life..." Lumpy Boy is your average unlikable droopy teenager. He laments the loss of his brother (who went to America to play baseball) and is constantly dodging the flirtacious advances of Floopy McFatlips, in whom he has no interest. He narrates the beginning and end of each episode, so we get to hear up-close and personal how angsty he is. He starts off complaining that nothing ever happens in his town, then later he complains because stuff is happening, and delights in throwing pubescent fits whenever possible. His counterbalance is Vespa Girl, so named because of the ugly motorscooter she rides around. She's a punk rockin', slam dancin', take-no-prisoners, in-your-face type of girl. She carries around a guitar and, uh, hits things with it. And in some scenes she's a nurse. She's the main source of Fooly Cooly's zaniness and, when taken in small doses, the most enjoyable character in the series. Floopy McFatlips rounds out the major foreground cast. Her job is to hang on Lumpy Boy in an eerie, pedophilic way that attempts to make the viewer as uncomfortable as possible. Her namesake comes from the fact that you could feed a small starving country with the meat in those bulbous, glistening, beefy lips of hers. Oh, and she has the most grating hyper-obnoxious voice ever. Imagine Fran Drescher's laugh seeping into every word of someone's vocabulary. Yeeah. Story: Okay. Deep breath. Each episode of Fooly Cooly is twenty-four minutes long. That amounts to 144 minutes, or, two hours and change. That's just about the length of your average Hollywood feature film. Now, you know how in most movies there's that scene where the entirety of the plot becomes shockingly clear? Fooly Cooly doesn't have one. It's just two-and-a-half hours of random events strung together like gritty, misshapen pearls. "I don't smoke weed, I just tell people I do to explain my personality." Not that stuff doesn't happen - just the opposite. Stuff does happen. But unfortunately, that's all that happens. At the end of the series, the characters haven't learned about the magic and mystery of love and life; they're in the exact same ruts they were when it all started. Which, to give you some indication of how completely out in left field Fooly Cooly is, I should probably summarize. The fudge hits the fan when Vespa Girl runs over Lumpy Boy with her scooter and assaults him with a guitar, then moves into his house. Lumpy Boy develops a strange lump on his forehead which, by the end of episode one, expunges a huge robot with a TV for a head. In subsequent episodes, TV Head eats Lumpy Boy and transforms into an enormous cannon which shoots down alien robot machines that come out of other people's heads. I swear on a keg of canned hash I did not fabricate a word of the former sentence. And the scary thing is, it's all downhill from there. Incoherency is a valid storytelling tool in the right context. Say the book/movie Fight Club. The trick is this, though: all the disjointed and mismatched pieces have to be able to be re-arranged to form a fairly clear whole. Fooly Cooly is like buying a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle and getting one piece each from 500 completely different puzzles. Animation: I have got to give props where props are due: Fooly Cooly has a very keen and stylish look going on for it. While you're scratching your head trying to figure out what the tarnation it is on screen you're looking at, you'll at least be heartened to know that what you're looking at isn't unattractive. In fact, if there's one of the many, many, many random elements used to create this show that actually works for it, it's definately the animation. Suddenly, without warning, the show will devolve into an onscreen black-and-white manga, complete with dialogue bubbles and goofy overblown emotes. Then, without giving notice, it switches back and pretends nothing happened. The thirty seconds or so of South Park animation in the last episode is probably the most riotous thirty seconds in the series. However, gimmicks without substance won't carry a series, and once the shock value of an unexpected shift in art paradigms wears off, you're back where you started. Makes you wonder where she was hiding the gun. I regretfully had to stop giving hamhams at four because, while I do think the drawings are pretty, most of those drawings are of cat testicles or robot poop or the grandoise cellulose deposits around Floopy McFatlips' mouth. Good-looking vomit is still vomit. Culture Shock: "You don't get it because you're not Japanese." That's why I created the Culture Shock category in the first place, and now that I've seen Fooly Cooly I'm glad I did. Though I'm not entirely convinced that even an honest-to-goodness Japanese anime fanatic can make heads or tails of Fooly Cooly's insanity, I can see where it'd pay off to have a solid sense of non-American humor while watching it. The only semblance of something familiar is the passing idea that "America is where baseball lives". Since I don't even like baseball, that doesn't leave me with much to cling to. Also, there is an episode which is pretty much 100% curry jokes; since I don't even have a vague idea what curry is, I felt more lost than ever. Funny, but not "ha ha" funny. Sometimes the TV likes to sit there and watch you for a change. I thought long and hard before giving Fooly Cooly it's overall rating. On one hand, I certainly don't find it as hard to watch as, say, Trigun. It took me a while to determine why that is. See, most times my television's job is to provide background noise while I'm playing/working/killing time on my computer. And if there's one thing Fooly Cooly has going for it, it's the kickin' soundtrack. The overall rating is supposed to be an indication of my enjoyment of the series, and not an average of the previous scores. But is it really fair to give a series two full hamhams just because I like the music? Especially considering I didn't even have the foresight to create a "music" category to rate? I didn't think so. Links Ryeka: FLCL Animenation Listing IMDB Listing So, for Fooly Cooly I make an exception to the rule. The following is rating is just the average of the above ratings, rounded down (AA doesn't give breaks). Before I leave you, I will make the recommendation that you watch this show at least once - even if you aren't an anime fan and take every word I write as gospel truth. Fooly Cooly may not be good, but it's certainly interesting. Just do yourself a favor and turn your brain off before you tune it, or else you might damage it. Overall Rating:

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