FLCL Alternative

This review was commissioned by @Bernkastel.


Seventeen years after its 2000-2001 release, FLCL received a pair of sequel series. "FLCL: Progressive" and "FLCL: Alternative" came out within a few months of each other in 2018, and the reaction to them appears to have been...mixed, to say the least. Depending on who you ask, they're either completely vapid cash-grabs whose existence is an insult to the original, or they're earnest artistically sincere sequels that fall only a little bit short.

Absolutely no one seems to think that they're *as* good as the original series, though, so I went in with tempered expectations. The fact that they were made almost entirely by different people, and that there was some ugliness involving the original creators' rights to the IP, tempered them further. These expectations of mine weren't even high to begin with, mind you, simply because the concept of an FLCL sequel just makes me go "Okay, but like, how?"

But, I'm not going to make up my mind about this show before I see it!

FLCL (assuming that this series is staying even remotely true in spirit to the original) is not the kind of work you can get much out of via piecemeal watch-and-react commentary. However, @Bernkastel also requested for me to give my review of "Alternative" a bit more word count than I did to the original series'. So, I've decided to write one post after watching the first three episodes of this six-part series, talking about what I'm seeing so far by that point, and then another (probably longer) one at the end with my final analysis.


Alright, three episodes in, and so far I've been pleasantly surprised with what I'm seeing. "Earnest, artistically sincere sequel that falls only a little bit short of the original" is...pretty much right on the money, in my opinion.

Right off the bat, it avoids the pitfalls that I was afraid it would stumble into. It doesn't try to be a direct sequel following Naota's continued adventures in growing up. It doesn't just cynically repeat the first series, like all too many 2010's-era sequels ended up doing. It has things to say, and while they're not the same things as the original FLCL, they're still closely related enough that it feels like they belong in the same franchise.

The subtitle "Alternative" is a well chosen one. It takes many of the original series' conceits, and says "what if instead of doing that, the series did this?"

FLCL was about a boy starting to enter his teens. Alternative is about a girl getting ready to leave her teens. Former protagonist Naota lived a lonely, isolated existence, and the series was about him coping with internal changes that he needs to get through in order to blossom. New main character Kana has a loving, healthy family and a tight-nit friend group she's rarely seen without, and her problems are about coming to grips with the world around her.

...

At the start of the series, Kana is a happy, well-adjusted seventeen-year-old girl. Even when she's unhappy or anxious, Kana tries to do the best she can by everyone she can, and is a source of cheer in the lives of those around her. Despite being extremely different from each other in personality and interests, her friends - tomboyish Mossan, hyperfeminine Hijiri, and introverted Tomomi - have a refreshingly nontoxic group dynamic, supporting and encouraging each other's endeavours even if they don't understand them.

The story begins with the subject of college exams being raised at school, and Kana realizing that the life she loves will inevitably end next year and she has no idea what comes afterward. Unlike some of her friends, she has no plans, no life ambitions (at least not ones she's willing to speak aloud), no particular artistic or academic talents to inform her path ahead.

That feeling of slowly impending doom is accentuated by current events. The economy of Kana's town is drying up and stratifying, thanks to a new (and notably laundry-iron-shaped, just like the mysterious factory from the first series that turned out to be packed full of scifi nonsense) shopping mall that sprang up at its heart. Meanwhile, commercial rocket launch facilities are starting to spring up around the world, including one near Kana's town, and rumor has it that the real reason for all this spacelaunch interest is because financial elites are looking into abandoning Earth and letting the 99% die to climate disaster without them.

While worrying about the exams and trying not to believe the dire portents for the world she's theoretically growing up to inherit, Kana has a brief, eerie encounter at the restaurant she waitresses part-time at. A strange, rude woman abruptly tells her to enjoy being seventeen while she can, because it's never, ever coming back.

Haruhara is, of course, the connecting thread between this series and the original.

She plays a slightly different role this time around, though, as befitting the different type of growing pains that this series is about.

Rather than forcibly altering Kana's body and moving into her house, Haruhara is just sort of hovering around her neighborhood like a fog, turning up here and there as she and her friends deal with challenges both mundane and surreal. Or like an infection, corrupting the reality they live in and generally making things more chaotic, stressful, and frightening. Her first appearances in each series are very representative; she enters "FLCL" by slamming into Naota with a motorcycle, and "Alternative" by whispering ominous warnings to Kana before vanishing into a crowd.

I remember comparing her to the Cat in the Hat in my review of the first series. This time, she's more like...Pennywise. This sentient dream-state that unpredictably takes places over as you enter them.

She still has the Rick Sanchez aspect, though.​

That's not to say that she's more antagonistic than she was last time. She has much the same hot-and-cold nature as she did the first time around, being a violent monster to flee at one moment and then a shoulder to cry on and provider of (sometimes completely reasonable, sometimes totally deranged) wisdom the next. She's the same character, but now she's out in the world to be confronted rather than inside your home to be accepted.

...

As for the nature of those confrontations, well, there are basically two recurring threads. The first of them is the aforementioned economic anxiety. The second is men. The big setpiece of the first episode alludes to both of them when Kana and her friends - inspired by all the rockets in the news - build their own rocket out of soda cans and scrap metal. Making a game out of a reminder of class struggle, and building an edifice that looks, um...

Yeah most rockets are not that phallic.

Their launch is prevented by the sudden fall of a giant map-pin from the sky that crushes it (and the building that they're in). It's also connected to space, and also phallic.

Also, its presence causes a piece of nearby wreckage - including a male-looking mannequin - to turn into a horrifying biomechanoid monster. And also causes a flower to grow out of Kana's head, in a manner reminiscent of - but distinctly different from - Naota with his forehead-boners in the last series. A monster that Haruhara has to show up and defeat, using a weaponized guitar that she summons by pulling the flower out of Kana's head Utena-style.

This establishes a pattern of the giant monsters being spawned by external triggers, while the solutions to those giant monsters - weapons, vehicles, etc - grow out of Kana's head in response to their attacks. Almost a direct inverse of the original. Kana is forced to grudgingly team up with the obnoxious, inexplicable Haruhara in these instances, providing her with the weaponry needed to defeat the current monster.

That by itself makes Haruhara a bit more heroic than she spent most of FLCL being. She makes up for it in other places, though. For instance, the second episode centers on one of Kana's friends - the hyperfeminine, super-attractive, already-done-some-modelling-gigs Hijiri - dating a college boy who wows her with his age, independence, and professional photography that might theoretically help her career. He ends up using her and then dumping her in a heartbeat for Haruhara. And even takes back the gifts he'd bought for Hijiri to give them to Haruhara instead.

Who then, after stealing him and being really smug about it, abruptly beats him bloody with her guitar and abandons him in turn.

As before, Haruhara blends male and female characteristics in weird ways that play off of the psychosexual demons of the protagonist. Sometimes, she's an invincible romantic and professional rival (she threatens to overshadow Hijiri's modeling career as well as steal her boyfriend. Briefly. For some reason). Other times, she acts like a caricature of juvenile, predatory male sexuality. She repeatedly holds her weaponry in front of her crotch and jokes about or pantomimes it being her penis. There's also one scene where she ambushes them at a doctor's office and seemingly tries (very, very ineptly, thank god) to rape them.

The third episode, which focuses on Kana's other friend Mossan and her struggles to work a hard construction job while keeping up her grades in the hopes of paying her way through design school, is the one that has Haruhara suddenly being a model and stepping on both Mossan's fashion design toes AND Hijiri's modeling ones. And also driving a construction vehicle at Mossan's worksite that almost crushes them.

But, despite that, she and Kana are developing something along the lines of a friendship. Born of them having to pool heads (heh) to defend themselves and everyone else from attacking biomechs at least once per episode.

Well, there is at least one exception to that, late in episode 3, when the biomech actually does come out of Kana's head old school style and delivers an important piece of life advice instead of attacking. And Haruhara appears and kills it by herself before anyone can react. I suspect I'll be talking more about this incident in my second post; as is, I need more context for the robots and anti-robot summons in this series before trying to dissect it.

...

I said that this series doesn't quite reach the same highs as the original FLCL, and there are basically three reasons for that.

First, the visuals. "FLCL" was constantly doing the most insane, over-the-top, what-the-hell-are-you-even-smoking-bro kinds of experimental animation, such that you never knew what you were even going to be looking at from one scene to the next. "Alternative" makes some nods to that, but they're not nearly as common, not nearly as impressive, and...they honestly feel almost like they're apologizing for their own existence.

Like the creators knew that they didn't have the same vision or talent at animation as the original crew did, but they feel obligated to throw a few nods to the original's style regardless. I empathise with their position, but, well, the fact is that they indeed did not have that same talent for visual experimentation.

The second issue is...well...in some ways this might be a necessary change for the subject matter, but the tone of the show is more sedate in much the same way that it's visuals are. On one hand, FLCL was about the feverish world of male puberty, while Alternative is about the much more grounded world of female young adulthood, so things can't be as insane and still fit. That makes Alternative more palatable, less gross and crass, and easier to recommend for general audiences, but it also makes it less memorable. It's just not as much of a departure from business as usual for anime. That doesn't say anything about quality in and of itself, but the weirdness is what most people probably remember FLCL for first and foremost, and this series' premise never would have let it be as weird.

The third is something that I will judge the creators much more harshly for: preachiness. For all that it was puerile in its exploration of puerility, the original FLCL actually had a lot of respect for its audience's intelligence. It never spelled out its metaphors, or repeated in as many words what the story is meant to be about. Alternative, unfortunately, can barely let fifteen minutes go by without someone basically looking straight into the camera and saying what important life lesson they're learning from this. It might be about more grown-up problems, but sometimes Alternative treats its audience like they're children.

None of these issues are enough to ruin the series. It's still good. But they do prevent it from being quite the uninhibited wild ride that the first series was, and - despite having a more refined air to it - Alternative just doesn't seem as skilfully made.


So, that's the halfway point. Next time, I'll go over the final three episodes and my final thoughts on FLCL Alt as a whole.