Growing Pains: Kazuya Tsurumaki’s “FLCL”

By Bob Clark

When it comes to anime directors, like any filmmakers, it pays to look back and see where they came from, who they studied under while learning their particular craft before eventually taking hold of the reins themselves in full. It helps put the work of Hideaki Anno into better context when one understands how he cultivated his skills as an animator under Hayao Miyazaki– though the two would seem to represent almost polar opposites in terms how technique, style and subject-matter as far as the medium is concerned, it becomes easier to see a kind of innocence at the heart of even the bleakest parts of Evangelion when one appreciates the creator’s work as an animator on Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (it also helps trace the source of some of those obsessions with adolescent angst and turmoil– Asuka’s traumatic past with her suicidal mother is closely taken from the Ghibli film). Anno himself would later shepherd his own team of animators and crew-members to full-fledged directors themselves as he worked on his own masterpieces, with no-one achieving more under his wing than assistant-director Kazuya Tsurumaki, with whom the director has shared an over twenty-year long creative collaboration. Working as an animation-director and storyboard artist on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and the seminal Neon Genesis Evangelion, he proved to be an invaluable addition to the team and one who was even able to helm a fair amount of the subsequent Evangelion theatrical features alongside the director, himself. One can see Tsurumaki’s energetic voice most clearly in sequences like Unit-Two’s doomed heroism in the battle against the Mass-Production Evas from End of Evangelion, or the battles against the imaginative new Angels from the Rebuild series.

Yet at moments like those, one can also see his ambitions being held back, if only somewhat, by the dedication to relative realism that the Evangelion creator demands even at the most surreal moments of his enterprise. The scale and scope of every battle may become higher and higher as gravity begins to let loose its grip of all sense of ante, but it’s always grounded in a hard-edged physicality that never lets you forget the bodily risk to the players, the life-and-death stakes and intimacy in all of its end-of-the-world helker skelter. Of course, all this talk of creative restraint is a fairly relative thing, and when Hideaki Anno is the one reining you in, it only speaks to the sense of potential fever pitch of abandon with which you might throw yourself given freedom from all restrictions. That’s exactly what you get in Tsurumaki’s debut as a fully fledged solo-director on the six-episode OVA FLCL (pronounced, for some reason, Fooly Cooly), a three-hour stretch of anarchic, self-conscious anime mash-ups that could be described as a civil war within the collective subcosncious of every otaku who’s ever spent too much time wondering about the inner workings of their favorite anime. Freely mixing the various archetypes of nearly every sub-genre it can get its greedy little mits around, as well as any other pop-cultural artifacts in reach, it plays as a devilishly clever riff on the conventions of over an entire decade’s worth of giant-robot adventures, harem comedies and outer-space mystical mumbo-jumbo to create what might be one of the most uncharacteristically authentic coming of age stories produced for anime

In Anno’s Evangelion, one of the principal pleasures was in seeing how the director turned the aspects everybody takes for granted about the giant-mech genre and turned them inside out, not so much actually subverting them as he was exposing their inner workings by changing the rules, just slightly. As the physical and psychological connection between the Three Children and their Eva Units was explored in full with so many diverse layers of boundary pushing body-horror, it allowed us to recognize how the robots that youths pilot in anime are always a kind of mental projection of their own image, an extension of the self rather than just an instrument to be taken advantage of. As written by Yoji Enokido, FLCL seeks to take the connection between child-and-mecha one step further by turning the technological contraptions into as literal a metaphor for the trials and turmoils of puberty as possible– after being run over by a Vespa and whacked over the head by its driver with a Rickenbacker, Naota Nandaba finds himself plagued by fleshy growths sprouting from his forehead that blossom into rampaging robots which may or may not hold the key to an intergalactic source of infinite power. This would ordinarily be enough for most anime to deal with while breaking into a moderate sweat, but Ekokido keeps piling on complications– there’s the matter of the medical appliance corporation whose factory overlooks the small Japanese suburbs of Mabase, and may be involved in a plot to take over the world; there’s the matter of the earthbound interstellar-defense force investigating the matter while hunting for a fugitive space pirate who manifests as a glowing phoenix; finally, there’s the matter of the various girls competing for young Naota’s affections, even as he does his very best to ignore them and remain as level-headed as his increasingly lopsided skull will let him.

This is the sort of material that would be a challenge to handles for a full season order on television, let alone a mere six-episode OVA. In juggling so many balls at once with in such a limited amount of time, one might expect Tsurumaki would ground his anime with as strict and expedient a sense of focus as possible, remaining fixed on the matters at hand of his complicated story and even more complicated characters and affording himself nothing else in the sense of creative indulgences. Yeah, right.  Instead, the director throws just about every imaginable style and technique into our faces and gives us only the most cursory of time to gather our bearings– at a moment’s notice, FLCL can shift from watercolor postcards of suburban landscapes to extreme exagerations of posture and setting that would make most works of its ilk look like documentaries. Tsurumaki adopts the visual mannerisms of dozens of beloved anime and manga over the course of the series (at times, it literally turns into a black-and-white manga come to life, entirely), covering generational ground as far and wide as Monkey Punch’s Lupin the Third and Toei’s Puss in Boots to Masaki Kajisjima’s Tenchi Muyo and Anno’s own Evangelion, with nods aplenty to even more bizarre outsider fare like J.D. Salinger, South Park, Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations and Looney Tunes for good measure. It’s that last addition that provides the gel which makes the rest of the disparate parts adhere to one another, as characters and settings are allowed to freely change all manner of appearance, spirit and continuity in the interests of driving home a point, or merely grabbing a laugh, aiming for the same kind of fourth-wall demolishing spirit that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck maintain in the best of the Warner Bros. shorts– cartoons that know they’re cartoons. 

It makes perfect sense, when one appreciates the time that Tsurumaki spent directing omake shorts for Gunbuster and Nadia while toiling as Anno’s assistant. There, he developed the same kind of freewheeling, uncensored comic enthusiasm that’s filled in every frame of FLCL, cramming every spare moment on-screen with the animated equivalent of the doodles a precocious adolescent with an overactive imagination might fill in the margins of a school book otherwise dedicated to the most observant and dedicated of cram-session note-taking. Seeing him finally tackle a long-form anime of his own after years of working in mere shorts or shielded from the sun by Anno’s shadow (helping on Evangelion and picking up the director’s slack on the contentious production of His and Her Circumstances), one is left with an impression not unlike seeing Chuck Jones make the move to longer-form cartoons after decades of contending himself to mere handfuls of minutes in theatrical runner-ups before the feature presentations. Tsurumaki’s passion for the medium is unmatched and greatly appreciated, even when his antic and kaleidoscopic vision veers toward the incomprehensible– watch just one episode of this series and Anno begins to look like the picture of anime-conservatism by comparison, with the economic pairing of rapidly paced storytelling and laser-cut focus he exhibits throughout his work. Spread out over 26 episodes, Evangelion knew when to let its muscles go taught in suspense, and when to relax them into slow, almost poetic reveries. In an episode like “The Hedgehog Dilemma” (aka “Rain, Escape and Afterwards”), Anno tested the patience of his audience by following Shinji as he wandered through Tokyo-3 in the midst of depression, turning out one of the slowest and most moving pieces of television ever produced, especially for a cartoon about skyscraper-sized robots. What makes FLCL so difficult is that there’s nothing to balance out its extremes– it’s nothing but one giddy sugar-fueled rush after another.

And yet, for the subject matter at play, it works, and at times works perfectly. After all, for a story about a young boy right on the cusp of entering the utterly terrifying pangs of adolescence, it makes a certain amount of sense that the animation style would constantly be in flux, as though it were undergoing growth spurts of its own at any given moment, its directorial voice cracking as its adam’s apple develops in full. Though it takes the giant-robot genre as its primary mode for its variously surreal and hallucinatory action set-pieces, the series’ main manner is rooted more in the usually strained histrionics of the romantic harem-comedy, the kind that Western audiences are most familiar with in the works of mangaka Rumiko Takahashi like Urusei Yatsura and in anime like the various Tenchi Muyo series. In those stories, as in FLCL, it’s common for the main protagonist to suddenly find a bevy of beautiful girls vying for his attention, mostly without him actually doing anything to earn their affection. They fall out of the sky in spaceships or rise from the grave in cutely demonic form– our heroes don’t so much seek them out of their own volition as much as they find themselves thrown into their den of feuding lionesses, without being asked for his say in the matter. It’s a set of conventions that is usually read as betraying the weakest parts of male fantasy, creating circumstances where horny young boys barely have to summon up any willpower or effort of their own to find comely members of the fairer sex to compete for their affections, but in the hands of Enokido’s clever writing and especially Tsurumaki’s unbridled visual imagination, it becomes something else entirely, and far deeper.

By pairing it with small doses of the surreal body-horror of Evangelion and watering it down with healthy heapings of omake cartoon theatrics, FLCL turns the harem-comedy into a metaphor for the violent moodswings that arrive in the onset of puberty, the likes of which can twist a young person’s perception of the world around them as much as it does their own body. Girls don’t just magically appear on your doorstep, one day, mere sex-kittens waiting to be adopted (if only it were that easy), but for the young boy who wrestles with the chemical changes that arrive with all those unwelcome hormones surging through his system, it isn’t so unreasonable to feel as though these beauties have just sprung up out of nowhere all of a sudden. You look around yourself after making the leap from grade school to junior high and find yourself surrounded by all these giggling, developing teases and might very well ask yourself, “Where the hell did they all come from?” They might as well come from another planet, for how utterly alien they all seem to the burgeoning male psyche. They might as well be demons from the antique realm of eastern mythology, for the ways in which they can toy with so many emotions. FLCL captures that lonely, vulnerable period of a boy’s life where he doesn’t know which girl he’s most afraid of, and therefore in love with– the young student-president from his grade who’s willing to rig elections just to co-star with him in the school play, the lonely high-school student and hand-me-down girlfriend from his older brother who’s off playing baseball in America, or the out-of-her-mind pink-haired pirate from outer-space who tries to kill him one moment while all but cradling him in her arms the next.

Though the answer steadily becomes obvious about midway, there’s a genuine suspense in the early episodes that isn’t usually present in most harem-comedies, where the question of which lunatic girl our hero is most attracted to is usually a foregone conclusion. It allows the moments where Naota finally begins to own up to the directions his heartstrings are pulling him to flourish with a real sense of worth, having earned that sense of sentimentalism with all the uncertainty that came before. It’s then that Tsurumaki’s antic style finally coalesces into a sustained kind of dreamlike lucidity, as the twin plot-strands of an end-of-the-world robot rumble and the boy’s confused emotions come twisting together like double-helix strands of DNA. While it’s never as original or moving as his mentor’s work in Evangelion, it becomes far more down-to-earth and approachable at its very best of moments. Anno’s aim was rather broad, after all, depicting the struggles of young people and their inability to connect with an entire world that seemed to be out to get them even as they did their best to save it. Tsurumaki’s goal is far humbler, despite all appearances to the contrary– at the end of the day, it’s really just about a boy and a girl, with the world only getting in the way as collateral damage. Try to remember the way it felt the first time you summoned up the courage to tell somebody you were in love with them, and the overwhelming crush of rejection that arrived when that first love turned to heartbreak, whether it came long after that climactic declaration of your affections or right on its stiletto-heels. FLCL literalizes the epic emotional stakes we all feel at high-peak moments like those, the kinds that we never really get used to over the course of our lives, unless we have the singular bad luck for each and every feeling in our heart to be dulled out by so much uniform pain. To open yourself, to let something out of your lonely mind and express the need you have for one singular human being. Sometimes you get lucky, and get to spend the rest of your life traveling the galaxy with someone special. Most of the time all you’re left with is a scorched-earth to call home, and a beat-up Rickenbacker left behind to remember her by. It already feels positively apocalyptic, at that age. Doesn’t it always?