Ah yes, the sequel that no one thought was necessary but we felt blessed to get... I wish I had something more to say about it but the process of eventually watching I can only describe as being akin to fanfic. They loved the original. They wanted to build on it. They didn't get how it worked.
I'm going to try to lay out some positives first before jumping in with the more frustrating aspects.
* The Pillows are back and provide the soundtrack. The main theme for Progressive, "Thank you, my twilight", with all it's silly Engrish, is great and I
...
won't hear otherwise. Hearing it start up in the scattered episodes that it did was always a highlight.
* Hidomi's VA, Xanthe Huynh, I had literally never heard of before but she was legitimately talented in voicing a character that was emotionally muted in spots and utterly manic in others as the plot dictated. I think she even outshone Kari Wahlgren, who was playing the Haruko character for all it was worth.
* Hidomi Hibajiri and Ko Ide are both interesting concepts for characters. I don't want to spoil them completely, but neither is totally what they seems, Hidomi presenting as a nihilist tsundere-like with morbid dreams and Ide as... well, basically a "bro" or the junior high equivalent of it despite not exactly looking the part. Both have more to their motives than you initially suspect and, while the reveals are in some cases too reliant on exposition for my tastes, it works to confirm junior high and that phase in one's life as a failed form of posturing.
* Episode 5. The animation quality was not at all consistent but they blew the budget on episode five and it shows. We also get the return of "manga" style, difficult as it supposedly is.
So, there's some decent stuff in there. I think that had it been a standalone and not trying to riff of a seminal work released some fifteen years prior, we would have been okay with it as its quirky self, but it suffers too much from comparisons and from here I have no choice but to address the negatives with spoilers and comps to the original.
* Subpar Narration. One of the odd triumphs of FLCL was the recognition that, without being hit over the head with it, Naota was fundamentally an unreliable narrator. It's not that he was trying to lie to you as other famous literary unreliable narrators were, he was merely convinced that in order to present a narrative of his own life, he needed to protect Samajima Mamimi or whomever or do X. The experience of watching FLCL was the experience of watching a teenager, immature but thinking that he knows how the world works better than everyone else around him, try to craft a story in which his life makes sense both in the moment and going forward as far as justifying action he's yet to take. After so many of these episodes in which Naota appears to make a decisive declaration that doesn't add up to much, you realize that it's not a bug, but a feature in trying to capture the teenaged conviction about what's to come. Hibajiri narrates... a little... but it's predominantly not as things are happening to her but rather as she's dreaming. Without getting into the persistent argument of "it was all a dream!" presenting relevant stakes within art, the whole thing is structured about as well as, say, when a long running series that builds its narrative arcs around fixed points in the schedule goes through a series of flashbacks or flashforwards preceding each episode in order to give you the illusion of development towards a specific endgame. Even without that unflattering comparison, you have a double removal within the dream sequences in that you are not only conscious of the dreaming, but have Hidomi's more Id-like subconscious emerging, no less nihilistic, but at least willing to have fun, and said subconscious is anomalous with the exception of episode four when it comes out to play in full. This could be analogous to the lazy writing that comes with "here's an episode where the characters are drunk" or "here's an episode where a magic spell causes them to be more candid than they would ordinarily." Naota's narration and all the attendant flaws were highly organic, arising out of his character and shortcomings. Hidomi's narration is artificial, rarely utilized, and mostly in the service of reminding the audience of what the shows fears they may not have picked up on.
* No Conceits. Each episode of the original was wrapped around a conceit that was developmentally reflective of where Naota was at as he was trying to become an adult. You had a video games episode, an airsoft / paintball episode, a class play episode, a baseball episode (I also discovered DBZ had a baseball episode which I watched the same evening as the finale). There's nothing in particular to organize any of the episodes of Progressive. You could conceivably say that ep 2 was a part-time job and ep 3 was riffing off the beach episode trope, but they weren't really doing anything with them. The potential was definitely there to explore something, as the original tried to deal with male-gendered tropes (maybe class play excluded) and there could have been ways of exploring Hidomi's more feminine presentation through consideration of other rites of passage. They just didn't.
* Amorphous Time. FLCL was very much of a time and place in its references, which was risky but I think worked, it's just hard to tell what the staying power will be once those references fall out of circulation. Progressive shied away from making any references to topical pop culture at all. The closest it came was talking about gendered clothing, ultimately a non-starter, and having Hidomi scrolling through her phone. References aren't going to make or break a show, but the original used them in a smart way where you could see the gestures they were making and how they were supposed to sync up with your understanding of the characters making them, especially in how Haruko referenced bands that presented as counter culture. There's nothing really "2018" or any single year about the issues the kids were dealing with or the world they were living in, and thus the whole exercise lacked that feeling of both density ("I can follow this thread and see how far it takes me") or being grounded in a specific setting or timeframe.
* Haruko. It's both too easy and too difficult to level one's aim at the show's "star," but the Haruko of the original was genuinely ambiguous as to her motives and aims. You can't really forget some of the revelations of the FLCL finale, but Haruko's personality in the sequel could be summarized as manic, controlling, and covetous, and not even Jinyu (as a largely unnecessary foil) can really overcome the fact that you're watching a character who mind-controls most of a classroom for... reasons? If it brings out anything, it really batters you with the "adults are wrong, kids are also wrong" motif from the original but not to any productive effect. Moreover the brainwashing bit is scarcely relevant to anything that's happening, outside of "let's get everyone to the amusement park!" late in the series, ultimately another failed conceit.
* Mori / Aiko. I suppose this is going to be a possibly polarizing opinion, but I liked Aiko's initial episode because I was convinced that we were finally getting a social commentary that was topical, in that Mori is pretentious and attempts to be fashionable but has almost no understanding of human nature, culminating in him paying Aiko to be the shy "I'm so embarrassed" anime girl stereotype because it's what he thinks he likes and it's what his notion of a relationship is. Aiko cutting him down to size and just taking his money in episode three was excellent, because it took to task all the dudes with similar notions, of such there are enough among the weebs. And then he continued to follow her around anyway and did a few selfless things in the finale episode and got the girl. Without really developing as a character or getting what was wrong about his prior behavior. I don't have an inherent opposition to the dumpy guy getting the girl, but for god's sake, at least have him come to some sort of realization about how awful his earlier behavior was.
* N.O. Overload. The trouble with just about every series, but particularly shonen, is that once certain abilities become prolific among the characters, they stop working as what singles out the original characters and makes them unique. Hidomi and Ide probably would have been enough, Marco, maybe, since they did it with Naota / Ninamori in the original, but when the whole junior high population appeared to have some version of N.O. that was being sucked out by Interstellar Immigration during the finale, to power whatever was fighting the giant iron, it felt that was taking away from the characters we were most familiar with.
* Lazy tie-ins. I don't really know what to do with Canti or Amarao or the mystery of the bass because even though the promo material asked "what ever happened to" this or that, the payoff was never there. Canti was little more than a Macguffin. Amarao was a visual name drop and then an actual one. The bass was there, but the potential tension between the Jinyu aesthetic and the Haruko aesthetic was never exploited nor spelled out particularly. The impression was given that Medical Mechanica was now just about everywhere and yet they simultaneously had very little "presence" in the show outside of the visual of the iron, which was rarely used to any particular effect, certainly not the siren and steam burst that accompanied Naota's more emotional moments. In short, they utilized a lot of the imagery without actually doing anything with most of it. Or rather, while the original highlights such characters and traits, the sequel referred to them, and then refused to expand on them. Thus, it positioned itself with the more lazy of the sequels, asking us "remember when?" without improving our understanding of what was happening.
Objectively, I'm not sure Progressive is bad, although a lot of people will probably say it's bad (MAL has a lot of 3/10 reviews right now), whereas I merely found it to be mediocre and poorly thought through. I'll still be watching Alternative when it arrives on the scene in the fall, but I feel like a lot of the wind's been taken out of me in terms of enthusiasm.
Jul 9, 2018
FLCL Progressive
(Anime)
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Ah yes, the sequel that no one thought was necessary but we felt blessed to get... I wish I had something more to say about it but the process of eventually watching I can only describe as being akin to fanfic. They loved the original. They wanted to build on it. They didn't get how it worked.
I'm going to try to lay out some positives first before jumping in with the more frustrating aspects. * The Pillows are back and provide the soundtrack. The main theme for Progressive, "Thank you, my twilight", with all it's silly Engrish, is great and I ... |
