Flag

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Alternative Titles

Japanese: FLAG（フラッグ）

Information

Type: ONA

Episodes: 13

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Jun 16, 2006 to Mar 2, 2007

Producers: Aniplex

Licensors: Bandai Entertainment

Studios: The Answer Studio

Source: Original

Themes: Adult Cast, Mecha, Military

Duration: 24 min. per ep.

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Score: 7.15¹ (scored by 4,736 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #3608²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #4685

Members: 21,769

Favorites: 74

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AniDB

ANN

Synopsis

In 20xx, a civil war broke out in a small country in Asia in spite of the dispatch of UN forces. But a picture taken by accident in the battlefield accelerates the peace process: a photograph of a flag, which became the symbol of peace. However, just before the peace agreement is finalized, the flag is stolen by an armed extremist group in order to obstruct the truce. To rescue the flag, the UN sends the Special Development Command (SDC, which is armed with the High Agility Versatile Weapon Carrier (HAVWC)), along with an embedded photojournalist to record their activities. That photojournalist is Saeko Shirasu—the young camerawoman who took the picture of the flag.

(Source: ANN)

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Background

It was broadcast as pay per view streaming web video on Bandai Channel.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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Related Anime

Summary:

Flag Director's Edition: Issenman no Kufura no Kiroku

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Shirasu, Saeko

Main

Tanaka, Rena
Japanese

Akagi, Keiichi

Main

Ishizuka, Unshou
Japanese

Eversalt, Chris

Supporting

Hidaka, Narumi
Japanese

Nikkanen, Jan

Supporting

Nomura, Kenji
Japanese

Paint Engineer

Supporting

Chief

Supporting

Kufura

Supporting

Orikasa, Fumiko
Japanese

Hacker

Supporting

Lisa

Supporting

Kobayashi, Sanae
Japanese

Captain

Supporting

More staff

Staff

Takahashi, Ryousuke

Director, Script, Original Creator

Terada, Kazuo

Director, Script

Momose, Keiichi

Sound Director

Yamaguchi, Takeshi

Episode Director, Storyboard

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Opening Theme

"00-Opening-Hope to Peace (Hata) (00-Opening-Hope to Peace-「旗」)" by Yoshihiro Ike (池頼広)

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Ending Theme

"Lights" by Eri Nobuchika

Reviews

Jul 21, 2008

Beatnik

Recommended

Flag is a pretty unique venture. It's researched reasonably well, and is set in our world. The world with the laws of physics and politics. More interesting than the reality-based content though, is the form. This show is set entirely within the eye of the camera.

When we're not watching the narrative through a lens; we're seeing photos or computer displays. There is no scene set outside of the camera, and that in itself is a bold creative choice, although it is stretched very thin, in that we have to assume these people are such camera junkies they take them everywhere ... and never turn them off, no matter what they're doing or where they are. It's a bit too much to accept, but the directorial concept is so cool that you just shrug off any unrealistic scenarios and run with it.

The story follows the main protagonist, and her friend's reflections of her actions at the same time. The pacing between their stories as a result is well balanced, as just when one avenue of narrative is reaching its end or becoming stale, another picks up the slack. The story's focus on the UN's 'peacekeeping' of a war-torn country is more developed than it has any right to be. We see bureaucracy, politicking, soldiers dealing with killing, and more importantly the feelings of photographers capturing war and their place in it all. I don’t think this anime raises anything more powerful than the case of Kevin Carter's infamous photo in Sudan, but it does try.

The animation for the show is very well done, it always looks good and the whips and pans from the camera P.O.V are very smooth and natural-looking. But this anime is a sad case of so much effort put into research and attention to detail that they forgot about the importance of narrative. But more about that below.

Flag always runs the risk of wallowing in self-importance; the music being a major fault here. Full of bombastic cinematic score in the vein of Lisa Gerrard, with Middle-Eastern lady wailing in pain, it's all very trite. Just like the majority of photos. Yeah, for a show revolving around photography, having it populated by generic and clichéd-as-hell photos really doesn’t do it any favours. You've seen them all before: soldiers and kids, animals and destruction, and you could say that the anime is just using the clichés of the medium to tell its own story, to give it context, but cliché is cliché, unless you're commenting on the cliché itself, then just don’t use it. There are some photos that are good though, mainly the infamous photo the entire show is about.

Ultimately though, is this show entertaining? Does it maintain your interest? Does it captivate you? It didn’t for me. Maybe others will love it, but I have to admit I was bored a lot of the time by the constant 3D maps of digital terrain and preparation for military assaults. Hardly what I call entertaining. Michael Mann's The Insider is about a tobacco whistleblower; there's a lot of talking and meetings in that film, but it’s engrossing, you're on the edge of your seat; you're captivated by what's happening to the characters. In Flag there's a whole bunch of talking and meetings but the narrative is like an afterthought, it’s like the script has been fitted around the concept, instead of the concept decorating the script. There's no drive, no momentum, even though the first half is building up to an assault, there's no sense of urgency, not when every scene transition is via a computer desktop mouse cursor clicking on random files. (which gets old very quickly)

If the anime's purpose was to be like a documentary, it fails even more, as this isn’t a documentary about anything actually occurring in the real world. We have a quasi-Tibetan like scenario here, but its all fiction. If the anime-makers were bold enough to actually focus on a real event, Iraq, Afghanistan, take your pick, and provide their own view on it, then I would find it engaging, but otherwise the anime takes the safe route and doesn’t stick its neck out on anything. Just universal themes of war and media, which isn’t bad of itself, but when it consists mostly of dry lifeless dialogue and 3D maps, it’s hard to find anything compelling to latch on to.

There's only one moment where all the aspects of this show come together and work properly, and it’s very late in the series in the 12th episode where a conflict is being filmed by the main two characters, and it feels alive, full of purpose and direction, emotion and drama.

No matter the faults of the show, it’s different and I always applaud that. There is the chance that it will inspire kids and teens to pick up a camera and find a career out of it. A shame the brilliant animation was wasted on a muddled tale with no backbone.

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Jan 4, 2013

mahoganycow

Mixed Feelings

There's this old saying: “You can't polish a turd.” Someone (probably a grandparent; it's hard to beat cranky old people in the “brutal honesty” department) relayed that valuable piece of information to me at some point in my young life, and I've found it to be a crude but immutable truth, in art and fiction as much as in anything else. The best way I can describe Flag is to say that it's a great example of attempted turd polishing. It boasts a unique visual presentation and some downright incredible animation, but at the end of the day a weak narrative, poor cast, and muddled ... themes stick out from it like sore thumbs.

The story is this: In the near future, a civil war is erupting in a fictional country in Asia. Before the events of the series occur, photographer Saeko Shirasu takes a picture of a flag being lifted by the UN with help from citizens of the war-stricken nation. The photo becomes extremely famous; the flag itself becomes a symbol of peace. The UN steps in to mediate the civil war, and a date on which the major warring parties will sign a UN-sanctioned peace agreement overlooked by the legendary flag is approaching. However, just before the peace agreement is to be signed, the all-important flag is stolen by an unknown insurgent group. Without this symbol of peace in its possession, the UN fears that the peace agreement will ultimately fail, so they assign an elite group of special operatives to locate and retrieve the flag. Shirasu agrees to be an embedded photographer and document the group's search for the flag. While she's doing that, a friend of hers (also a photographer) is keeping an eye on the increasingly tense situation in the country's UN-occupied capital.

At this point you're probably asking questions in the vein of “if the flag is so important that they're risking lives to locate it, why wasn't it heavily guarded in the first place?” But I digress.

Flag's story is told with a film making technique called “found footage,” meaning that the series is presented to us as being raw, unedited footage of events that someone taped in the past with a handheld camera. This technique has existed for a while but was popularized in the late 90s with the success of films like “The Last Broadcast” and “The Blair Witch Project.” Flag shows everything either through the lens of a camera or the display of a computer, and goes to great lengths to maintain this illusion. Whenever the cast enters a vehicle, for example, the locations of the cameras on the vehicle are pointed out to the audience, so that we don't wonder where exactly the footage of different angles is coming from. In addition, you can tell the two main characters apart based on the differing electronic displays of their cameras, allowing the series to switch back and forth between plot threads without much of a hitch. I think that's neat. The whole setup does require a certain suspension of disbelief; I don't think a photographer would use their computer's webcam to film themselves typing, or leave their camera running while sitting around drinking coffee with a friend in a Starbucks.

The reason for using this style of filming is that it's honest. We see only what the camera sees, and hear only what the camera hears. That leaves us free to make up our minds about what we're seeing on our own. No external influences, such as a character's thoughts, affect our judgment. Depending on how it's used, this property could be seen as a strength or a weakness, and in Flag, it's definitely the latter. Dramas like Flag survive on swaying the emotions of the audience, so one might question how wise it is to use a style of presentation which creates distance between the audience and the events of the drama. In Flag, I don't think it was wise at all. There isn't a single conversation in the series that doesn't feel cold, empty, forced. And that's at least partially a result of this stylistic decision.

The other problem with the way that Flag's story is told is that, quite simply, it's boring. Flag is an endless montage of interviews, computer simulations, and narrative monologues played over still images. We're shown grainy photographs of the harsh reality of life in this country, political and religious doctrines are explained at length, and we watch the military perform long, tedious tests of its soldiers and their futuristic weapons. All of this is out of respect for realism, and I can appreciate that, but it takes over the series to the point where I almost forgot there was an actual plot buried in there somewhere. The series has strong sequences, but they're few and far between. For every genuinely rewarding moment in Flag, there are fifty that are empty and directionless. Several episodes begin with unnecessary recaps that sometimes stretch for as long as three and a half minutes. It's draining to watch this series. I have a pretty big reserve of patience, and it ran out long before I reached Flag's conclusion.

The characters aren't much better. The main character, Shirasu, is shown to be a little insecure and lonely. She's trying to figure out what exactly she wants to do with her skills as a photographer. She gains a bit of depth as she gradually becomes more comfortable with her role in the squad of soldiers she's been assigned to film, and moves from feeling like an outsider to being accepted. Unfortunately, the soldiers themselves are nowhere near as fleshed out as Shirasu. They're cardboard cutouts at best, bordering on outright stereotypes. There's a tough blonde female commanding officer, a big Russian strongman-esque pilot, an intelligent young Asian woman with glasses who does computer work...the list of seen-them-befores goes on. The show botches several opportunities to turn the cast into something more memorable. For example, in a series of interviews, Shirasu asks the soldiers about their personal reasons for choosing this line of work. Just when I thought I might get to hear them say something interesting, the responses came back, all empty one-line platitudes: “I fight for my family,” “I fight to save people,” “I fight for my country,” etc. Real nice. Apparently everyone's reasons for risking their lives come from recruitment posters they saw in their local middle school. We can eventually discern a little bit more about the cast based on how they react in discussions about military protocol and battle, but they're still too flat to be a source of any real drama or interest.

Thematically, Flag is more than a little confused, and doesn't seem to know what it wants to say at all. Originally I thought the series was going to be about photography: The value of an iconic image, the ability of the photographer to capture the past, breaking the barrier between being an observer and a participant, risking yourself for your art. Flag brings up all these themes, but utterly fails to elaborate on them or make any sort of real statement. Which is too bad, because those are all relatively original ideas. In addition, as Flag goes on, the focus shifts from themes of photography to general antiwar sentiment. This isn't bad in and of itself, but it's nothing we haven't seen before, and Flag doesn't bring anything new to this theme. Images of children with guns, civilians killed or displaced by indiscriminate bombing, masked terrorists taking to the streets...these images can be powerful when infused with the right amount of emotion, but on their own accord, they ceased to be shocking and new to most of us a long time ago, and they're now fairly commonplace in our media, both fiction and nonfiction. Flag presents them in an emotionless manner that doesn't bring anything new to the table. They're cliches, to put it simply. The result of all of this is that it's tough to say with certainty what Flag is even supposed to be about. If it was meant to be about photography, they should have taken out the deluge of trite antiwar content. If it was meant to be a statement against warfare, they should have taken out the commentary on the nature of photography. If it was meant to be both, they should have hired some better writers.

Two elements of Flag that I can truly compliment are the art and animation. The background art is well detailed, with wide expanses of desert and mountains looking about as close to real life as possible. The city, likewise, is an appropriately drawn maze of housing. Say what you will about Flag (and I've said a lot), but it doesn't slack on creating a setting. However, it's in mechanical design and animation that the series really shines. The show, set in the near future, prominently features some military mecha in the battles, and these look unbelievably good. The series captures the motions of vehicles more realistically than any I've ever seen; every moving part seems to function with the perfectly regimented order typical of machines.

Unfortunately, the music is another downer for Flag. The first problem with the musical score is that it exists. No, seriously; since Flag is presented to us as a collection of images and raw footage found in numerous video cameras, the fact that there is any background music at all works against the original concept of the series. The second problem with the music is how typical it is. Some of it's Middle Eastern sounding, lead by traditional drums and wind instruments, sometimes with wordless vocals, sometimes without. The other half of it is more Western, spearheaded by horns and crashing drums. It's generic and not at all memorable, and if you've seen any film about war in exotic nations, you've pretty much heard this music. What's worse than that, it's sometimes so ridiculously overbearing that it's unintentionally comical. Why is there a booming, uplifting patriotic song playing while the main character huddles helplessly in the fetal position to avoid being killed by shrapnel? The mind boggles. The most tense moments of Flag are actually those accompanied by either silence, or light atmospheric noise. In one memorable sequence, we hear nothing but a pilot's shallow, unsteady breathing alternating with the roar of her vehicle's minigun as she kills a group of insurgents. This conveys both her hesitation and dislike of killing, and her determination to get her job done even if it means doing something she dislikes; it tells us far more than any patriotic music could. Flag would have been well served to rely more on the atmosphere and setting that it went to such great lengths to create, rather than on some very heavy-handed music.

When all is said and done, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend Flag to anyone but a select group of people. I actually give it a lot of points—probably way more points than I should—for its visual originality. So if you are actively searching for something that is unique in its visual style, then Flag is definitely worth a bit of your time; if nothing else, it's a good looking show. But if you're the average person, wanting to be entertained and/or informed by a series with a strong plot, and you're looking at Flag with curiosity, rest assured that your curiosity has been evoked under false pretenses. Flag's method of storytelling, and its cast, are exceedingly poor efforts. Its themes are a miasma of generic antiwar sentiment and undeveloped artistic ideas which play a dysfunctional game of tag with each other during the running time of the series. A domineering musical score that browbeats the entire concept of the show is the last nail in the coffin of mediocrity. On the outside, Flag is about as polished as you can get, but on the inside...well, refer to paragraph one.

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Sep 9, 2010

Just_Augos

Not Recommended

Preliminary (4/13 eps)

This anime had a good concept but terrible execution. I wanted to review it for a long time so here it is. There's spoilers in this review BUT you'll be warned beforehand and you'll be glad I spoiled it for you LOL! This anime was so misleading and bad that I just had to review it for you to save you pain and time.

Basicly there's some kind of war going on in some kind of 3rd-world country and some kind of war journalists (I think they are Japanese but that doesn't matter) go to this country to get pictures because that's their job or as ...

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Poll: FLAG Episode 2 Discussion zippy - Mar 22, 2008	7 replies	by DrThurl »» Dec 12, 2023 3:17 PM
Poll: FLAG Episode 13 Discussion FighterZ - Aug 10, 2008	24 replies	by W3TFT »» Feb 19, 2023 5:17 PM
Poll: FLAG Episode 1 Discussion zippy - Mar 22, 2008	12 replies	by Gundam_Sage »» Apr 5, 2022 3:59 AM
Poll: Flag Episode 12 Discussion _HeroKenzan_ - Jul 28, 2015	2 replies	by TitanInsane »» Jan 28, 2021 7:17 AM
Poll: Flag Episode 11 Discussion _HeroKenzan_ - Jul 28, 2015	2 replies	by TitanInsane »» Jan 28, 2021 6:21 AM

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Characters & Voice Actors

Shirasu, Saeko

Akagi, Keiichi

Eversalt, Chris

Nikkanen, Jan

Paint Engineer

Chief

Kufura

Hacker

Lisa

Captain

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

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Flag

Alternative Titles

Information

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Synopsis

Background

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Characters & Voice Actors

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Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

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