Aku no Hana (Flowers of Evil)

Takao Kasuga, a high school student fascinated by poetry, reveres Charles Baudelaire and even decorates his room with the poet's portrait. On a normal day, Takao forgets his copy of The Flowers of Evil in the classroom. When returning to retrieve it, he steals the sports garments of Nanako Saeki—a model student who Takao calls his muse and a femme fatale.

Deeply ashamed of his act which he sees as a sin and what others see as a crime, Takao realizes with horror that Sawa Nakamura, his classmate and social outcast, knows about his theft. Blackmailed by her, Takao is now forced to partake in Sawa's disturbing fantasies, lest she reveals his deeds to everyone. Caught in a negative spiral of increasingly traumatic experiences, will Takao be able to break free from Sawa's thorns and atone for his sins?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Aku no Hana is considered to be the first anime to extensively use rotoscoping. The anime adapts the first 20 chapters of the manga.

The series was released on Blu-ray and DVD in Japan from August 21, 2013 to December 25, 2013, and in North America by Sentai Filmworks on July 8, 2014.

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Adaptation:

Aku no Hana

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Nakamura, Sawa

Main

Ise, Mariya
Japanese

Kasuga, Takao

Main

Ueda, Shinichirou
Japanese

Saeki, Nanako

Main

Hikasa, Youko
Japanese

Kojima, Ken

Supporting

Hamazoe, Shinya
Japanese

Yamada, Masakazu

Supporting

Matsuzaki, Katsutoshi
Japanese

Kinoshita, Ai

Supporting

Uemura, Ayako
Japanese

Kasuga, Father

Supporting

Naka, Hiroshi
Japanese

Nakamura, Grandmother

Supporting

Kasuga, Mother

Supporting

Kobayashi, Ai
Japanese

Saeki, Mother

Supporting

Doi, Mika
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Nakanishi, Go

Producer

Tateishi, Kensuke

Producer

Nagahama, Hiroshi

Director

Tanaka, Kazuya

Sound Director

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Opening Theme

	1: "Aku no Hana -Takao Kasuga- (惡の華 -春日高男-)" by Uchujin (with guest vocalist Noko) (eps 1-3)
	2: "Aku no Hana -Sawa Nakamura- (惡の華 -仲村佐和-)" by Uchujin (with guest vocalist Mariko Goto) (eps 4-6)
	3: "Aku no Hana -Nanako Saeki- (惡の華 -佐伯奈々子-)" by Uchujin (with guest vocalist Shiho Nanba) (eps 7-9)
	4: "Aku no Hana -Gunma-ken, Kiryuushi- (惡の華 -群馬県桐生市-)" by Uchujin (eps 11-13)

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Ending Theme

	1: "Hana -a last flower- (花 -a last flower-)" by ASA-CHANG & JUNRAY (eps 1-4, 6, 9, 11-12)
	2: "Hana -a last flower- ver.Z (花 -a last flower- ver.Z)" by ASA-CHANG & JUNRAY (eps 5, 10)
	3: "Hana (花)" by ASA-CHANG & JUNRAY (eps 7)
	4: "Hana -a last flower- ver.X (花 -a last flower- ver.X)" by ASA-CHANG & JUNRAY (eps 8)

Reviews

Jun 30, 2013

Polyphemus

Recommended

DISCLAIMER: FOR THE SAKE OF THIS REVIEW I WILL BE OPERATING UNDER THE ASSUMTION THAT THERE IS AN UPCOMING SECOND SEASON. The anime said there would be a part two and I’ll trust that for now. If there is no season two then I'd have problems with the conclusion and the score would have to be lowered. But the anime created interest in the manga, they haven't exhausted the budget, they previewed pt. 2 scenes that they've supposedly finished, some of the most powerful scenes have yet to come, etc. At this point, it seems very safe to assume there will be a second season ...

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Jul 20, 2013

5camp

Mixed Feelings

I appreciate anime trying something a little different when it's appropriate. Flowers of Evil is a pretty good example of the kind of manga you should be doing this with. A teenage boy idolises a pretty girl in his class but then gets roped into stealing her gym clothes by nothing more than his own secret desire to defile her. It's a reactionary piece to trends in popular culture that references a 19th century poem which was also a reactionary piece to trends in poetry and art at the time. The mangaka didn't want a straight adaptation of his work, and only accepted when the ... director of Mushishi Hiroshi Nagahama came along with his radical idea. His adaptation was a reactionary piece to the response people who saw Flowers of Evil as, to put it in the words of the original author, "Nakamura unf unf".

I can see what they were going for with this adaptation. It shoves back in the face of the people who saw, in what was supposed to be a story about our creepy desires to defile the ideals we hold to be pure, an overly elaborate piece of NTR erotic fiction. These are real people, not the idols that you fetishise. It's supposed to heighten the sense of unease we get over the actions the characters take in this elaborate piece of NTR erotic fiction. At least, that's what I think it's supposed to be doing. It's certainly what a lot of the early chatter around this show suggested it was trying to be. Problem is that this was not only poorly implemented, but also seemed to have fuck all to do with the main theme of the actual story Flowers of Evil was telling.

Tell me Flowers of Evil, what are you supposed to be about? Is it about the mind-numbing mundanity of everyday life and screaming to get out, or is it about wanting to defile the things you hold pure? Because one half of the series focuses on one of those themes and the second half on the other. You could argue the two are connected, but then you'd be wrong. The directing likes to spend forever showing a decaying town and characters walking really slowly along streets with the only background music being a man randomly hitting a piano key every 10 seconds. I guess this is supposed to show how friggen boring everyday life is, although that's the director deliberately making his show boring and tedious to watch to make an artistic statement, for which I would like to kindly ask him to please take his head out of his own backside.

The second half of the story tries to focus more on trying to escape this mundanity, but this mundanity is presented as a crappy thing. The idolisation of purity is presented as a more careful balance between whether purity or defilement is the way to go. There's one attempt made in the entire show to marry these two scenes in an absolutely amazing scene at the end of episode 7 where the two characters destroy a classroom in a giant obvious metaphor for sex. But the series seemed to blow its load in that episode and after that spent its time piddling away doing next to nothing. Then again, before that scene, the show spent most of its time piddling away doing next to nothing. At least then it was novel and I could kid myself this was going to lead to something. Spoiler warning (although this isn't really a spoiler at all) no it doesn't go anywhere. Instead the show ends on a fucking montage of all the things that happen later in the manga that will never get animated because this show was never going to get a sequel and was pathetically stupid of the creators to even think that it would.

The biggest problem of all is simply that it's a goddamn boring anime to watch. Once the novelty wears off, and it will, you come to the realisation that only one thing happens per episode. No really, only one thing happens in each episode. The rest is padded with shots of people walking and the main character panicking. The camera liked to linger on the town falling apart, which I think was supposed to tie into this idea of the town being decaying and boring. But the show also lingered on Nakamura, lingered on the main character, heck it even lingered on the picture of the poet the main character kept in his room. This rendered the entire directing choice of lingering on anything completely pointless and only served to drag out the episode even further, which on reflection probably was the only point. The main character...also talks...like this...most of...the time...taking...deep breaths...between every....other word....he says. It's supposed to show his panicked mind, but I couldn't take it seriously after a while and just started hearing the kid from Malcolm in the Middle in the wheelchair with the missing lung.

Also I'm just going to say it: The rotoscoping looks dumb. I'm not a fan of this animation technique even when it's done well, but here it has characters spazzing out when they move and that curious way faces aren't drawn in when they're too far away from the camera but as they get closer the faces get drawn in as though we're on a crappy video game system and the textures only just loaded in. They got people in their 30's to play these middle school kids so it's way more difficult to swallow their middle-school stupidity when you can clearly see they don't look 14. Sometimes it's able to capture these wonderful moments of expression on their faces, particularly the joy on Nakamura's face during the classroom destruction scene, but most of the time their features look like they're are drooping off their face like they're made of plasticine and they've been out in the sun for too long.

I do appreciate the effort, and at the time I did enjoy picking Flowers of Evil apart to get at its juicy core themes. Unfortunately the more it went on and the more I picked at it, the more it started to come apart for me. There's evidently fuck-all enjoyment you can get from it on a surface level, and it was clearly asking to be picked apart for its themes. I like that it got weird moe fans all angry over their beautiful manga waifu longer being pretty, but stripping the sexuality away from a story that was precisely about dealing with sexual urges diminishes the point of the story in retrospect. All in all I'd class the whole thing as a failed experiment. An interesting experiment certainly, albeit one that is very boring to actually watch.

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Jul 6, 2013

GonzoLewd

Not Recommended

Whenever people watch a film or show, regardless of whether it’s anime or not, they want to be enticed into a deep and complex world full of mystery and wonder that they can solve for the benefit of their humanity. It seems as though Aku no Hana was meant to be something that was going to be the “change” some people were looking for in the wake of entertainment controlling the masses. But boy, did it fail at doing that on almost all accounts.

Let's reveal the elephant in the room, the animation. It is flawed, but not to the extent where it should be castrated ... out of someone’s psyche after viewing the first episode. For starters, the animation that the studio decided to use is called rotoscoping, a style of animation where people are filmed in live action and animators draw over the film frame-by-frame. Considering that this is the first anime show to do this animation style, how is the quality of the rotoscoping? Not too well, that’s for sure. The lip-syncing is atrocious, and the facial expressions are devoid of any character. They don’t fit well with the emotions that the characters are trying to convey, and given how low the budget was, the animation isn’t very fluid in most places. Though these flaws are mentioned, the show isn’t necessarily unwatchable due to the average animation, so it gets a slight pass in this department.

With this in mind, however, the art design of the background in the show’s setting is truly spectacular. The grime and rust from the buildings and the dark tone of the outside world succeed in enveloping this dark, depressing story. It fits with the style Aku no Hana is trying to capture, and its effectiveness is relatively good. Another thing that also improves Aku no Hana’s mood is the music. Its subtle ambient and minimalist influenced sound is one of the most beautifully crafted scores that I’ve enjoyed listening to.

On a technical level, the show is mixed with good music and art but average animation, but how does it compare to the narrative and writing? Not too well, that’s for sure. For one, the characters and how they are written are not well developed or fully realized with anything happening with the plot. To address this even further, the relationships between the protagonist Kasuga and our two main heroines, Nakamura and Saeki, are as well put together as one could get from a high schooler’s attempt at writing a story as this, a bad one at that. What makes these characters so bad in terms of a writing perspective is how poorly paced it gives us a clear indication that Kasuga has a bond with either Nakamura or Saeki. With Kasuga and Nakamura, there is no chemistry. They play off as a couple of degenerates who spout out vapid angsty monologues towards one another whenever they are on screen.

Kasuga himself is not an enticing protagonist to be on-screen. Just because you make him this Holden Caulfield type of character where he is obsessed with a dark poetry book doesn’t make him have any more depth than any other character in the show. Are we to sympathize with him just because he acts pessimistic about the world around him with his pseudo-intellectual jargon? Not if it’s done with careful precision in Kasuga’s archetype, which is not the case in Aku no Hana.

Nakamura and Saeki are two other characters who are unfortunately not spared in mediocre character writing. The romantic development between Kasuga and Saeki was rushed to the point where we only see very few inclinations that they are a couple. We get two awkward dates and a moment where she invites him into his room. Not only that but Saeki’s reasons for liking Kasuga are not at all convincing to the slightest degree. With all of the things Kasuga did or forced, in this case, to Saeki’s property, any ordinary girl would quickly never speak to him again. Still, just because the writers want to keep the story going, they’ll have to hope that anyone with half a brain would buy into this—no explanation for Saeki’s reasoning for liking Kasuga.

Then there’s Nakamura, Kasuga’s “sidekick” in the show. As you might predict, she is about as explained throughout the show as any other character. This is, of course, the intention because Nakamura is something that we should be wary and suspicious about whether she’s evil or not. Once she forms a contract with Kasuga, the only thing we get out of Nakamura is that she is nothing more than the show’s attempt at pouring empty melodrama into the mix to make the plot seem too deep than what it already is. Her primary goal to the plot’s theme is never given any deep context other than the fact that she thinks the whole world is bullshit and should be destroyed. If you want to provide me with an existential angst plot device, try to deliver a better explanation than just a one-dimensional written one. The character can be portrayed in a reasonably sympathetic light. Unfortunately, Nakamura just doesn’t cut out to be a deep convincing anti-hero with how poor the writing is.

While the show's tone is solid, the atmosphere tries too hard to be frightening to the point where it almost does the opposite effect of what it was initially trying to impose. Whenever there is a faint rumbling noise in the background that’s supposed to resemble a heartbeat, that is hardly effective in establishing a mood, or whenever the music starts to grow in its dynamics with a dark droning noise that is unsettling in a wrong way. What’s funny is that some of the build-ups in some of the scenes are unnecessary and fail to capture any fear. Once you do it multiple times throughout the show, it loses its momentum quickly, and all you are left with is just an empty white noise in the background.

It’s not often I talk about the actual “acting” rather than the voice acting in this show. While good in a few areas, the acting is often overly dramatized and doesn’t reach that greatness of any drama TV show you could be watching right now. Actors constantly spout out their lines and try to carry out as much emotion as possible in scenes that don’t seem as though it was needed in the first place, such as one that involves a bathroom area.

The numerous plot holes drag down the plot from making it convincing to anyone watching. Usually, plot holes can be forgiven if they are tiny to where they are not noticeable to ruin the show's flow. With Aku no Hana, many coincidences can easily be accounted for lazy writing, such as no one noticing the blackboard writing being blocked out the day after the vandalism scene. Anyone could have easily deciphered what the saying was in two seconds flat.

In the short scheme of things, Aku no Hana is just a failed experiment that probably never should have been fully realized given its source material. In all honesty, the original manga’s story is quite fascinating. If only they had hired more competent writers to fill in the wide gap that crippled Aku no Hana’s chances of becoming an intriguing psychological drama. It wouldn’t be a shock to call this a “wasted opportunity” given how the creators were ballsy in making it with the rotoscope technique; it just goes to show when you want to do something “different,” you might want to focus more on your writing structure than your artistic integrity.

Grade: D+

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Need advice: Should I start the manga from where the anime left? JustOscar - Oct 14	5 replies	by giomagno »» Oct 21, 8:21 AM
Poll: Aku no Hana Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Jun 8, 2013	132 replies	by XeroBeat »» Oct 19, 6:45 PM
Poll: Aku no Hana Episode 3 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) Stark700 - Apr 19, 2013	249 replies	by XeroBeat »» Oct 13, 11:31 PM
Poll: Aku no Hana Episode 2 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) Stark700 - Apr 12, 2013	469 replies	by XeroBeat »» Oct 11, 6:04 AM
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Characters & Voice Actors

Nakamura, Sawa

Kasuga, Takao

Saeki, Nanako

Kojima, Ken

Yamada, Masakazu

Kinoshita, Ai

Kasuga, Father

Nakamura, Grandmother

Kasuga, Mother

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Aku no Hana

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Background

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