Flowers of Evil’s production values are generally quite impressive. The series’ use of rotoscoping in its animation has been highly controversial, but it’s very misunderstood. Too much attention has been given to the basic act of deviating from the manga’s art style, and not enough people have questioned the effect the new art style has on the narrative. It actually brings together a highly effective chemistry. Yes, the frame-skipping animation of the slow-moving rotoscoped facial features looks creepy, but “creepy” is what defines all aspects of the show. The “uncanny valley” look of the characters is appropriate for Nakamura’s imagined society where people are just pretending to be human, and as their facial features disappear the further they get away from the camera the world begins to look emotionally distant and impossible to empathize with. This is intentional, as Kasuga and Nakamura’s difficulty to relate to other people is their defining link. My only complaint about the character designs is that they look far too old to be middle schoolers, and this more mature impression diminishes the plausibility of the story due to Kasuga and Nakamura’s frustrated, juvenile reactions to things.
Their city is portrayed as deserted and devoid of life, with plenty of slow shots of the cinematography showing numerous empty streets and buildings that have no activity inside of them. A muted color palette drapes everything in depressing, lonely greys. Emphasizing the lifelessness of the town is a soft musical score that often utilizes low keyboard drones under greatly spaced apart single piano keys. A mix of the light nature of middle school life and the perceived shallowness that comes with it, and at times, Kasuga’s fears. The four opening songs each play from the perspective of one of the three main characters, with the final song addressing the general themes of repression. Each episode’s transition into the ending song is also among the most memorable in an anime, concluding a series that thoroughly uses music in conjunction with its narrative. The painted backgrounds are gracefully done yet always sullen, and the distinct direction utilizes other surrealist tricks such as dream-like symbolic sequences and live action footage to further create a world of uncertainty. Flower of Evil’s very slow, deliberate atmosphere is both mysterious and unnerving like puberty itself and possibly the best thing about the series. The metaphorically orgasmic finale scene to one of the middle episodes is a particularly well-done scene.
The first episode has Kasuga’s friends arguing whether a movie is in the horror genre or romance genre, foreshadowing the blurry line in Flowers of Evil itself. There’s a light horror aspect as Kasuga is trapped in his situation and forced to risk embarrassing himself by the demands of the seemingly sadistic Nakamura who stalks him daily, and these scenes can be tense and difficult to watch. It displays some of the shame of adolescent bullying, but I wish it went further with its themes of sexuality and its psychological impact on those discovering sex for the first time. It was twisting these themes and progressing to more severe places until the final five or so episodes. At this point the series becomes less about taking its themes to new places and demonstrating them in other ways and more about the teen melodrama of its three leads. This strikes me as a mistake that makes the show far less interesting, as it gives some immediate semi-closure of the main characters before it’s given us enough of a metric of their true selves for these revelations to feel meaningful and deserved. The motivations and true feelings of Kasuga and Nakamura are so vaguely defined at this point that the weight behind their emotional drama feels hyper exaggerated compared to what we’ve seen of them so far. This turns their teenage angst into something more slight, like how a teenager overreacts to a breakup rather than the more drastic, darker social commentary that made the series initially gripping. It was too much too soon to turn this psychological drama into a relationship drama. To make matters worse, the already slow series seems to grind its progress to a halt. The cinematography shots and slow walking scenes now become a chore when the introspection behind them is now that same slight teen melodrama rather than alienation and anxiety.
After the series uses all of this remaining time just to resolve its plot conflicts, the themes it explored prior to this have ended before they were able to make a powerful statement on adolescence or society. This promising series ends its evolution too soon and slowly declines into a drawn-out, melodramatic conclusion. The end result is something that will probably only stick with me on a conceptual level, thanks to its strong atmospheric direction and ideas of concepts that could’ve been much more than they were. My curiosity was piqued, but it wasn’t followed up with questions or stimulation. Flowers of Evil’s story itself meant very little to me, and there probably wasn’t much meaning to it in the first place.
