‘FLCL Is a Brilliant Sexually Charged Anime That’s Barely About Sex

Most anime is weird, but even to the those who embrace the medium have to admit there’s something off about FLCL. The original run of the series premiered from 2000 to 2001 and only consisted of six episodes. Yet this roughly two-hour story has taken on a life as quirky, ambitious, and unpredictable as its deceptive Manic Pixie Dream Girl protagonist, Haruko. It’s consistently listed among the best anime shows in modern history, and Adult Swim’s repeated airings of the series’ short first season helped establish Toonami as hub for excellent and weird anime.

And this weekend Adult Swim, Production I.G, and Toho enter the reboot arena armed with vintage guitars and giant robots. We’re finally going to learn if the network’s announced two-season revival of FLCL is cool enough to hang with the sex-obsessed, baseball bat-touting, zany original.

It’s difficult to explain what exactly FLCL (pronounced Fooly Cooly) is about without breaking out a book on adolescent psychology and writing a novel. On a surface level, the coming-of-age story follows 12-year-old Naota, a boy who has consciously turned off all of his emotions until a manic pink-haired lady riding a Vespa bashes in his head with a guitar, specifically a blue vintage Rickenbacker 4001. That sentence encapsulates perhaps one one-hundredth of the weirdness that is FLCL. Enormous fighting robots routinely emerge from Naota’s head; a giant hand appears from an interdimensional portal and threatens to destroy a city; a boxing glove sometimes sporadically emerges from the guitar-loving Haruko’s vagina; there’s a man who wears seaweed for eyebrows. It’s a show that could absolutely not exist as anything other than manga or anime. That’s a big reason why this sexually-charged series works.

And FLCL is an indisputably sexual series. The first episode shows the high school ex-girlfriend of Naota’s brother, Mamimi, pressing her breasts against the child. Haruko flirts, moans, and speaks in innuendos, often dressed in suggestive clothing or once in just a towel. There’s a clear connection to make between Naota’s budding manhood and the giant horn protruding from his head that he can neither control nor understand. And yet for all of its suggestive language and provocative positioning, FLCL stands as a somber, insightful, and surprisingly disturbing story about becoming an adult.

This isn’t a story about Naota learning to control his boners, though that is very much a part of it. It’s about a boy learning what the actual strength in adulthood looks like. That strength is implicitly connected to Naota’s sexuality and emotions. When the series begins, Naota is little more than an emotionless wall. Even as the confusingly sensual Mamimi presses against him, he barely reacts, speaking in a monotone and demanding that everyone around him needs to grow up, even when the circumstances around him more than warrant him emoting. In these beginning moments he’s just a child miming maturity. By contrast, FLCL‘s final episode sees Naota desperately hugging the guitar-wielding Haruko and sobbing. Through far too many innuendo-labelled robots, our hero has finally learned that maturity isn’t about suppressing emotions. It’s about embracing and controlling them.

In between intimate moments and scenes filled with barely clad ladies is also a story about the trauma that accompanies the realization that your heroes have flaws. Throughout the series, Naota is haunted by the memory of his older brother, who left Japan to play baseball in America. That older brother is one of the few, if not the only near-adults Naota trusts, and when he’s in trouble, he often calls out his brother’s name. So when our childish hero mistakes Haruko for his brother in the first episode, his attraction to this alien woman is immediately cemented. She stands as a possible replacement for the idol he lost.

As the series eventually proves, Haruko makes for a very poor idol and an equally terrible object of his affection. She’s ruthlessly selfish, often stalking and exploiting Naota for her own reasons. And she messes with him both emotionally and sexually. The pink-haired alien knowingly bounces between flirting with Naota and his garbage father. FLCL could lean away from the sexually abusive undertones of this dynamic, but instead it knowingly and darkly leans into them, teasing at a story about childhood abuse. Much like everything else in this show, that arc is open to interpretation. But regardless, in the end both Naota and the audience see the idolized Haruko for who she really is — a selfish woman who used a child to get what she wanted. Haruko falls off her pedestal, but in the ultimate sign of maturity, Naota is OK with her fall.

Though the original run of FLCL is unmistakably Naota’s story and though there are enough up-skirt and cleavage-filled shots to make anyone feel uncomfortable, FLCL still treats its female characters with a shocking amount of tenderness. Haruko is a conflicted and sinister near-villain with her own rich backstory. Mamimi’s expressions of her sexuality transform into a conversation about how people respond to loss and shifting power dynamics. The phallic robots that erupt from Naota’s head even get a gender-swapped rewrite. At one point, the portal releasing the robots attaches itself to his classmate Eri, where the resulting robot then turns into a manifestation of female sexuality. These characters may be presented as sexual objects, a la how anime typically treats women, but they’re far more than just set pieces in Naota’s story.

The original run of FLCL is far from perfect. It’s an anime that loves to put its female characters in sexually compromising situations and glosses over the topic of sexual assault. Given the ages of its characters, that can be particularly disturbing, and at times its unclear if the show is acting as a satire of how sexuality is portrayed in pop culture or if its just contributing to a toxic culture. But for all its cat ears, guitar bashing, compromising situations, and excellent use of The Pillows’ songs, FLCL does what good anime and sci-fi does best. It uses the nuances of its genres to tell a deeply human story that couldn’t otherwise be told.

For all of FLCL‘s weirdness, it works. Let’s hope the next two seasons do too.

Where to stream FLCL