Ani-Me #17: Doing Emotional Horny Cocaine With FLCL and Chuck Jones’ Ghost (Patreon)

Note: to read  most of this essay you don’t actually have to have seen this. For most of the article, it’s about larger discussions of criticism, genre subcultures, and gonzo art, all before getting to the actual analysis of the show.

~ That Funny Feeling ~

So there’s this brand of criticism that I’ve never really ascribed to that’s all about describing things. Specifically, the use of evocative language to try and capture how a film feels. There will be so much use of simile or you’ll see descriptions like, “it’s brutal, beautiful, and elegant! A feast for the senses!” Or maybe it’s delivering pans that say the film is a “languid, insipid affair effort that gives rise to ennui!” You’ve probably seen that kind of stuff before. It’s nice and all (mostly because it sounds nice), but I don’t think it does all that much for the reader. For one, it doesn’t really communicate as clearly as basic language does. And two, at its worst, it tends to hide any real insight because you’re too busy describing vibe rather than writing about meaningful mechanics or conclusions. And I honestly believe the goal is to explain as best one can, not merely describe.

Which is not to say we’re always able to do so. I admit that all of us tend to fall back on this kind of descriptive language when we encounter things that readily defy both categorization and explanation. It’s just all part of how we’re trying to make sense of something that doesn’t quite make sense. We actually saw this happen a lot with the release of 2019’s CATS, whose confounding series of choices mostly stupefied critics to the point where they were all participating in a race to make the most jokes about how the movie was like injecting LSD into your eyeballs or something. Which I don’t say disparagingly. We do this sort of thing because it’s fun. And weird media like that are ready-made gifts for critical sporting.

Which is why here with FLCL, I couldn’t resist indulging the title above. Also keep in mind that I knew absolutely NOTHING about the show going into it, but quickly discovered that this show doesn’t just have vibe for days, it assaults you with that vibe like a shocking slap upside the head. A vibe that almost needs to be described as “Doing Emotional Horny Cocaine with FLCL and Chuck Jones’s Ghost” in order to get on the same absurd wavelength. But that title (hopefully) does two other things. One, it sets up the set of reference points that help better understand the context of the show. And two, it invites curiosity about whether or not there’s MORE than a vibe at work here. The notion that underneath all the gonzo affectation, there is actually a point to what we see in this show. And I believe there is. Dare I say, even an explanation.

… Sort of.

We just need to do a little more description before getting there.

~ Music Television ~

As I watched FLCL I kept thinking about MTV.

Not the MTV as many of you know it now, but the one in its heyday. Come to think of it, I’m kind of curious how many of you didn’t realize how massively influential it was? As in right from its inception in 1981 all the way up until about 2003 or 2004? For those two decades it was a genuine taste maker, both within the music industry and social culture at large. Keep in mind we’re talking about a mostly pre-internet environment, which needed rallying points to gather around. Because the only thing really outside of MTV was record store / zine / underground music culture, which was really just the flipside of the same coin. Because whatever was in / outside was still defined by MTV’s golden gaze. Which means that for artists’ looking to make it, it often meant the difference between feast and famine. Getting their evolving countdown-type shows could change your life. A creative video could make you “an artist.” And even all the “MTV Unplugged” albums were mega sellers.

But you have to understand that a lot of what MTV liked was also, well, good. It wasn’t exactly pop chasing, it was taking genres and making them popular. Going back to the original VJ culture, they were readily embracing looks / feels that were cutting edge. It followed culture with more targeted shows Yo MTV Raps and Alternative Nation. And as a kid and teenager, I can’t tell you how much I discovered through MTV. It was honestly the gateway drug to record store culture and going down deeper rabbit holes for things that you thought would never, ever make it to MTV (often unsuspecting that there was someone working at the channel who felt the same way about X band that you did). It was all part of the same symbiotic relationship. Say nothing for the fact that it was also putting out some of the best original programming for teenagers imaginable: Beevis and Butthead, Daria, Jackass, The State, and I remember Aeon Flux breaking my little brain.

Put simply, MTV was the dominant voice in youth culture.

Then it just got a little bit younger. With the pop explosion on T.R.L. (Total Request Live), there was a major demographic shift from the much sought after 18-35 year old market to 12 year olds. Why? Well, because there was an explosion of spending money in that market in comparison to what was happening with the young adults in the dot com bubble of 1999. The pop music tween shift honestly made music bigger than it had ever been before. So honestly, many long-time MTV fans stopped watching because they were no longer the target demographic. But it didn’t matter anyway because this meteoric rise directly ties into the approaching collapse of the record industry at large.

I mean, have you ever thought about how all those insanely expensive videos got made in the first place? Aside from the occasional outliers, they were mostly funded by the record companies, often going into budgets from half a million to a record 7 million dollars. But it was all promotional costs that were often worth it. It was the place to SHOW artists and get them to define the look of culture, I.E> a worthy investment because these records were making bank. Then Napster outright killed the record industry (Mostly because they had no idea how to adapt to the internet and everything shriveled). And MTV was left in the wake. Keep in mind, it’s not that people had any less desire to watch cool videos. It’s the question of “where is the money going to come from to pay for them?” So the other question became “how is MTV going to still keep making lots of money, too?” And so their strategy quickly shifted to reality TV, which had been the kind of programming they basically invented a decade earlier with The Real World, etc. No matter how much the soundtracks of these shows still made an impact, or how much Laguna Beach, or The Hills still felt plugged in, the Taste Maker was pretty much done.

I say all this because 1) it’s fun to talk about and 2) watching FLCL I rocketed right back to that 90’s MTV timeframe. Seriously. The texture of the show comes wholesale out of that world. The crunchy guitar licks, the aggressive cutting style, the non-linear context, the non-stop whammy bar tricks. Do you realize this tact was literally called “MTV Style Editing” and it’s a term which now takes on the designation “Post Classical” in scholarly language? Forget music videos, the style had cropped into just about everything by the late 90’s, from commercials, to movies, to television at large. And this context is so important because in every little bit of it in FLCL, both in the style of and the core emotion, it’s dripping in this exact kind of punk rock disaffection. It’s almost inseparable from this MTV context, right as things started to hover around this apocalyptic end of that same culture. There is this real “end of the 90’s” energy to all of it and I just want to put you in the emotional space right there with it. But not JUST that space.

Because you can see other influences too…

~ Translating From Mr. Jones ~

This show reminded me that I’m still very much getting a handle on anime.

Because even with all that understanding of MTV Style Editing, I was still six minutes into watching FLCL and like: WHAT!? WHAT ARE THESE FACES!!? WHY IS IT WHIPLASHING WITH ANGER AND INTERNAL RESPONSES!?! ARE THOSE REALLY HAPPENING!?!? WHY IS THIS ALL OVER THE PLACE!?!?! I LITERALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT’S GOING ON AND WHY DOESN’T IT CARE ABOUT THAT!??!?!

Most of you grew up on a lot of this stuff and you perhaps don’t realize how different the style can seem. Yes, I had some references to the kinds of faces being made / whiplash language in the anime I’ve seen so far, even going back to Avatar. But that’s what the littlest of stylistic changes can do when they 1) still seem new and 2) fly fast and furious at you. It becomes hard to keep up. Especially when a joke isn’t about hitting you logically, but your involuntary laughter response. Now, the last thing any critic should do is be like “this doesn’t make sense to me, lol it must be bad,” but we unfortunately see it a lot - and fuck, the times I’ve done it have been some of my worst failings (of which there are many). Because that moment should instead be the exact point you get to work.

Luckily, I had a key piece of context, which is that I’ve seen people watch clips like this before in offices as people all sat around dying laughing. And as confirmation, it was just quick google to see that 1) the people who made this were Gainax! I understand that reference! and 2) that this was indeed listed as “comedy.” Yes, it sounds absurd that I literally had to google whether or not this was comedy in order to feel more grounded, but that’s what any new language does (especially if the person is talking fast). If we don’t understand it, then we can’t understand the intention. Like it’s seemingly simple stuff: are they actually angry or fake angry? And believe it or not, having that simple “comedy” designation helped give me a foothold to embrace the simple idea of what it was trying to do - and more importantly - try to figure out who is the target of the given joke. But I also had another key point of reference, which helped ground me in the pacing.

Because everything in this was flying just as fast and furious as anything Chuck Jones ever did. In case that name is new for you, he’s basically one of my favorite artists and the writer / director of so many of the classic Looney Toons shorts (and who famously hated Space Jam). So even if a short like Duck Amuck is using classical style editing, the speed of the jokes, the meta gags, and the sudden fits of anger and change are all at the same pace of what we see in FLCL. There’s really no core difference in the text - and you can draw a straight line of influence between the two. But again, this is what small differences in film language can do. They make us other-ize what we’re watching and go “this is so weird!” But it’s certainly not any weirder than a sentient sponge living in a pineapple under the sea. Again, you have to ground yourself in those kinds of reminders so you don’t see the thing as being any different.

Which is why I spent these 6 episodes of FLCL getting used to the language of the show. Because it really takes that experience to understand what emotion a given face or animation move translates to. And then you start picking it up pretty naturally. Heck, by the last few episodes I was laughing along. And more importantly, I was grounding with the story (sort of). Because where the gonzo escalations of something like Summer Wars hit me with a pitch perfect sense of internal logic, the sudden whiplash escalations of FLCL were a bit harder to parse. Heck, it more felt like holding on for dear life as it went along as a non-stop romp of unhinged craziness. Which perhaps invites a bigger question of the romp…

What makes for a good one?

~ The Gonzo Art Predicament ~

Let’s be blunt. When talking about things like FLCL the concepts of good and bad go out the damn window. Because good and bad are not even really the point of something so hellbent on dismantling our concepts of either. More than that, some works of art are firing from the hip and working off instinct. Yes, instinct is always a part of art, but with filmmaking, the cerebral sides are often a necessary part of logical communication and story building (if only with your crew). No, I’m not talking about boring exposition and simplified story models - I’m talking about the incredibly complex aspect of craft and creating cohesive emotional journeys that make resonant semiotic connections with the audience. Being aware of all those things helps make for great storytelling. But throwing all those notions to the wind to rely solely on instincts? It’s a dicey prospect. Because it can go so, so, SO wrong. And happens way more frequently than you think.

Because most people don’t see most movies.

Even within the passionate movie go-ing audience, you have to realize how many movies you just never see or hear of. I’m not just talking about direct to demand efforts, or commercial works built for foreign territory sales, I’m talking about the ones in the high-minded art field. Because you are likely aware of the 10-15 or so independent films that are pretty good and might even pop in a given year. But if you go to film festivals, you end up seeing so many more films that never find distribution (or very meager distribution). And we’re only talking about the dozens and dozens of films that are good enough to make it in, forget that there’s thousands of them that didn’t make it in the festival at all. You really have no idea how many movies are out there struggling to find eyeballs. But when you scan through the hopefuls across the board and look at “why” they don’t strike a chord, you see a few recurring issues.

Yes, sometimes it’s what you expect with straight up technical failure, or the inability to find even semi-convincing actors. But most of the it’s just basic story sense issues, where they are usually falling prey to the kinds of problems that come with “working of instinct.” Sometimes it’s means they’re making films that are nakedly indulgent for their id (for a funny example that characterizes this I always love going to the episode of The Office where they find Michael’s screenplay about a super cool sexy secret agent named “Michael Scairn” and halfway through he just absentmindedly writes “Michael Scott,” which removes all pretense). Or in more “intellectual” cases, it’s artists writing stories of their lives with the lines they wish they said, as in which case constructing a movie is still a way of re-making their wishful reality (it’s just a more realistic wish). In either case it’s so clear it’s just for them, not for us. Which really means they’re not trying to give us something that would be meaningful to us in turn. And as flip-side of that same idea, there are artists often making art so cryptic that they genuinely don’t know what they’re saying and hiding beneath veneers of mystery and obfuscation and “leaving it up to the audience” to create the meaning that they have no idea how to make themselves. Again, you have no idea how much these traits pop up in the thousands of films that people never see. And outside of the small audience that loves to stretch their pallete and find every super weird dysfunctional film they can, very few of these films transcend their poor-communication bounds to become embraced by an audience.

Which is not to say artists can’t do it! And I want to be clear that it’s important to start making art for WHATEVER reason and paralyzing fear does no one any good. Besides, there are so many nakedly indulgent films I adore and gonzo art pieces that are purely working off instinct that can indeed succeed. My simple point is that most don’t. For every film like The Room there are thousands of staid films that are just boring. For every David Lynch, there are thousands of imitators who don’t get how clear his symbols are, nor how well he balances the cryptic weirdness with emotional, visceral entertainment (and when he doesn’t do those things, like with Inland Empire, notice how few people grab on). And the further point is that gonzo art is incredibly risky and rarely pays off. To connect, you really have to tap into something meaningful and communicate it emotionally instead of logically. And then you have to create enough of a genuine through-line to make it feel like a transcendent arc of an experience.

Y’all, FLCL absolutely does this.

It might even be a pinnacle example of “vibe art.” Yes, it’s full of attitude. Yes, it moves at the kind of clip inherently designed to leave you behind (which I have a question about later). Yes, I essentially write about semiotics for a living and yet even I was “what the fuck is even happening?” Yes, that’s why it has to spend so much time with quick catch-ups of basic information. Yes, it’s often interrupted by absurdity. Yes, I sometimes had no idea what was real. But that doesn’t mean the instincts behind this show don't have their own kind of genuine logic. Sometimes it's absurd comedy logic. Sometimes it’s gut logic. Sometimes it’s boner logic. Or perhaps better, it’s “playing with little kids” logic because sometimes we’re a step away from something like Axe Cop or even Charlieverse - Fruity Pebbles Castle of Torment: A Scary Castle with One Hundred Rats (If you know, you know).

But best of all, it mixes all that with genuine story logic!

As in mixing it all with critical parts that makes total and complete sense for these stories, all while staying centered on the characters feelings. That’s the whole thing about FLCL, for all the gonzo moments, it’s not HIDING or playing coy with what its real feelings are. And it’s also okay with them being sometimes contradictory. Which is precisely why it’s able to get tension out of the growing relationships, no matter how absurd the fights around them. In the same vein, the show will be inscrutable in one moment and then suddenly hit you hard with divine lines like “even if you burn it down, it’s remains stay” / or “before hitting the ball, a real batter imagines an arc inside his heart” / or the gutting cruelty of when he tells her “that bread is old” to shame her despite being hungry. It’s so readily mixing targeted insight with the unhinged id.

But most of all, it shows that raging id with absolutely no apologies. Which is probably part of the reason I was SO UNCOMFORTABLE watching parts of this show unfurl out onto the screen with reckless abandon. There’s so much fucking embarrassment depicted and yet so little embarrassment from the artists, which just heaps embarrassment upon you even more. But that’s all part of the laser-like emotional focus of what it’s really after. Because after a lot of pretense here, I think I have a guess at what “the explanation” really is. But before I probably embarrass myself in the same fashion, I realize there’s things about anime that I may not be getting so I’m going to ask them before I hit the conclusion…

~ A Quick List of Questions / Comments ~

-So in this essay I talked about how much information in FLCL comes at you with retroactive explanations or very little at all, but I’ve found this trait to be more common with anime in general? It’s often so good at bringing you into headspace, but there’s such a radical difference between how we’re erratically introduced to important information. Don’t get me wrong, so much Hollywood cinema is bad at exposition (mostly because they’re trying to explain IN the moment which just stalls things), but most of the great American stuff is so damn good at layering in information beforehand and doing so in the drama itself, to the point that practically defines what is “good storytelling” for us. But there’s so much anime that either explains it later (or never at all) and just asks you to roll along in the process. To which, I realize there’s probably a whole history and tradition of the medium / Japanese storytelling at large that I’m less privy to. And at this point, I just want more context.

-Is there a name for that bleached white background thing that shows up a lot in this show? I’ve seen it in other shows, but I wanted to ask here.

-So… the young girl’s underwear thing… I’ve heard people making jokes about it with anime for forever and you naturally figure people are overblowing it and I’ve seen things like this even in Kiki’s Delivery Service and EVA… but with FLCL… there were like 90 brazen parts and like what the fuck is happening with this? Why is all the damn time? Like what’s an explanation / criticism of this that’s not hand-wavy? Am I missing something?

-I know the show is Gainax and people were hitting me with all these anecdotes about this being the post-EVA respite - but  someone brought up that director Kazuya Tsurumaki did the opening credits of EVA and one of the animation directors was Hiroyuki Imaishi who did the hyper-vibe-heavy Promare and I’m like, ahhhh! This is all starting to make sense!

-At least sometimes! Because the part where Naota’s dad shows up with the Luger in the Nazi uniform I was like UHHH THIS DOESN’T FEEL OKAY - and I obviously get it in an Americanized history context and he’s demonizing his dad - but I still have a bunch of questions about how that plays with the specific context of Japanese history? Basically, is there a part to this that I’m missing?

-Was the cat a direct reference to Kiki’s????

-I saw a lot of people making the Scott Pilgrim comparison and it feels apt on the tangible details level, but aside from O’Malley directly saying it’s not a big influence, it feels much more like two artists at the same time being influenced by the same sorts of things?

-It wasn’t MTV, but still right in the punk-rock TV category... I can’t believe there was a literal South Park reference in this.

-Coming back to the comedic language of FLCL - aside from the western influences I cited, what are the anime shows / movies that had this kind of language beforehand? Was there a long tradition of shows with this kind of language? Is this just how most outright comedy looks? Cause again, it was mostly new to me so I need more context.

-Why was the Dad giving the head massage the most unnerving thing I’ve ever seen?

Okay that’s enough questions, it’s time to get to the big one:

~ WHAT IS THIS SHOW ABOUT?! EXPLAIN!!!!! ~

It’s about puberty!

But I’m realizing how much of the anime I’ve seen so far is also about puberty? Granted, a lot of the work I’ve been watching has been the “Shonen-adjacent” properties that got elevated to the canon, but are still centered around that younger male demographic sweet spot. In America the thing is that this age group is actually engaged less specifically and more gets filtered into the larger blockbuster mentality (of which they are still the center). Meaning it’s rarely showing kids on adventures, but the kind of adults (or Superheroes or whatever) that kids aspire to be. And when we do tell stories about that age group? They tend to be “coming of age” stories, where the ideas of puberty either get wrapped up in broad comedy or wistful nostalgia. The kinds of stories full of baseball fields, first kisses, and the usually the first moment of understanding the adult world is more complex than you’d think.

And from what I’ve seen in Anime so far, the ugly part of weird ass puberty is just SO DIRECTLY woven into the fabric of just about everything. Whether it’s the explosive bodies of AKIRA, the thrusting (and also explosive) bodies of EVA, the direct power fantasies of kids in action, the literal sex fantasies, and the abject depiction of the sheer power that older women have over young boys crippling shyness. And it always seems to find the strangest way to depict it all in a way that captures the strangeness of the pubescent feeling. In short, I feel like these puberty works have more in common with The Peanut Butter Solution than something like Stand By Me. Mostly because it finds the weirdest metaphors for these involuntary responses.

And ho boy, is FLCL an example of all of this.

On paper, it’s just your average “19-year-old-alien-comes-to-earth-to-disrupt-12-year-olds-life-and-comes-between-him-and-his-high-school-aged-maybe-girlfriend-who-was-in-love-with-his-older-brother-and-becomes-his-housekeeper-and-flirts-with-his-dad-and-makes-things-grow-out-of-his-head-to-fight-these-other-erupting-beings-and-he-soon-gets-inhaled-by-a-robot-he-erupted-earlier-which-later-shits-him-out-and-turns-out-its-all-him-being-used-so-that-the-alien-girl-can-break-her-pirate-space-king-ex-boyfriend-out-of-the-medical-iron-shaped-jail-that-lords-over-the-town” story… You know, one of those!

But take the central conceit of Naota’s “bumps” on the head. These are older girl-triggered events that become giant stand-ins for acne / boners / whatever kind of body response that is unwanted. Which is why he’s so desperate to hide it, ESPECIALLY when it’s cute / meek /unmasculine like his cat-eared cuteness. It’s also why the erupted forces so readily transfer into guitars / bats AKA powerful phallic weapons for Haruko to use. And the ability to use them essentially makes him a “man.” And like EVA, he even goes into the robot machine that makes him the more desirable, muscular, adult figure. I mean, FLCL is clearly about these things, it’s just a more gonzo, comedic version of what we saw in other stories.

But Naota’s characterization is really interesting. Because with so many of the protagonists I’ve seen before (Shinji, Kenji, etc), they are almost singularly defined by their paralysis and inability to act outside of a few of their strongest qualities. There’s a kind of depressed softness where they genuinely don’t want to do harm (and in turn makes them bury their perceived-to-be-shameful instincts deeper). But keeping with the punk rock vibe, Naota is far more mercurial. There’s moments where he’s angry, resentful, and lashes out, and yet also more vulnerable, pained, and expressive. He’s someone who has a love / hate relationship with pretty much everyone in his life, from Haruko, to Mamimi, to his Dad. Heck, he laments how much people talk about his older brother and yet he’s the one still carrying around his old bat, looking for courage to take the proverbial (and literal) swing. Everything in his life feels like this cruel act of transference. Mamimi liked his older brother and she displaces that lingering want onto him (super inappropriately) - and they’re keeping this incredibly vague sense of what she’s actually doing to him whether it’s holding / kissing (and there’s one part where her underwear comes off when he stands up???). But then Naota gets wrapped up with the even older and larger than life Haruko, who infuriates him to no end, but she becomes the subject of his infatuation, even though she is ultimately just using him to get the pirate king.

Now, virtually everything about this construct is about resentment. And where it gets tricky is because it is the “justified emotion” of the story - but incredibly necessary to look at in terms of intent from the artists behind the creation of that story.

Because, look, Naota’s, like, a few steps away from being a full on red-piller. He doesn’t use the language, but all the resentment is wrapped up in how women are controlling bossy types who expose and use him. But worst of all, they expose his vulnerability. And in turn, builds a resentment toward a toxic father who could give less of a fuck about him (the Oedipal essence is STRONG at Gainax). Naota’s essentially a victim in a constant state of duress and being provoked by women who don’t treat him as a man. Which, looking to the creators, needs radical contextualization in order to separate depiction from endorsement. But luckily, there’s a lot of juxtaposition at the heart of the depiction too. There’s crucial moments of understanding the quietness of life and why he’s drawn to that chaos. There’s the irony of how he calls them immature. There’s tenderness and wanting to be held. And I can’t help but think of the loaded innocence in the shot of him and Haruko sleeping on the bench in the last episode. We see Naota’s anger, but also fully depict the boyish, quiet, scared feelings in his heart. Likewise, it takes care to literally “disarm” him and his cocky behavior in episode five with the literal loading-of-the-gun metaphor that plays in his head before he tries to act like a cocky grown-up (and eventually unleards). Like wearing a big robot suit, the show knows that ain’t the real way forward to maturity.

Which is all part of what makes Naota’s ending arc feel so cathartic. He knows Haruko doesn’t love him and finally can cop to the fact he’s being used - but he tells her how he feels anyway. Not with anger and resentment, but the kind of quiet resignation that’s ultimately about being true to self. For all the nail biting worry about it going in that red-pill direction, it’s ultimately a story about overcoming the feelings of resentment of women and understanding that most of your resentment is aimed at the simple fact you are not grown up yet. Which sucks, but something you have to be resigned to. Which is why the story brings us to that ending.

It’s funny how much anime I’ve seen just ends like: “no.” [read in Dril tweet voice]. Because after indulging this wild fantasy world of brain guitars and older alien girls, the ending normalizes things to the point of “no, you can’t live in that world.” It’s like they write these absurd fantasies that so succinctly get into your head space, but at the end, “sorry, when the story is over you have to be a normal kid.” Which compared to so much western media, feels jaw dropping in it’s brazen honesty. But if there’s any age-old lesson of maturity that goes back to Plato, it’s that more knowledge brings more sorrow. But this is hard-won sorrow. And as we look at those quiet, calming shots of a young Naota, going to school in his uniform and finally at a somewhat uneasy peace - at least now having boundaries and distance from those who sowed chaos in his life - we know it is a sorrow that is so much healthier.

Man, you look at the arc of what I’ve described the theme sounds downright coherent!

Which it is! It’s just brought to us in a way that’s constantly interrupting itself, but is also part of the point. Because where Gainax brought us EVA and the laser-focused darkness of the same kinds of headspace, here we go devil may care, but in a way that’s actually part of the bittersweet tragedy of growing up, which is sort of integral to the punk rock quality of it all. Think about the depiction of its setting, a world finally growing green around the literal iron that was flattening a town. And how the final words highlight how the “nothing amazing here” mantra that keeps being echoed throughout the story can actually cut both ways. Because it first plays funny as the teenage inability to recognize extraordinary before your eyes. But in the end, it captures the jaded sense that all these extraordinary things become ordinary, too. It’s just more well-earned sorrow.

Even when I think about the words that come with the electric punk rock anthem that shows up again and again, “WITH THE KIDS SING OUT THE FUTURE / MAYBE KIDS DON'T NEED THE MASTERS / JUST WAITING FOR THE LITTLE BUSTERS / AW YEAH” I note that it feels so obviously fitting for a young boy that is so tired of his masters. But with the final release comes not the imagined freedom of unshackling (in fact, he watches his masters disintegrate away from him with very little of his help). So instead he comes the 1000 yard stare of “what now?” Which perhaps contextualizes the fact that you’ve internalized so much hope along the way. Because the thing we’ve come to really understand about our little punk Naota is how much he really cares. That’s the thing about jaded disaffection, you’re putting up a young front and trying to take the posture of angry adulthood / control itself. Which is why his big admittance is about coming to peace with being stuck in youth - and less sure than ever. You have all these feelings and learn more and more of what’s wrong with the world, but it’s still so hard to find what feels right. And when you see him in that little suit and you realize it’s a struggle that never really truly goes away. You’re always going to wonder what it’s really about. Which is probably the cruelest part of all.

And it’s why the term “fooly cooly” is designed as a dark, but playful taunt.

I mean that both literally and figuratively. Haruko says the words are about things getting in his head, which she does, but it’s also repeated ad nauseam, always with different contexts. And however erratic, it’s always designed to get under Naota’s skin in order to get all sorts of great and terrible results. Which is why it’s such an appropriate name for this visceral piece of art that does the same. But thankfully, it’s a gonzo piece of art that’s still functional on the core level AND blew my mind in a way something new-feeling hasn’t in a long, long time. I mean, I’ve spent all this time writing and it’s not that I can’t explain it. I actually can. It’s just that explaining it isn’t enough. I need to keep describing it to capture the complicated feeling forever on. But luckily I have so many words. Because it’s brazen. It’s slapdash. It’s eruptive. It’s weirdly cathartic. It’s confusing. It’s emotional. It’s horny. It’s funny. It’s flawed. It’s a punk rock anthem. It’s like doing cocaine. And it’s even a surprisingly sweet story about the pains of puberty and the things we really need to grow up anyway. But hey, maybe I really only need two words.

It’s fooly cooly.

<3HULK