Anime: Aku no Hana

mild spoilers ahead

Aku no Hana, or "The Flowers of Evil" is the oddball entry of the season. Both, on the surface and far below, it brings up many things hard to love for the average fan of the anime medium, who is sixteen and needs his boobs and explody things. It's a fine example of a specimen that can only be loved or disdained (complete with "no true scotsman" arguments) for what it is. An instant "meh" for many to complain about, while compelling and satisfying for others. Which, in itself is interesting.

The most often heard argument and the seemingly most offensive and divisive part of it all, concerns the visual style of the series. What we see is the result of constant rotoscoping, an age-old technique in film -- think 1930s Disney movies -- that derives its moving pictures from film stock that is used as blue print and then drawn and painted over. This paint-by-pictures method creates characters for the show that are suddenly well proportioned. Eyes and noses are not scaled to reality-defying sizes, the hair color remains in stoic black. These people are not cartoons. Or even if they are, they look awfully real.

The audio too, is everything but cutesy and toony. Sound and speech are unusually raw and come from a distant. The recorded voices seem to come directly from the material filmed on location. The creators are also fond of the David Lynch staple of droning, spooky ambient music to create an uneasy undercurrent, a hint of (or a wish for?) weirdness and excitement in an all too normal and predictable world of little town, Japan. Music in general is important here. The OP themes are uplifting, tuneful garage pop tunes, variations that mirror the characters of the show. And the music that rounds up each episode and plays over the credits sounds like it's lifted straight from some eerie 1980s avantgarde pop vinyl record, oddly fascinating and fitting.

The next point of derision are the characters. They are as Japanese as they come in popular dramatic media. They are very afraid of the opposite sex, very busy over-complicating and over-thinking their weird little platonic relationships and overall standing in society. Everyone suffers from some kind of social neurosis. The main character is a "weakling without a reason" (a common anime stereotype and trope), an emotionally imprisoned, hyper-sensitive individual, almost too good for this world. As a literature nerd, he's obsessed with an anthology of poems, the titular "Les Fleurs du mal", written by a Frenchman in the 1850s, that is all about Weltschmerz and lesbian sex. Or so Wikipedia tells me. Characters two and three are, surprising no one, girls in his class. One is crazy, one is preppy. One is a nuisance, pushy and blackmail-y, the other sensible, nice and clean. Symbolically they represent the Freudian trio (ego, id, superego), or different life choices, or so you might think, but this too, is a charade. Those characters do not form a triangle, they stand in line. Fundamentally, they want the same, but for different reasons.

The events and tribulations then, play out slowly, but beautifully and with an ambiance of foreboding mystique. By the end of episode 7, an animated highlight, we reach the summit of the Drama/Psycho/Mystery show hill. By episode 10 however, the house of cards gets knocked over by an unhealthy blow of overdone melodrama, the very Japanese kind again, with tears in the rain and a great deal of screaming cryptically verbalized emotions at each other. It gets back on track again, just in time to dispel any impression of harem fantasies, but it's still a pit of suck that is way deeper than it needs to be.

What we are left with is a coming-of-age show about rebellion and choosing your path in life, but mostly rebellion (because, apparently, there is no path). And yes, it's open ended. The manga chapters 21 to 33 are yours to read, as the second season which would likely cover those events might not appear for a long time, if it gets made at all.

PRETTY COLORS
Like in pretty much any show, the Flowers of Evil were judged by most, based on how they looked, instead of what they actually were. The anime community was divided into those who hated it because it doesn’t have the exact same artwork as the source material, thus it’s bad, and to those who loved it for the exact same reason, because it was avant garde. And of course close to nobody bothered to look past the pretty colours to see if there is anything else besides that. Stay classy you tasteless casuals.

If you ask me, I say it is both ugly and artistic. On one hand, the budget is clearly low, making it look crude and not good fapping material for the otakus. On the other hand, it is unorthodox, experimental, and different. Both of these impressions are the result of rotorscoping, a technique no longer used much, since it takes way too much time to look nice compared to android animation. They didn’t give enough frames per second or detailed enough body structure, so the result feels very crude. The motions are jerky, and the characters don’t have faces or lightening when they are a few meters away from the camera. This makes them look bizarre, especially next to the backgrounds which remain fairly detailed and full of textures.

Nonetheless, exactly because rotorscoping is very rare, it gives the show a special feel. If you are fed up with all those overused anime-style characters and their copy-pasted into infinity school grounds, then chances are you are going to embrace this artwork as a breath of fresh air. I mean, they could have simply used the bland artstyle of the manga, the result of which would be an anime nobody would notice or care about. By not doing that, it created an enormous amount of buzz, and became rather famous.

SCRIPT & CAST
But what does fame or animation style even mean in the longrun if theme exploration, characters and writing are garbage? When it comes to those elements, I found the show interesting but not developed. There is emphasis on the twisted mentality of the characters but it’s not going anywhere in specific, so by the end of the day it feels like deviance for the sake of deviance, with very little of anything else. It makes it focused, but also one-note.

I appreciate the effort to deal with the issues of disturbed teenagers and trying to make something more other than yet another fan service oriented school comedy. It feels like a psychological thriller at times, but saying all that stuff led to something, would be a lie. Despite the characters SEEMINGLY acting far more realistic and plausible than your average school harem, they are still pretty simple and hard to take seriously. Especially the teen idol girl which is pure hearted to the point of stupidity, falling in love with the introvert loser protagonist for no real reason, and constantly forgiving him despite everything he did to her. And despite the various scenes where the characters are hallucinating, or completely lose themselves in rage and frustration, nothing really comes out of it.

I can’t even say I cared about any of them either; they were so simple in character and bland in behaviour that I was given no reason to bother remembering them. And no, reading books or reciting poems is not depth of character. The only things I still fondly remember are the artistic overtones, the ending song, and the scene where they vandalize the school. Everything else is just a vague memory by now. What does that mean? If you have a show where you only remember one song, the art, and one scene, then you know there isn’t much content in it. The plot also uses the age-old trick of resetting progress after every event, and making everyone to act like they are too blind in figuring out who is responsible, or too stupid for doing the obvious.

The show also ends incomplete, so you don’t even get closure. Thus the whole thing becomes once again an excuse for advertising the source material. That’s right people, the anime is just a sample, go read the manga, only to realize it is also not going anywhere as well.

IN CONCLUSION
In all, the Flowers of Evil try to be different and more mature than your run of the mill ecchi school comedy, by trapping you in a constant feeling of disgust and regret. It is still nowhere near great, and the small fanbase the show has are blowing its content out of proportion. If it had a faster plot, no character resets, closure, and the atmosphere was like episodes 7 and 8 all the time, I would consider it an amazing watch. But because it isn’t, I end up remembering mostly as an ugly looking piece of low budget art.