FLCL, or Fooly Cooly, is one of the wildest anime of all time. It’s hard to sum the plot up but here are the basics. Naota is a middle schooler who has a lot of anxiety issues. He doesn’t feel like he can live up to his brother who left Japan to play baseball in the United States.
Everything seemed normal and kind of dull for Naota until an alien girl, Haruko, ran him over with her Vespa. She then hit him with a guitar and made a weird lump appear. This lump turned into a multitude of things because it was secretly a gateway to the universe. Based on his emotions, things can get pulled through. That is the general premise of FLCL. If that wasn’t weird enough already, these next entries will make any anime fan’s head spin. There will be spoilers ahead.
8 Naota’s Head
Naota’s head has to be the strangest thing in the show from the get-go. He gets hit with Haruko’s Vespa, and is presumed dead but gets revived anyway. After that, he gets a weird bump on his forehead which starts to burst at the end of the episode. Two robots cone out of it. One enemy and the other would eventually become Naota’s pal, Canti. If Naota having a portal to another dimension in his head isn’t weird by anime standards then this list is nothing.
7 Going Full Manga
One of the best things about FLCL is that it constantly breaks the fourth wall. One of the best examples of this is in the first episode when Naota comes home after the accident. He is surprised to find his assailant eating food with his father and grandpa. Not only that, the scene is drawn like a manga. The energy is through the roof in this scene. There’s so much content packed into the dialogue and panels that fans are still discovering things decades later. This gets repeated in the finale as well which they call more attention to. Putting a manga scene in an anime is hard work.
6 Naota’s Relationship With Women
FLCL is one of the strangest anime around. That much is true. However, beneath the giant robots and alien invaders is a story about a young adolescent boy trying to find himself in this crazy world.
Naota has three love interests in the show. There is Mamimi, the ex-girlfriend of Naota’s brother. She fondles him like he is a good backup which is strange. Then there is Ninamori who is appropriate for Naota, as she is in his class. She likes him but Naota doesn’t feel the same. Finally, there is Haruko, a much older woman who is constantly toying with the feelings of every man she meets. She is also an alien. No one ever said love was simple.
5 People Disappearing
In episode two, there is an early scene wherein Naota is chastising his father, Kamon, for using Canti publicly. Naota thinks they should keep it on the down-low since robots aren’t a normal thing for a bread shop to have. As Kamon is defending his reasoning, random people keep walking past their shop and disappearing. It’s not a story tool to showcase time passing.
Everything is happening in real-time. These people just pop out of existence like Thanos snapped his fingers. It’s funny but it is never explained like so many other things in the anime.
4 Canti Eating Naoto
Canti popping out of Naota’s head was strange but their relationship gets even weirder in episode two. Canti grows a huge mouth from his chest and eats Naota in one bite. This powers Canti up and shows the audience, for the first time, that there is sort of a symbiotic relationship between the two. After the battle Canti runs out into a field and passes Naota like a bowel movement.
Naota even looks like a soft-served turd and everyone around him says he stinks. That is an insult to injury. The kid just got eaten, digested, and pooped out in a matter of minutes. That is anime in a nutshell.
3 Amarao’s Eyebrows
Commander Amarao enters the scene in episode four. At first, he tries to pass himself as a customer in Naota’s family bread shop. However, it soon becomes clear that he is after Haruko and is part of a bigger organization. The most distinctive thing about him is his giant eyebrows.
Characters are constantly saying “those eyebrows” after being in a room with him for an extended period. They are distracting but not as distracting as when they fall off his head at the end of the episode causing Amarao’s subordinate, Kitsurubami, to scream in horror. Finally, in episode six, Amarao gives Naota a set of giant eyebrows as well. It’s hard to say what the joke here is. The eyebrows might be there to be weird for the sake of being weird for an anime or it could be a Japanese thing culturally. Either way, Amarao’s eyebrows are intense.
2 Kamon The Robot
Haruko is constantly teasing Naota but things take a turn in episode four. She is flaunting her affection for Kamon over him. Kamon is also acting a lot stranger. They seem to be more intimate out of the blue. It turns out that this version of Kamon was a robot. Naota only finds this out after he bashes Kamon to pieces with a baseball bat. The theme of baseball comes back often in FLCL.
He thought this was his real father. He was so jealous of Kamon's dealings with Haruko, that Naota would have killed him. Finally, toward the end, he discovers his real father in a closet, looking like a mummy. That must have been a whirlwind of a day for poor Naota’s emotions.
1 FLCL Goes South Park
Episode five might be the best episode of FLCL. It is action-packed for an anime and has a lot of comedy still in it as well. For example, out of nowhere, there is a scene involving Amarao getting a haircut. The animation style starts to look like South Park and Amarao even starts to sound like he is a character in the show.
Besides the manga panels, these two examples are the only times when the animation changes in FLCL. South Park was huge at this point so it is not that surprising to see it referenced in this anime. Both are very odd cartoons.