FLCL

I don't fully get it and honestly that's kind of the point First, a disclaimer, I am not a sci-fi person. At all. Giant robots, space stuff, weird science things happening for no clear reason that is genuinely not my thing, and FLCL has ALL of that. Like a lot of it. There are robots coming out of a kid's head. Literal robots. Out of his forehead. And somehow that's not even the strangest part of the show. So if you're like me and you see "mecha" in the tags and your eyes glaze over a little, just know that feeling does not go away. I pushed through it, and I'm glad I did, but I won't pretend it was comfortable watching. The plot. Oh, the plot. Here's the thing I spent a good chunk of the first two episodes genuinely wondering if I had missed something. Like did I skip an episode? Did my brain just stop working? The story follows this twelve-year-old boy named Naota who lives in this weirdly flat, quiet town, and then a completely unhinged woman on a Vespa shows up and hits him with her bass guitar, and his life falls apart in the most chaotic way possible. There's a corporation, there's an iron, there's a hand coming out of the TV, there's, I don't know, a lot. The plot is genuinely confusing, and I want to be honest that it IS intentional. The show is not broken. It is doing this on purpose. It's using all the chaos and the "what is even happening?" energy to mirror what being twelve and completely overwhelmed by the world actually feels like. Growing up, first feelings for someone, your body changing, adults not making sense FLCL turns all of that into literal robots and guitar smashing, and somehow it works. Once I understood that the confusion WAS the metaphor, I relaxed a little. And speaking of metaphors, this show is stuffed with them. Naota's head is literally a gateway things grow out of him against his will, and he can't control what comes out of him. A strange older woman shows up and disrupts everything comfortable and safe. I mean. Come on. That is puberty. That is adolescence wrapped in the most insane visual language I've ever seen, but it's THERE, and it's actually kind of beautiful once you see it. The whole show is basically one long metaphor for growing up and the loss of innocence and the moment you realize the world is bigger and stranger and more painful than you thought. It's doing real thematic work underneath all the nonsense. I respect that a lot even when I didn't enjoy the surface-level stuff. The animation, though. Genuinely, the animation is something else. I kept stopping and just staring at certain scenes. The way it shifts styles sometimes it goes full manga panels right in the middle of a sequence, sometimes it turns almost sketch-like, and sometimes it's doing something so fluid and kinetic you can't believe it's from 2000. The action scenes especially are just electric. There's an energy to the movement that most anime don't have even now with bigger budgets and better technology. It feels alive in a way that's really hard to describe. The people behind this clearly had complete creative freedom and used every single pixel of it. I genuinely cannot imagine what it was like to watch this when it came out. 2000. People sitting down for this with no context, no internet explainers, and no YouTube explained videos about what it all means. That must have been a completely disorienting experience, and I mean that as a compliment. Even now in 2026, with all the weird experimental anime that exists, FLCL still feels unlike anything else. It is still better than probably 80% of what gets made. The ambition alone puts it above most things. The fact that it committed so fully to its own strange vision without apologizing for it is rare. The soundtrack is apparently a big deal, and I get why. It has this raw rocky energy that just fits the show perfectly. Honest disclaimer though, I only started watching anime in May 2023, so I don't have that nostalgic attachment to these songs that long-time fans seem to have. I see people talking about this music like it's tied to core memories, and I'm just not there. I came in completely fresh. Even so, I genuinely liked it, it never feels like background noise it feels like it's actually part of what the show is saying. I can only imagine how much harder it hits if you grew up with it. Here's my honest conclusion, though. It's too weird for me personally. That is completely on me, I know that. My taste runs toward things that are a little more grounded, a little more emotionally straightforward. FLCL demands you meet it on its own terms, and I'm not sure I was fully able to do that. But I cannot in good conscience ignore what it is. It's revolutionary. It changed what people thought anime could do. It took a six-episode runtime and packed more genuine ideas and visual invention into it than most shows do in two cours. So. 7/10. Because I couldn't love it the way it deserves to be loved, but I absolutely know it deserves to be loved.