Forum - View topic

Shelf Life - Flowers For Baudelaire

^Of course it bombed. People don't like having their eye poked with a sharp stick. Even if it's warranted.

Wow, even after a year has passed people are still having extreme reactions to Flowers of Evil. I don't think there has ever been an anime that has polarized anime fandom to this extent. It would be nice if both sides didn't take such an exclusionary position.

@errinundra Maybe my memory serving me badly, but didn't you have a mixed reaction to FoE? Small group of people discussed it on forums so I remembered your comment because it was surprising to see someone else comment on it.

Well, I loved the rotoscoping and the perversely enthralling faces of all the characters. I appreciated their realistic body shapes and their twitchy movements, even when they were apparently still. I thought the artwork was marvellous, especially the decaying town and, where it appeared, the rampant vegetation - reflecting, of course, the barely suppressed ripeness of Kasuga and Seiki. I was entranced by its slow pace: menacing and suggestive of sexual repression. I particularly welcomed the refreshing way that a high school anime was presented and how the director thumbed his nose at the narrow creative parameters expected by some of the anime audience. The best things, however, were the amazing OP & ED songs.

Against all that, the inconclusive ending and three pathologically silly main characters brought the series down. And, while I liked the the mood created by the slow pace I found the development of the story inconsequential, although there were some very powerful moments. Like several others here I find myself ambilvalent about it as a package.

Rating: good.

...I think the anger of the show's detractors comes from panic. And not simply because of its depiction of adolescent sexual hysteria. Flowers of Evil is a pre-meditated challenge to our expectations of anime styles, and thus becomes an analogy for anime fandom itself, sort of in the same way The Sky Crawlers did a few years back. (Like FoE, for all its strange beauty, The Sky Crawlers also tanked.) The series IS Nakamura; your average anime with its highly constrained, typical stylistic elements IS the inward-looking town in which she lives. To a fan who wants their anime expectations affirmed, this series is a personal attack on them and their conservative anime values. Being based upon a manga that, visually, adheres to those values is galling for some. But that's the point.

The anime is a deliberate poke in the eye of anime fandom. Changing the visual style of the original manga IS the point. If it were an original work it would entirely lose its ideological subtext. Your stance on the matter is precisely what director Nagahama and mangaka Oshimi have in their rhetorical gunsights. Part of the strength of Flowers of Evil is that the story and setting themselves are metaphors for the anime fan community and is presumably why Nagahama chose it. And, that mangaka Oshimi provides his own end-of-episode provocations indicates that not only does he approve of the adaptation and its rhetorical tone but it also suggests that he created the manga under stylistic constraints that he resents.

...I am also very familiar with your "virtually all anime is garbage these days" view...

Blood- wrote:

...I am also very familiar with your "virtually all anime is garbage these days" view...

Really? I feel so misrepresented here.

It should read, "virtually all anime is garbage since forever".

I stand corrected. But 'fess up, there is a little bit of the "anime was better back in the day" quality to you, is there not?

And, as if anyone is actually interested.

ShatteredWorld wrote:

Flowers of Evil is one of my favorite shows and, with all honesty, the classroom scene was, to me, one of the best displays of animation that I've seen in my years of watching anything animated. No matter how many times I rewatch the series, that scene will always blow me away.

Completely agreed. I really don't understand why people call this show ugly, as it's easily one of the most fluidly animated and carefully crafted anime I've seen in all my years as a viewer.

: " a way of making a movie by using a series of drawings, computer graphics, or photographs of objects (such as puppets or models) that are slightly different from one another and that when viewed quickly one after another create the appearance of movement

Also with all due respect to bamboo, is she not going against the rules of shelf life. She says she would recommend this, but you recommend a show that you think a casual viewer will like. Flowers had it been done in regular anime style like the manga was already a limited audience as its a dark seninen with sexual overtones. With this rotoscope the audience shrinks even more. So I don't see how this can be recommended in good faith.

And Bamboo, WTF Brina Palenica for Nakamura-san?? Since you asked, try Terry Doty or Luci Christian (if you must) or better yet, some unknown with talent that sounds like Nakamura-san.