Flip Flappers

Episode 11

Okay, I'm finally gonna call it here: Flip Flappers did not escape losing its head writer unscathed. Given how instrumental she was to the series' initial tone, I guess it would be a miracle if it had, and you don't get miracles every anime season. Either way, whatever Flip Flappers has become now, it no longer resembles the show we started with.

Since I mostly walked away from this one with negative feelings, I want to focus on what I liked first. Even if it's not in the form that I wanted, we do get concrete answers for just about everything in this episode, so you certainly can't accuse the show of holding its cards too close to its chest anymore. The hypothesis I posed a couple weeks ago that Papika (and Cocona) would have to push through their own childish illusions and accept each other as they are in the present in order to stay together in the future is also coming true in a somewhat satisfying way. Cocona's been stripped of her agency temporarily, but her consciousness will probably return to her body in the next episode, so before that, the focus shifts to Papika instead. Even if she reacted to it immaturely, Cocona was right in that she was initially just a security blanket for Papika, a replacement for the companion she had lost when Mimi disappeared. If Papika had been given more layers beyond hyper-innocent dreamchild, there could have also been an interesting struggle to her befriending Cocona with the knowledge that it might bring Mimi back. (She obviously didn't know anything about the bigger schemes in play, so that's not the case. The only guilt she bears is for childishly ignoring the past when trying to replace Mimi with Cocona in her heart.)

So on as broad a thematic level as possible, it looks like Flip Flappers will be resolving its character arcs in a way that mostly makes sense and remains visually interesting. But the rest of the details and execution at this point have devolved into a red-hot disappointing mess.

First of all, episode 11 betrays an immediate downgrade in animation quality for most of its run (occasional red-goop tendrils and other fluid flourishes aside). Director Kiyotaka Oshiyama is still doing his absolute best to imbue each shot with a sense of wonder and dynamism, but the production is actively working against him at this point, with blander backgrounds and even a duller sense of color design accompanying the numerous laboratory settings. (I don't know the full details, but apparently Studio Pablo skedaddled from production on Flip Flappers just a few episodes after writer Yuniko Ayana, which might explain the series' less engrossing aesthetic leading into this episode, where it reaches its lowest point visually.) But even at its worst, Flip Flappers's visuals can put most anime around it to shame. The real problem here is a tragically compromised chimera of a script that feels like it's dragging its way to the finish line, bleeding off all its best bits from early episodes to become yet another poor man's Evangelion imitation instead.

I mentioned earlier that Cocona gets totally stripped of agency for this episode, but unlike Papika's struggle, her possession by Mama Mimi doesn't seem to have much to do with her struggles as a character. No, Cocona's transformation is couched entirely in tangles of backstory for a tale we've seen told many times in anime before; just swap Rei for Cocona, Yui for Mimi, Gendo for Salt, NERV for FlipFlap, and SEELE for the amorphous cult, then smudge the most blatant details over with slapdash clichés from other anime, and you've got the perfect recipe for a flavorless, substance-free, yet still climactic-feeling endgame.

So here's the full scoop. Mimi continued to be monitored by FlipFlap as she grew older. Papika grew up alongside her (but still talks and acts like a little baby for some reason), and Salt-kun finally got the Doctor part added to his name by taking a job under his father, who we'll call Salt Senior. While FlipFlap still can't figure out how to send other humans to Pure Illusion, they manage to get the girls to warp to specific locations together by using human minds as an anchor point. Of course, Salt Senior makes himself the guinea pig for this test when everything goes wrong, as Mimi and Papika pass through the gate from his subconscious mind to his conscious memories. Whatever they did in there drove Salt Senior insane, (what did they do? what emotional significance did it have for Salt or the girls? doesn't matter, just rush right through it!) which drives a wedge between Salt and Mimi. When Mimi refuses to work with FlipFlap any longer, they threaten to take away her baby, who Salt is somehow completely unaware of. What? How and why did she hide her pregnancy from a lead researcher at the facility when everyone else obviously knew about it, especially when this researcher is the father of her child? This was so confusing to me that I ran it back a few times to discover that there's a quick throwaway scene, literally less than a minute long, implying that Mimi and Papika went on the run from FlipFlap for a full year before being recaptured. It's obvious that this was shoehorned in just to make sure Salt didn't know about Cocona until after she was born, and it's still baffling to me that Mimi didn't tell Salt she was pregnant, emotional conflict over zapping his dad's brain aside. It all just seems like disinformation in service of forcing plot points, the kind of writing you see in bad romcoms. Anyway, even though he's conflicted about losing his father and rejected the girls' offer to run away the first time, this revelation that he has a child now pushes Salt over the edge to help the girls escape (again). Unfortunately, they can't fool FlipFlap twice, so when they're caught before they can escape and Cocona's life is threatened, Mimi transforms into Nega-Mimi, declaring that she doesn't need anyone but her baby, shifting from undeveloped plot device heroine to undeveloped plot device villain, and vanishing into Pure Illusion for good—or so we thought.

Now that all the amorphous fragments have been gathered and reunited with Cocona, (wait, how and when did they get Cocona out of Pure Illusion?) Mimi reawakens to initiate Third Impact and merge Pure Illusion with reality to take Cocona back. The amorphous cult is ecstatic about this (even though they try to stop her at first?) because that was their goal all along. Dr. Salt is less happy about it, attempting to exorcise Mimi from Cocona's body, and then just plain shoot her in the face when that doesn't work out. So what was Dr. Salt's goal? If he wasn't trying to get his girlfriend back all this time, why would he put his daughter in such frequent danger, and if he was trying to get her back, why does he respond with such bloodthirsty resolve when she returns, albeit inside Cocona's body? Either way, I find myself struggling to care about any of it, because this apocalyptic corporation/tragic lovers/chosen one baby plot has been done to death in anime, many of which spend their entire runtimes fleshing out the details behind all these familiar twists. Flip Flappers just scraped up the sparknotes of these familiar tropes that it knew would play fine to an otaku audience and tossed them all in a couple episodes, regardless of how divorced they are from everything that made Flip Flappers unique in the first place.

It's no wonder that Papika, once the deuteragonist of this story, seems to have no place in everything that supposedly led to this point. The show didn't even have the decency to tell any of this backstory from her perspective, flesh out her character through it, or place importance on her role in what came to pass. She might as well not have even been there at all. I can't decide if I'm more disappointed that she has no meaningful role in this obviously cobbled-together infodump, or if I'm more disappointed that they didn't even care enough to give adult-Papika a more complex or matured personality than child-Papika. This turn of events isn't terrible by any means, it's just incredibly lazy, and given the choice to fall back on Evangelion plot beats and imagery, I'm thinking it's the result of production committee meddling that either resulted in or resulted from the lead writer quitting the project. Flip Flappers has always been a visually arresting production, but in terms of story, it went from a project that didn't seem to have full confidence in its ideas to a production overtaken by people who didn't understand the original writer's ideas.

Anyway, all this melodrama results in Mimi escaping to a remote pocket of Pure Illusion where she can re-mold Cocona in her own image, in a halfhearted attempt to tie some of this "everyone has multiple facets" idea to the themes of the show at large. If I tilt my head sideways, I can kind of see what they're trying to say about coming-of-age or personal identity through this, but it's all so poorly done that I don't even want to bother analyzing it; I'd basically be breaking down something that I don't think actually works or says anything cohesive. Meanwhile, the other woefully underdeveloped characters of FlipFlap escape to a safehouse while the world around them transforms into a nightmarish version of Pure Illusion. Dr. Salt pleads with Yayaka and Papika to rescue Cocona and stop Mimi, Yayaka gives Papika a thoroughly generic pep talk, and we ride off to a penultimate episode that I can only hope will be better than this one.

At the same time, the damage has already been done. I waited and waited for Flip Flappers to finally show its hand and commit to its strongest ideas, only to be supplanted by a conclusion that feels like a different show entirely, mandated by a faithless or scrambling production committee. At best, the last two episodes will have to be damage control for a largely failed story with some beautiful imagery and a tragic amount of promise.

Rating: C+

Flip Flappers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jacob can't deny that Third Impact would be a lot more pleasant if everyone turned into flowers instead of Tang. You can follow Jake here on Twitter.