FLCL Alternative

At the cusp of graduating from high school, childhood friends Kanna, Pets, Hijiri and Mosan are content with life carrying on as is.  The fun and carefree like of Kanna is shattered with the arrival of a beautiful pink haired girl on a Vespa scooter: Haruko Haruhara.  Kanna might not want to accept it, but there’s more than change in the air.  Kanna might just possess the most powerful weapon in existence and she might just need that power to save the world.  No pressure right?  Between friendship and departures, love and dislike, giant robots and killer hormones, seventeen has never been this weird for anyone…but that’s life for ya when Haruko Haruhara comes to town.

Im not sure where I should begin with this one.  FLCL Progressive left me in such an uneven state I wasn’t even sure how I should approach FLCL Alternative.  To it’s credit, we were promised Alternative was going to be something very different from FLCL or FLCL Progressive and it lived up to that promise.  Was that a good thing though?  Cause by the end of Alternative I cant really tell if I enjoyed it, felt way too frustrated, or just wondered if my time had been wasted altogether.  There are some good points to FLCL Alternative but on the whole…I just don’t know.

Let’s begin with the cast of characters Haruko has chosen to torment this season.  Kanna, Pets, Hijiri and Mosan had a bond that was hard not to love, especially in the beginning.  While Kanna is supposed to be the Naota/Hidomi of this series, ample time was given to her other three friends to shine and have their own personal dilemmas challenged and explored.  It was kind of hard to pick a favorite amongst the four friends, though I would narrow it down between the gifted and full hearted Mosan or the beautiful and confident Hijiri.  Kanna, however, I felt became a rather irritating link in the chain as things went on…and that ended up being a bit of the point in the grand scheme of things.  From her not wanting things to change between her and her friends and her refusal to take a serious look at her future, Kanna definitely felt grating compared to the others and, for a time, I wondered why we should even care about her.  As for our resident Vespa riding maniac, Haruko, she seems to have eased up a bit since FLCL Progressive and having a bit more fun crashing into the lives of Kanna and her friends.  Gone are her darker aspirations from Progressive and im alright with that.  Part of me wishes we had more of a focus on her than Kanna but while Haruko is the poster child for the franchise, id say she’s always played a more supportive role to the child in question at the center of the story.  She’s still zany and insane, I kind of wish we just had more Haruko than Kanna sometimes.

Like I said though, Kanna’s refusal to grow up was the point and the message of FLCL Alternative is laid out plain and clear by Haruko in the first episode, “Seventeen has arrived.  Life cant wait forever.  It’s shattered just like your teenage dreams”.  This quartet of heroines happens to be the oldest protagonists in FLCL to date.  At a time when they should be looking to the future and deciding what they want to do next, Kanna remains stagnant and some of Alternatives most surprising moments come when that viewpoint is directly challenged and we learn her own selfishness is hurting people in ways she never imagined.  It’s very deep and sometimes heartbreaking, which is funny since Alternative tries to be way more lighthearted than the rather dark Progressive.  Still, moving on is the central theme of FLCL Alternative and while it might seem like its taking its sweet time hammering that message out, the show does so in smart ways.

While there is a good story to tell, I was kind of disappointed by the visuals of the season.  I don’t really think either FLCL Progressive or FLCL Alternative managed to land the same grab bag animation magic of the original FLCL.  Things did get wacky, especially in the final episode, but nothing ever really made me look at the screen in awe.  Even Progressive managed to start each episode out with a distinct, visual artstyle that left an impact (mostly horrified cause they were all Hidomi’s nightmares but hey points for not sticking to a norm like Alternative did).  I feel like the rapidly changing art has always been one of FLCL’s greatest superpowers and Alternative didn’t embrace that nearly enough.  Thankfully, The Pillows continue to excel in their role as soundtrack providers.  I really cant wait to get this soundtrack and Progressives and listen to them back to back with the original FLCL.  Honestly, while it did get a bit old watching a montage of Kanna and company just chilling out and walking around, adding a Pillows song to the mix made it worthwhile.  We even got to hear some updated versions of familiar FLCL tunes like “Little Busters” and “I Think I Can” while also getting a couple of surprise return tracks from FLCL Progressive. 

So, what are my ultimate thoughts on FLCL Alternative?  It’s…a strange chapter to end things on if this is to be the final season of FLCL.  My wish to see everything come full circle and connect across all three seasons was never granted.  I wanted to know more about Haruko’s relationship with Naota lookalike Kanda.  I wanted to know if anyone was an offspring of a previous character.  I wanted…well I wanted something FLCL isn’t exactly prone to doing…making clear sense.  That has never been it’s thing and it isn’t ashamed to admit that.  Still, FLCL Alternative was a very mixed bag for me.  There were some really good character studies and the music is always a win.  However, I think it strayed too far from what made FLCL great in favor of a different approach that didn’t always work for me…im pretty sure I said the same thing about FLCL Progressive but even then there was enough FLCL DNA there to make it feel like a true successor to the original series.  Alternative has a story to tell and it tells it in its own very strange way and ends in a very ambiguous manner that we may never get any real resolution (same could be said about Twin Peaks: The Return, for that matter).  I just wish there was the same fun animation flair that made the series so infamous to go along with Kanna’s journey through adolescence. 

It really is tough for me to grade this one…so im going to settle on giving FLCL Alternative a 7/10.  Who knows, maybe further rewatches of this (and Progressive) will help this sequel grow on me.  I know they say this is the final season but ill always hope we see Haruko Haruhara ride the shooting star again one more time down the line.