Flowers of Evil (Aku no Hana) had caught my eye for a few weeks through screen shots of its unusual rotoscoped animation. Rotoscoping? The style is so infrequently used that some people might have to look the word up in a dictionary. It looked awesome, so I finally sat down to watch it. Guess what? I wasn't disappointed. I was actually kinda... disturbed.
After all the senior project research I've done over these months, I am equipped with the vocabulary to describe the feeling Flowers of Evil raises in me: uncanny. Yup, the jittery animation of Evil's photorealistic characters is uncanny. The flat application of color, and the blend of a 2D/3D format creeps me out. Now, that wouldn't be so eerie on its own, but the show supplements this with an atmosphere of complete anxiety, as we follow the paranoid and socially inept Kasuga. He finds the gym outfit of his middle school crush Saeki and "accidentally" takes it home. Another class outcast, Nakamura, sees him do it, and promises not to tell only if he does whatever outlandish tasks she asks of him. Nakamura's outlandish aim is to make Kasuga show the world how sick and perverted he really is.
The show gets pretty surreal at times, and even invokes Surrealism founder Andre Breton at some point to underscore this. Anime about fragile human psyches seems to be what I'm into nowadays, evidenced by my recent taking to Neon Genesis Evangelion. People who appreciate artsy, weird stuff will love Aku no Hana, although the middle school pseudo-romance story and Nakamura's dense insanity can get tedious at times. If anything, the absurdly epic ending theme should be enough to call you back to the show over and over again.
I'm also keeping up with Oreimo 2, or, My Little Sister Can't Be this Cute. which is totally up my alley for no logical reason whatsoever. This season continues a story about older brother Kyosuke helping younger sister Kirino deal with her otaku addictions. Kirino is, for all intents and purposes, an ass. I don't know why Kyosuke bothers helping her at all. But he does, finding her a circle of otaku friends that she clearly doesn't appreciate most of the time.
As you can tell, it is Kyosuke who makes the show so captivating. His constant need to deliberate between Kirino and her friends creates some light-hearted harem romance; after all the crap he goes through, Kyosuke deserves some action once in a while. His most likely prospect is Kuroneko, a shy goth girl who writes online novels. She's pretty cute, and if Kyosuke gets with her, I'd ship that.
Since every anime has a weird factor, Oreimo is no exception: Kirino is obsessed with erotic games in which the player has to hook up with younger girls. I'm trying to figure out if this means Kirino is a lesbian, but the show doesn't seem to probe that much further. Kirino's friend Ayase is madly in love with her, and I don't think that will ever be requited.
Lastly, I've gotta mention Attack on Titan. Basically, humans have been living behind massive fortified walls for the past 100 years in fear of Titans, tall humanoids who feast on ordinary little humans. No one knows where they're from or why their diet solely consists of people; as one episode suggests, they might do it simply because they want to. I have high expectations for this series: the original trailer a few months back featured a form of 360 degree combat relying on cables, allowing combatants to swing through the forest like Spiderman. It's been done a few times in the past five episodes and it's freaking awesome. The depiction of the humanoid titans also recalls the Playstation 2 game Shadow of the Colossus for me, bringing back some fond memories. I still have high hopes for the series considering it's being made by one of my favorite studios, Production I.G. The last episode was pretty crazy, and I have no idea how it will be followed up.
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