FLCL (Japaneseフリクリ, pronounced and sometimes romanized as Furi Kuri (not 'furry curry') or Fooly Cooly) is a six-episode direct-to-video Japanese animated series (anime), the brainchild of director Kazuya Tsurumaki of Gainax and released by Gainax and Production I.G. It was also released as a two-volume manga by artist Hajime Ueda, and a three-volume novel serialization by Enokido Yoji. All were released in Japan starting in 2000.
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The series focuses on Naota, a 12 year old boy on the verge of puberty living in the strange yet ordinary Japanese suburb of Mabase, and the activities which start when a strange pink-haired girl named Haruko Haruhara drives up on a Vespa and whacks him in the forehead with a heavly modified, left-handed Rickenbacher bass guitar with a chainsaw start motor. It gradually transpires that she is fighting a company, with a plant in Mabase, called Medical Meccanica.
Naota lives with his lecherous father Kamon and his baseball-coaching grandfather Shigekuni at their family bakery. Naota admires greatly his older brother Tasuku, a baseball phenom who has gone to America to play baseball and appears in the series only in a flashback scene. As the series progresses, it is apparent that Naota has grown up without a maternal figure. In addition to being hounded by Haruko, he is under observation later in the series by a man named Commander Amarao, who, with his assistant, Lt. Kitsuribami, are attempting to stop both Haruko and Medical Meccanica.
FLCL is both a comedy and a drama, as well as being, at turns, a horror story, a soap opera and a science fiction drama. Its comedic side is most noticeable, as it satirizespop culture icons such as John Woo and South Park, not to mention other anime such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Lupin III. Puns and suggestive metaphors fly freely. However, its comedic elements at times overshadow what is, at its core, a very mental coming of age story. The stranger elements often reflect the confusion and awkwardness of puberty, or possibly mankind in general.
Eri Ninamori, who goes by her last name. She is the daughter of the mayor of Mabase and for reasons never made clear frequently wears a shirt saying USSR on it.
Archetype/Based on: None in particular. She most closely resembles the princesses and daughters of the President who want nothing more than normal lives.
Mamimi Samejima, who was Naota's older brother's girlfriend, but since he has gone away she dotes on Naota. She attends school infrequently, smokes and has arsonistic tendencies, and may be poor and living under a bridge.
Archetype/Based on: Closely resembles Charlotte from Lost in Translation (who smokes and takes pictures, like Mamimi) - although she can't actually be based on her since LiT came out three years after FLCL - and Charlene McGee, from Firestarter, (who sets fire to things, like Mamimi).
A significant element of '\'FLCL's'' appeal is its music. Most of the background music was scored/produced by the band "the pillows," which has generated mass success and appreciation since the anime's release abroad. Two soundtrack compact discs were released in Japan.
Mamimi is never shown actually setting fire to anything. Although she smokes cigarettes throught the whole of the series, she is never shown lighting them. A seemingly throw-away detail, it takes on new meaning when the second episode, FireStarter, is viewed in the context of the Stephen King book of the same name. In it, a young girl is born with the ability to start fires with her mind (this is called pyrokinesis), and by the odd standards of FLCL it is entirely possible, since no contrary evidence exists, that Mamimi is in fact starting the fires with her mind.
Most of the vehicles in the series (such as Haruko's Vespa) appear to have been taken out of a European setting (such as Gaku's three wheeled truck and Amarao's Volkswagen Rabbit.
