Review for Flowers Of Evil Collection

Introduction

“It’s anime, Jim, but not as we know it...”

No anime in recent years has divided fan opinion as much as Flowers of Evil and it seems that its status as Marmite anime was set the day the first episode was streamed on Crunchyroll. Fans of the show loved it, really rated its story and its characters, acclaiming it for offering something different from the usual anime suspects. Detractors all pointed to one thing, the way Flowers of Evil looked. It quickly went into my queue on Crunchyroll, waiting for when I actually would have the time to watch it. It’s been sitting there ever since, and in the interim, MVM went and licensed it, announced it, and now the discs are here for review. You can guess that I don’t have a lot of time for online streaming anymore!


MVM are also changing their approach to releasing anime this month. Previously, a show had to be licensed and released in the US, then licensed and converted to PAL in Australia, after which a UK company would license the show and use the Australian masters to release the DVDs here. But recently, Australian distributors are converting fewer DVDs to PAL to save money, and they just release the US NTSC discs instead. When that happens, you might as well skip Australia and obtain the masters directly from the US, and in the coming weeks and months, MVM are releasing four shows that have yet to even be licensed in Australia, of which Flowers of Evil is one. As to what’s different about this show? It’s not animated in the traditional sense. It’s been shot in live action, and the footage rotoscoped, each frame traced meticulously to create its animation. Think A Scanner Darkly, but without the theatrical production values and with more of a 2D flat anime style in terms of characters and backgrounds.


Takao Kasuga is a pretty normal schoolboy. He’s a little more introverted than his peers, and he loves reading, with a particular fascination for Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal, Flowers of Evil. He’s also got a crush on his class’s top student Saeki Nanako, although he prefers to think of her as his muse. Then one day after school, he finds Saeki has left her gym kit behind in class. And in a moment of temptation, he takes it. It’s something he comes to regret almost immediately, as his theft, and his fetishist behaviour has been witnessed by the class delinquent, Sawa Nakamura. The next day, the class is in an uproar about the ‘perverted theft’ leaving Kasuga no easy way to come clean, and then Nakamura confronts him with what she knows, and offers to keep his secret if he will sign a ‘contract’ with her. And so the blackmail begins...


The thirteen episodes of Flowers of Evil are presented across 3 discs from MVM in a 4-5-4 distribution. This title is DVD only in the UK, but did get a Blu-ray release in the US, and cursory research seems to indicate that the Sentai Blu-ray is Region B compatible.

Picture

Flowers of Evil gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer on these discs, and progressively encoded if you have the compatible equipment. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with no particular signs of compression. Playback is smooth, and colours are strong and consistent. You do have to deal with the perennial issue of digital banding, but that seems to be par for the course for anime these days, and is the only nit left to pick with transfers. As mentioned, Flowers of Evil is an unconventional anime, using rotoscope techniques to capture the actor performances and transform them to animation. As such, the animation is a lot more fluid and energetic than traditional anime, character designs are as realistic as the human form gets, but detail tends to vanish at the middle distance, certainly facial features are really only well defined in close-up. It may not be traditional anime, but it works stupendously well to tell this dramatic and real-world story.

Sound

You have the sole option of a DD 2.0 Japanese Stereo audio track with translated subtitles. Given the nature of the animation, it’s no surprise that there is no English dub as lip-syncing is an issue here far more than the usual lip-flaps of traditional anime. Having said that, there are moments where the subtitles are a little too localised when it comes to pop culture references. One person can be recognised as saying “Captain Supermarket”, but the subtitles read Army of Darkness in one scene. It’s a dialogue heavy piece, but the stereo audio does a good job in conveying atmosphere. And the theme songs are exceedingly weird, but appropriately so. The subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos, and there are a fair few screen captions to explain references along the way, so pause might get pressed a few times.

Extras

These are the Sentai discs re-versioned for Region 2, with the MVM logo at the head of the discs instead. That’s why the show is on 3 discs instead of the usual 2 from Australia. They get jacket pictures and static menus.

They’re also light on extra features, with Disc 1 merely hosting trailers for Dog and Scissors, Busou Shinki, Henneko: Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat, and Devil Survivor 2.

This is one show that would have definitely benefitted from a Japanese making of featurette, showing how the unconventional (for anime) animation was accomplished. It’s also missing out on the usual textless credits.

Conclusion

I feel like I’ve just been hit by a truck... in a good way. I’ve spent more years than I care to contemplate watching and reviewing anime, and somewhere along the line I thought that I’d pretty much seen it all, or at least seen enough to be able to put a handle on the medium, to not be overly surprised by a new show, despite how it may be different from the other shows that are out there. Then Flowers of Evil comes along, almost derisively challenging me with a “you know nothing, you petty fool!” I love it when that happens. I have seen nothing like Flowers of Evil before, and that’s even after putting the controversial rotoscoped animation to one side. I haven’t seen a story like this told in anime before, it really could have been a live action series. In fact, reading around the show, it seems the reason the director opted for this form of animation rather than live action was that he wanted the show to be as much about the characters as possible, and with live action, he felt that the actors would get in the way of the characters. That may be doing the acting profession a disservice, but the resulting animation is amazing, the results are wholly successful, and Flowers of Evil is one of the best shows that I have seen in many a year.


It’s a school drama, but one played for a completely different dimension of realism than other anime, especially when it comes to the characters and the way they interact. It’s set at that coming of age, cusp point of childhood, when adolescents are beginning to discover who they really are through experimentation, misadventure and pretension. Teenagers at that age have big ideas, big dreams, big ambitions, but wind up crashing into the real world. As Flowers of Evil is set in an isolated town, hemmed in by mountains, and run down because of the economic downturn, for some teenagers, the town is more like a prison than a home.


That’s certainly true for the protagonist Takao Kasuga, who is the quiet, bookish but friendly kid in class, has a clique of friends, but would rather spend his time buried in the pages of a book, most notably Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. He does what’s expected of him, but he thinks of the world in terms of himself and then everyone else, seeing other people as small-minded and conformist, that he alone really sees the world for what it is. Pretty much like most teenagers then, but he does have his muse in Nanako Saeki, the cutest girl in class, and about whom he harbours only the purest of affection, adoring her from afar, thinking of her in poetic terms. That’s until he happens upon her gym kit one day after class, and is witnessed stealing it by the class dropout Sawa Nakamura. Nakamura is the girl with the bad attitude, who is alone through choice, and who lets the authority figures in her life know exactly what she thinks of them in no uncertain terms. She’s just as derisory of the rest of the class, foul mouthed and confrontational, in essence she lives the kind of worldview that Kasuga thinks that he has.


When she spies Kasuga’s perversion, and his introverted nature, she thinks that she might have found someone with something in common with her, although to truly get Kasuga to understand her, she needs to get Kasuga to understand himself first, to remove the masks of conventionality, and to embrace the true pervert that he actually is. She starts by blackmailing him with her knowledge of his actions, but soon realises that the real key is Kasuga’s feelings for Saeki. She engineers an actual meeting between them, and moves things so that a relationship develops, albeit through the perverted prism that she insists of placing in front of Kasuga, actions which increasingly taint Kasuga’s pure vision of Saeki.


The thing about Saeki is that she may be the pretty one in class, she’s academically the most able, but she too has been following the path laid out for her, and her popularity hasn’t resulted in relationships or close friendships. So when Kasuga actually shows interest in her, it invites a response. Add to that, Kasuga is quiet, gentle, and kind to her, genuinely pays attention to who she is, and talks to her as a person rather than just as the cutest girl in class, and it all means that Kasuga’s interest is quickly returned. And Kasuga learns that Saeki is more than just a muse. Suddenly this relationship is actually developing, which conflicts Nakamura all the more, as she struggles to understand just what it is that she wants from Kasuga. A relationship triangle develops, but in a warped and unexpected way.


Flowers of Evil is a coming of age drama, unconventional love triangle, and expression of teen angst, rich in allegory, and visually arresting. It’s also paced in a wonderfully effective way that makes the most of its imagery and emotional weight. This is a show that can spend five minutes of an episode in silence, watching two people walk hand in hand through an empty town. But not a minute is wasted, every scene has meaning, every beat counts. The best way to describe it is live action in anime clothing. Its compelling character study is perfectly suited to this format, the drama engaging, the story enthralling. If it were live action, you could imagine Sion Sono directing the feature film. If Flowers of Evil does falter, it’s at the end. As so often happens in anime adaptations, we only get the first half of the story here. The anime leads up to a critical juncture in the story that is satisfying enough, but it’s the preview of a second season which strikes the wrong note, presented almost as a hallucination, or premonition. The story could have ended without that melange of imagery and be perfectly fine, but the sequence here is a little jarring in aspect. The utter downside is that despite the preview, the likelihood of a Flowers of Evil Season 2 is bleak indeed at this point. The flaw and the disappointment aside, Flowers of Evil is one of the best anime shows released this year. Just put aside all your preconceptions about anime first, and go into it expecting a realistic drama, and you’ll be thrilled by what it can do.