FLCL: Shoegaze - Review

We often write off sequels as unnecessary, and FLCL’s sequel seasons have certainly been no exception. But a sequel’s very lack of necessity is also what gives it so much fascinating potential: It must continue from an atypical starting point, building a new story from a world and characters that were previously changed. In this regard, there’s real promise to FLCL: Shoegaze, which picks up 10 years after the events of 2018’s FLCL Alternative. That series followed 17-year-old Kana Koumoto (Megan Taylor Harvey) and her tight-knit group of friends, culminating in the permanent defeat of Medical Mechanica’s iron-shaped, planet-flattening factories. A new dimension opened in the process that, in a laborious fit of prequelizing, swallowed central FLCL character Haruko Haruhara and her newly acquired yellow Vespa. She’s never seen again on this plane of existence – beyond a few split-second flashbacks, she doesn’t appear in any of Shoegaze’s three episodes.

But teens are still teens, and neither Haruko nor Medical Mechanica need to be around to manufacture their discontent (especially when songs by The Pillows are playing in the background). Consider 15-year-old Masaki Aofuji (Jesse Nowack), who’s alienated from his peers for his insistence that there are squiggly green ghosts everywhere. Exposure to the Medical Mechanica incident has left him constantly seeing these apparitions, each of them flashing images on their bodies that range from random backgrounds to stills from throughout FLCL history. When Masaki moves to a new town, he notices a huge, pink ghost-bird perched atop a mysterious tower that, to him, symbolizes all that's wrong with the world. He’s resigned himself to being a loner who doodles ghosts in his notebook, but then he meets Harumi Araishu (Kim Gasiciel), who’s leaning off the edge of the school roof just to feel something besides her itchy discomfort at not fitting into this world. Soon enough, the pair hit upon a logical solution to their woes: terrorism.

Shoegaze’s first episode opens with the two having broken into the tower, intending to blow it up with a homemade bomb. It’s less serious than it sounds; the place is totally empty, and both Masaki and Harumi seem to regard the act as more of a mischievous excursion. Nevertheless, law enforcement is on the scene, including the Interstellar Immigration Bureau still headed up by Chief Kanda (Ray Chase), who now complements his luxurious (and real!) eyebrows with a goatee that makes him look quite old indeed. He gives the order to bring in the now-adult Kana Koumoto, who shows up sporting a G-woman suit and a bandage on her forehead where flowers had protruded so many years ago.

Compared to the original FLCL, Alternative was a much more grounded and subdued affair, a slice-of-life series centered on Kana’s inability to let go of her childhood among her friends. There were fewer art shifts and cartoonish antics, which helped the series stand on its own (although it also left the usual FLCL shenanigans feeling a bit tacked-on). Kana’s return continues to distinguish this story from the original, taking the franchise somewhere genuinely new: much of Shoegaze’s second episode paints a resonant portrait of adult listlessness.

Once part of something grand, Kana spent a decade chasing that feeling with Chief Kanda. She volunteered for experiments that meant to use her abilities to merge the split dimensions, but she never succeeded and eventually aged out – powers fueled by teen angst aren’t of much use when she’s no longer a teen. The unused convergence device is, naturally, hidden in the tower that Masaki and Harumi have invaded. There’s a real pain to Kana’s disappointment, trying to move on but never quite letting go. Her situation is given a thoughtful parallel with a story Chief Kanda tells about his youth as a benchwarmer for a nationally recognized baseball team, which made him feel like a glorified spectator. He has a wry, clear-eyed view of the whole ordeal, yet he still tosses the ball around like he’s got something to prove – Kana asks him if they can stop playing catch because the way he’s throwing it hurts her hand.

Kana likens her boss’ story to “a teen movie,” though her description more accurately applies to the romance between Masaki and Harumi. Their dynamic feels ripped straight from an indie romance, with the sullen boy brought out of his shell by a quirky girl who shows him how to cut loose. Introduced joking about whether he’s going to drink her urine if the cops cut off the water supply, Harumi spends most of the series as a function of Masaki’s sexual awakening. She seems to exist largely to supply innuendos as well as exposed skin and underwear for the camera to pan over. In other seasons, this is generally the role that Haruko occupies, but her Looney Tunes relationship with reality and her general function as an agent of chaos (if not an outright villain) work as counterbalances – as a genuine love interest, Harumi feels more like the anchor of FLCL: Garden State. 

Shoegaze doesn’t have the time to flesh out this relationship or explore the Heathers-esque nihilism that comes from Masaki and Harumi’s desire to dismantle their world in hopes of building a better one. As in the abbreviated FLCL: Grunge, three episodes isn’t enough to get more than a broad sketch of the characters along with some half-realized concepts. It’s no coincidence that Kana’s storyline comes out the most fully formed, since it can build on Alternative. Compared to Grunge’s one-character-per-episode approach, Shoegaze uses its time far more economically by focusing on Masaki and Harumi’s break-in with periodic flashbacks, but it’s missing many of the scenes where they’d have gotten to know each other better as a result.

The small episode count is felt most in the final episode, which tries to flesh out Harumi a bit more by tying her perpetual restlessness to the dimensional split. But the influx of information, which reveals huge changes to Harumi’s body and family life, fights for space as Shoegaze races to wrap everything up. And worse, it ends up undermining the inner turmoil of all the characters by explaining it away as a reaction to a demonstrable, physical shift in reality. The split becomes a sci-fi scapegoat of sorts, turning the characters’ more nebulous emotions and anxieties into metaphysical loose ends. In its sequel-fueled instinct for explanation, Shoegaze comes perilously close to eliminating the very thing that makes FLCL so resonant in the first place: the grounded, relatable basis for alienation and dissatisfaction.