 A
few years ago, when Neon Genesis Evangelion was first bending the minds
of anime fans, Gainax representatives were peppered with questions about
that series at North American anime conventions. Now the hot Gainax series
for those fans is FLCL, even though it's not due for a North American home
video release for months. Kazuya Tsuramaki, who directed FLCL and worked
as an assistant director on Evangelion, was in the spotlight of anime fans
at Otakon. Just as with Evangelion and its mysterious title, fans wanted
to know what the letters FLCL meant. "FLCL means fooly cooly," Tsuramaki
replied. "I thought that meant `fool and cool.' At the time we needed a
title desperately, so we used that. I always wanted to make a title from
an English name made shorter, like `pocket monsters.'" |
 One
fan at the panel actually asked if the guitar-swinging female character
in FLCL came from the old Hanna-Barbera Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. Tsuramaki
said the running gag in FLCL came from a popular J-pop star, a very edgy
person who says she wishes she was a pizza delivery girl, "...and if i
was a delivery girl I would want my customers to hit me with a guitar."
A Japanese band also provides FLCL's music. "I wanted to use a lot of Japanese
pop culture in FLCL. A lot of anime uses classical music, but I wanted
to use a band." And since South Park was becoming popular in Japan at the
time FLCL was produced, there is a South Park parody in FLCL. |
 The
Otakon fans still wanted to learn about Evangelion's mysteries and motives.
Tsuramaki said he was surpassed that Shinji Ikari was understood so well
by North American Evangelion fans, and admitted that Shinji was modeled
after the director Hideki Anno. "Shinji, he gets summoned by his father
to ride a robot, and Anno was summoned by GainAx to make a big animation
show after he had had a problem with Nadia of the Mysterious Seas and didn't
know if he still wanted to direct." Some fans think that the extreme violence
in End of Evangelion was inspired by fans' disapproval of Anno, but Tsuramaki
said that was not the case. "It wasn't a bitterness toward the fans. A
lot of people think anime should always have happy endings, but that's
not always the case. We wanted to educate the fans that anime can have
bitter endings." |
