Anime Review: Aku no Hana
Aku no Hana (Flowers of Evil) (2013) is a truly different anime. This 13-episode Zexcs production, based on the manga by Shuzo Oshimi, is a dark slice-of-life teen drama. I generally detest slice-of-life teen drama, so I’m not just idly gushing when I say this series is (mostly) fantastic. It owes much of its originality-and controversy-to its use of rotoscoping in place of traditional animation. This technique, in which live-action footage is traced over, puts Aku no Hana artistically in a bit of an uncanny valley between cartoon and live action drama. The effect unsettled me at first, but the whole story is meant to be unsettling, and in the end, I found it the perfect mix of realism with a creepy, otherworldly overlay.
Aku no Hana starts out as an adventure in Schadenfreude. Shy middle-school boy, Takao Kasuga, has a crush on the beautiful and accomplished Nanako Saeki, and in a moment of bad judgment, he steals her PE uniform. Unfortunately for Kasuga, this momentary lapse is witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, a borderline psycho from his class who is desperate to find another authentic “sicko” like herself to relieve the tedium and hypocrisy she sees in middle-school life. She blackmails Kasuga into performing more and more bizarre acts in exchange for her silence about the uniform. And Kasuga, like the clueless, emotionally sensitive boy he is, lets himself get buried in increasingly unconscionable webs of deceit. All this is just the jumping-off point for an in-depth psychological investigation of Kasuga, Nakamura, and Saeki, none of whom is quite what they initially seem.
Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.
Aku no Hana starts out as an adventure in Schadenfreude. Shy middle-school boy, Takao Kasuga, has a crush on the beautiful and accomplished Nanako Saeki, and in a moment of bad judgment, he steals her PE uniform. Unfortunately for Kasuga, this momentary lapse is witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, a borderline psycho from his class who is desperate to find another authentic “sicko” like herself to relieve the tedium and hypocrisy she sees in middle-school life. She blackmails Kasuga into performing more and more bizarre acts in exchange for her silence about the uniform. And Kasuga, like the clueless, emotionally sensitive boy he is, lets himself get buried in increasingly unconscionable webs of deceit. All this is just the jumping-off point for an in-depth psychological investigation of Kasuga, Nakamura, and Saeki, none of whom is quite what they initially seem.
Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.