English Dub Review: FLCL Alternative “Flying Memory”

Not Another High School Anime

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kana Koumoto (Megan Harvey), age 17, is nearly at the edge of her time in high school and has no idea what to do with her life. Her friends, Tomomi (Marieve Herington), Hijiri (Erica Lindbeck), and Man (Marianne Miller) are all equally without a proper plan for the future. One day at work, Kana meets a mysterious pink-haired woman who pokes fun at her being at a time in her life where everything seems like it’ll be the same forever, and tells her “Seventeen won’t wait.”

Later, while hanging out with her friends, Man’s urge to build a rocket out of soda bottles ends up hooking them all into its construction. Once it’s all together, they decorate it all nice and pretty and make a big project out of it, pulling from a lot of local shops but avoiding the big shopping center that seems to be stealing business. Everything’s just right and complete, giving Kana hopes they can even take it into outer space!

Then a giant object comes crashing down, destroying their club room and the rocket. The object then sends electricity into something else, which forms into a giant lipped robot with teeth. None of the girls know what to do but then jumps in the pink haired woman, Haruko Haruhara (Kari Wahlgren), who was observing them all nearby. She kicks Kana in the head, knocking her into the wall, then tries fighting off the robot while her friends try waking her up.

Suddenly, a glowing pink flower bursts forth from Kana’s head just as the robot enlargens and destroys the building entirely. Haruko introduces herself as a “space investigator” for the Brotherhood Galatic Police, not that any of the girls know what that means. She then deflowers (lol) Kana, pulling out a 1967 model Mustang guitar which she proceeds to use to demolish the giant robot.

At Haruko’s encouragement, the girls decide to build the rocket again and launch it at the beach, though Tsukata Kanda (Ray Chase), a member of the Department of Interstellar Immigration, is concerned about Haruko’s motives. Though the second rocket also crashes, the four have fun with as they see three large rockets launch from a nearby island.

OUR TAKE

Unlike Progressive, this first episode has actually been out in the public for a few months now, having aired during Toonami’s 2018 April Fool’s Day broadcast when they switched everything over to Japanese audio for the night. As such, it’s the only episode of the two FLCL sequel seasons that also has its Japanese audio available for now. It also means people have had quite a while to watch and rewatch to try and gleam details and foresee story beats. Now, with a whole other season to compare it to, we seem to be getting a more complete picture of what was planned for these sequels.

Compared to FLCL “classic” and Progressive, Alternative’s premiere is by far the most relaxed of the three. While the original wasted no time in establishing its unique and erratic style and Progressive was more than happy to pull from that to make sure people knew it was cut from the same cloth, Alternative is surprisingly very sparing with its callbacks (at least in comparison to Progressive). The one odd stand out is probably the Jenga pieces that had “never knows best” on it, but that’s not a big deal.

What’s really odd is just how easy going the majority of the pacing is, which has its own advantages and downsides. On the positive side, giving us more time to see our protagonists in their natural state also gives us more time to understand why they are the way they are and what’s at stake for them. The potential downside is possibly losing viewer interest if the pace doesn’t pick up, especially with the reputation for zany action that the FLCL brand has. We do eventually get to that before the episode is over, though I do wonder if this will be the mixture for the five other episodes of the season.

That said, I did actually end up liking our introduction to Kana and her situation, even if her friends are kinda lean on the personality side. They do all have some aspect of high school girl trope to them, with Tomomi having a “Tambry from Gravity Falls”-like obsession with her phone, Hijiri is “the hot one”, and Man is the calorie focused one who surprisingly breaks the stereotype of the overweight character by having an aptitude for engineering. While we don’t yet have a sense of how her impending adulthood will impact her cheery outlook on life, we do see her clinging to her remaining childhood innocence for dear life, which is reflected around her in how a giant Walmart-ish shopping center seems to be stealing from local businesses, as well as the apparently far-reaching issue of potentially banning space travel that she sees on the news. It’s almost the reverse of Naota’s journey in the original, which mainly focused on him trying to force his maturity while still having plenty of childhood ahead of him. This is where I would also compare it to Hidomi’s character arc in Progressive, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what that was.

Though I will say that Flying Memory, like Progressive’s RE: Start, starts off with a lot of promise and interesting questions. We still don’t know what Haruko’s up to this time around (or how she refused with Jinyu if her hair is any indication), nor how the giant robots and the Mustang guitar factors into things, but that’s what we’re here to find out.