{"id":57301,"date":"2023-12-07T01:00:40","date_gmt":"2023-12-07T01:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.alltheanime.com\/?p=30531"},"modified":"2023-12-07T01:00:40","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T01:00:40","slug":"flowers-of-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/07\/flowers-of-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Flowers of Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Andrew Osmond.<\/p>\n

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Anime is often compared to live-action cinema. If so, Flowers of Evil<\/em> is the cultish indy film, whose moody images sing with the torments of alienated schoolkids. It has dollops of black comedy, moments of painful lyricism, and a real human sympathy under the cruelty.<\/p>\n

Few other anime feel so likea live-action indie, for Flowers of Evil <\/em>was filmed<\/em> in live-action, with the animation painted on afterward. It\u2019s reality, just a bit out of joint. The story \u2013 of one screwed-up teenager who falls under the thumb of another \u2013 is told subjectively, yet with the assurance that it could <\/em>happen, and maybe has somewhere in the world.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

In some ways, it\u2019s familiar anime territory, about what happens when a boy meets a really strange girl. Takao Kasuga is the withdrawn schoolboy \u2013 contemptuous, with the arrogance of the deeply lonely, of his porn-watching, sex-joking \u201cfriends.\u201d Kasuga reads poetry under the desk; his idol is Baudelaire, a melancholic, decadent Frenchman who wrote the book Flowers of Evil. <\/em>The boy thinks reading Baudelaire makes him sensitive and deep, and he\u2019s about to prove it\u2019s possible to be a more pathetic wuss than Shinji in pre-Rebuild<\/em> Evangelion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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One of Kasuga\u2019s passions is pretty Saeki, a girl who sits a few desks from him. He\u2019s sure that his feelings for her are pure and spiritual. That\u2019s until Kasuga\u2019s in the classroom alone, and a bag tumbles down from a shelf, containing Saeki\u2019s gym clothes. In a slow, sweet moment of transgression, Kasuga grabs them, then flees.<\/p>\n

Of course Kasuga is horrified by his crime. Surely he can take the clothes back, put things right? But (heh heh) it\u2019s too late. Kasuga\u2019s crime was seen by the class\u2019s resident girl weirdo, Nakano. (Or it\u2019s possible that Nakano didn\u2019t<\/em> see him, and made a shrewd guess when the theft was discovered.) Now Nakano lurks everywhere, hooking Kasuga by his guilt and gonads, toying with his fear of what she\u2019ll do with his secret.<\/p>\n

Soon she\u2019s stripping Kasuga naked in the library, though that\u2019s nothing compared to the psychological stripping she\u2019ll give him. At times Nakamura is as clinical in her tortures as Hannibal Lecter; then she\u2019ll bay like a banshee and overwhelm Kasuga like a monstrous rapist. It\u2019s as if Britain\u2019s gormless Adrian Mole had run into Elliot Page\u2019s castrating avenger from Hard Candy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Flowers of Evil<\/em>\u2019s rotoscoping highlights people\u2019s small artless shifts and movements, like Kasuga scratching his bum in the first episode. It gives the story a woozily detached patina, though it\u2019s far less trippy than, say, Richard Linklater\u2019s film Waking Life<\/em>. Some anime fans find the look repulsive, and a betrayal of animation; but then Flowers of Evil<\/em> was directed by Hiroshi Nagahama, who\u2019d worked for decades in more conventional anime, including the Mushi-shi<\/em> series.<\/p>\n

The drawn-over live-action makes most of the characters seem uglified \u2013 even Saeki smiles like an alien impersonating<\/em> a girl. But with Nakano, it\u2019s reversed. On first sight, she seems frumpy, dumpy; but as her role grows, she becomes alive and sensual, far outshining the other kids. Her gargoyle smiles are bad enough, but that\u2019s nothing to her screams, full of frustrated hate and heat. Meanwhile her victim Kasuga is humanised by his eyes, darting in terror like a snared rabbit\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Much of the anime plays like a mordantly funny thriller, a mind game like Death Note<\/em>. The bag of stolen gym clothes comes to feel like a ticking bomb; later, an empty room is as terrible as Smaug\u2019s lair. The show is cruel, but doesn\u2019t stereotype. It would have been easy, for example, to have made the pretty Saeki into a joke character, a bimbo. Instead she\u2019s anything but.<\/p>\n

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Then there are the show\u2019s stranger trimmings. Disembodied voices intone the poems of Baudelaire. There are furry, bristly black flowers with alien eyes; these first appear as drawings on Kasuga\u2019s book, before popping up in dreams and surreal cutaways. Of course they illustrate Kasuga\u2019s growing pains, his burgeoning, corrupt teen libido that Nakamura can smell on him so easily. There are glacial scenes of characters walking through town, asking us to feelthe difference as the emotional situation changes. One episode has Kasuga walking in a lover\u2019s afterglow; minutes later, he\u2019s marching to his seeming execution.<\/p>\n

The series was based, on a manga by Shuzo Oshimi, originally published in Bessatsu Shonen<\/em> magazine and published in English in four hefty volumes by Vertical Comics. Oshimi\u2019s notes on the manga make clear the setting, if not the events, came directly from his childhood. The story takes place in Kiryu, a small town which Kasuga and Nakamura both loathe.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was once prosperous, but has declined,\u201d Oshimi says of Kiryu. \u201cAll the iron in the city is rusted, storefronts are shuttered, and if you live there, it weighs on your heart. In that environment, my middle school self was boiled down into thick jelly. I was even worse off than Kasuga.\u201d He also recalls, \u201cI had nowhere to go so I was constantly hitting up the few bookstores in town, where I\u2019d stand between the bookshelves and read as many paperbacks as I could manage.\u201d Like Kasuga, Oshimi developed an early love of poetry.<\/p>\n

Also like Kasuga, Oshimi was far from pure-hearted. According to his confession, he attempted something far more sordid than stealing a classmate\u2019s sports kit, though he failed (and wasn\u2019t caught).  He writes, \u201cThe idea of \u2018pervert\u2019 has the aspect of shoving things we don\u2019t understand in a box so we can feel better about ourselves. But the truth is that more of less every human has some perversion hidden away in their hearts. I\u2019d be perfectly happy to have people read this manga and just think, \u2018Ew, what a pervert<\/em>,\u2019 but if anyone stops even a moment just to wonder \u2018What does perversion mean to me?<\/em>\u2019 then I\u2019m really glad to have created this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As mentioned earlier, the director of the anime version was Hiroshi Nagahama, who\u2019d worked in anime for decades. He started at Madhouse, working on the 1990 fantasy video series Record of Lodoss War<\/em> and the judo show Yawara!<\/em>, from an early strip by Naoki Urasawa. \u201cAt the time,\u201d Nagahama told Anime News Network<\/em>, \u201cI got 160 yen for one Yawara!<\/em> cel and 210 yen for a Lodoss<\/em> cel. For that 210 yen, one cel I worked on was a large dragon. I worked on (its) scales for days.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that start, Nagahama had multiple credits on Revolutionary Girl Utena<\/em>, including conceptual design; he drew image boards of such settings as \u201cThe Forest of Duels.\u201d From there, his credits ranged from directing Guilty Crown<\/em> episodes to his series director debut. That was the aforementioned Mushi-shi<\/em>, a mellow supernatural series with an almost matter-of-fact sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

In the Anime News Network<\/em> interview, Nagahama remembers he was asked to adapt Flowers of Evil<\/em> by King Records. However, he replied that what the manga conveyed could not be conveyed in animation. After a month of coaxing, Nagahama said it could only be adapted through rotoscoping, which was expensive and might get blowback from viewers. Nonetheless, Nagahama said, the idea was accepted.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI still don’t know how we made it happen or how I made (Flowers of Evil),\u201d Nagahama said (this was in 2019). \u201cI have partial fragments of a memory of making it. I only have images that have nothing to do with animation, like looking through the lens of a camera.\u201d The live action took about three months; the overall production schedule was about double that for a normal anime series.<\/p>\n

The Japanator <\/em>website reported on a convention panel where Nagahama explained why he pushed for rotoscoping. \u201cI read (the manga) and I thought what is being depicted is something realistic and close to our daily lives, so I thought rotoscoping is the way to go.\u201d Asked why he didn\u2019t make a live-action version, Nagahama suggested rotoscoping was a way \u201cto depict fiction and connect it to our world,\u201d different from watching actors.<\/p>\n

In the panel, Nagahama also said he knew there would be criticism of the series, even before it aired. \u201cPeople were saying it looks creepy, but I think it\u2019s better to feel something than nothing at all\u2026 Say in five years it\u2019ll be on rental or on Blu-ray… People then can check it out and say, \u2018Hey this was that creepy anime on TV.\u2019 There\u2019s so much anime in Japan and few titles leave an impact on the viewer. I didn\u2019t want to create something that doesn\u2019t leave an impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, Flowers of Evil<\/em> has also been adapted as a live-action film (2019), with a script by Mari Okada, known for her many anime writing credits and for directing the film Maquia<\/em>. Nagahama also worked on the long-gestating version of Junji Ito\u2019s horror strip Uzumaki<\/em> using techniques that are plainly far from Flower of Evil<\/em>\u2026 and yet the atmosphere is so similar that it\u2019s uncanny.<\/p>\n

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films<\/a><\/em>. Flowers of Evil<\/em> is released by Anime Limited. <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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By Andrew Osmond. Anime is often compared to live-action cinema. If so, Flowers of Evil is the cultish indy film, whose moody images sing with the torments of alienated schoolkids. It has dollops of black comedy, moments of painful lyricism, and a real human sympathy under the cruelty. Few other anime feel so likea live-action [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[61,122,127,129,124,128,125,132,131,133,126,130,123,66,94,88,97,56,64,65,60,112,40,75,95,104,33,120,105,101,16548,98,115,30,29,41,86,70,69,68,72,71,26,118,108,87,46,55,48,52,54,51,50,83,62,58,57,109,35,59,63,85,79,82,96,80,27,81,114,44,42,43,45,38,39,110,117,100,111,116,73,89,90,92,91,93,84,78,37,102,34,36,77,67,74,99,113,119,28,121,32,47,49,53,103,31,76],"class_list":["post-57301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","tag-airpods","tag-anime","tag-anime-characters","tag-anime-cosplay","tag-anime-edits","tag-anime-merchandise","tag-anime-movies","tag-anime-news","tag-anime-recommendations","tag-anime-reviews","tag-anime-series","tag-anime-streaming","tag-animes","tag-app-store","tag-app-store-samsung","tag-appgallery","tag-appgallery-oneplus","tag-apple","tag-apple-music","tag-apple-tv","tag-apple-watch","tag-bbc-sport","tag-best-mobile-games","tag-bixby","tag-bixby-xiaomi","tag-champions-league","tag-cyberpunk","tag-cyberpunk-2077","tag-fantasy-football","tag-fifa","tag-flowers-of-evil","tag-football","tag-formula-1","tag-fortnite","tag-free-fire","tag-free-mobile-games","tag-freebuds-pro","tag-galaxy-a52","tag-galaxy-note-20","tag-galaxy-s21","tag-galaxy-watch-4","tag-galaxy-z-fold-3","tag-game","tag-games","tag-golf","tag-harmonyos","tag-how-to-backup-iphone","tag-how-to-factory-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-restore-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-5","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-6","tag-huawei","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-iphone","tag-live-soccer","tag-lol","tag-macbook","tag-macos","tag-mate-40-pro","tag-mi-11-lite","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p-huawei","tag-mi-smart-band-6","tag-minecraft","tag-miui","tag-mlb-scores","tag-mobile-game-design","tag-mobile-game-development","tag-mobile-game-marketing","tag-mobile-game-monetization","tag-mobile-games","tag-mobile-gaming","tag-nba-scores","tag-nba-standings","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-scores","tag-nhl-scores","tag-one-ui","tag-oneplus","tag-oneplus-9-pro","tag-oneplus-buds-pro","tag-oneplus-nord-ce-5g","tag-oxygenos","tag-p40-pro-plus","tag-poco-x3-pro","tag-pokemon","tag-premier-league","tag-pubg","tag-pubg-mobile","tag-redmi-note-10-pro","tag-samsung","tag-samsung-pay","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-steam","tag-steeam","tag-top-10-anime","tag-valorant","tag-when-do-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-does-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-is-the-iphone-7-coming-out","tag-world-cup","tag-xbox-series-x","tag-xiaomi"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57304,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57301\/revisions\/57304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}