Fooly Cooly is without a doubt my favorite anime of all time, it's just full of everything I like in the medium. The music, the aesthetic, the characters, the way the plot unfolds, YAS. Fooly Cooly, basically, is about a sixth grade asshole named Naoto, who spends his days trying to act mature and hanging around with his brother's emotionally unstable ex-girlfriend. He meets a Martian woman who hits him over the head with a bass guitar and causes robots to come out of it. Plot ensues. Comprehension is not the primary draw, or even point, to this show. The plot is something that must be discovered for yourself, not explained. I've watched this shit like twenty times and I still don't really know what goes on for some of it.
As postmodern works of art go, there's really nothing that's like this show. The series is ultimately an exercise in creativity for creativity's sake, but in the process it becomes a show that analyzes the importance of context in art and deconstructs the medium of animation as a whole. So much of the humor of the anime comes from Japanese wordplay, meaning that a good portion of the humor is either lost on those who watch the dubbed version or get an edited version of the jokes in the English subtitles. Along with this, many of the characters in the series exhibit odd characteristics for reasons that we don't necessarily understand unless we were to watch interviews with the director of the show Kazuya Tsurumaki. For example many of the characters in the show exhibit an obsession with spicy curry, which stems from Tsurumaki's belief that people who love spicy food tend to be more eccentric and thrilling than those who do not. Both of these are just two examples of how Fooly Cooly manages to comment on the importance of context in art and its role in the art itself. Without context, the work is left incomplete and the message ultimately lost on the viewer. In this case, however, the message is humor and imagination, without a care in the world or how we interpret it. This in turn is also a form of deconstruction of the anime format. Many examples exist in the show when the animation style completely changes to a different format or homage to earlier cartoons. Episode 5 in particular has an entire segment told in the art form of South Park. All of this can be interpreted almost as a stab at the tedious nature of the anime format. You know what it will look like, how it will move, etc. With Fooly Cooly, you don't even know what the plot is.
Backtrack THIS reference:
Tsurumaki, Kazuya. "Brittle Bullet." Fooly Cooly. 9 Aug. 2003. Television.
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