So Furi Kuri exists to be weird and silly, and is amongst the strangest anime ever to be made. Because the Japanese love quirky stuff, or perhaps because that rather defines much of their history, it got animated by animation gods Gainax, becoming a high-budget 6-episode series. It’s not just because it’s only a short mini-series that means it won’t take very long to review.
Okay, plot…plot…right, so Naota is a 12-year-old boy who lives in a town with a skyline dominated by a giant iron. Uh-huh. After Naota's brother left Japan to play baseball in America, his girlfriend is on her own, so Naota starts to hang around with her - getting used as a substitute for her affection. Then another girl appears and hits Naota over the head with her bass guitar, making his head an interplanetary transportation device. He gets weird bumps on his forehead, and when he is sexually aroused (which happens quite often, since he’s a pretty twelve-year-old boy, and of course, in anime world, 12-year-old boys get lots of attention from the ladies), huge robotic creatures burst from these distinctly phallic bumps. Riiight. And things get weirder from there, with the girl with the bass manipulating Naota to summon various robots and get absorbed into them until he can call out a godly creature called Atomsk.
The point of this guff is to have a lot of parodies of other anime and movies, plus to just fill every episode with total rubbish. There are countless visual gags: Matrix bullet time, animated manga segments, even a part done in the style of South Park. Why? Because it’s craaazy.
Yeah. Except…for all its expensive animation and extreme zaniness, it’s just not very funny. And that’s that.
(Originally written 14.10.05)
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