My New Find

I popped this into the DVD player last night and was completely, utterly blown away. I feel incredibly bad now, because I know there’s a ton of great anime floating around out there that I haven’t watched, but THIS… my God, this is definitely one of the harsher and weirder ones out there, I’m sure.

It’s called Elfen Lied, though that last word is pronounced “leed”.

The series has been around for a while now, but of course, I’m hopelessly out of the loop on these things, because I’m not plugged into that anime livewire like I used to be in university, and anime has gotten a lot bigger and more complex than the days of yore that I remember when we would all quiver over a bad VHS recording of an episode of Zeta Gundam that had been recorded straight off Japanese TV, no subtitles, and made into a million buzillion copies, of which we got episodes 12 and 26, as 45th generation dub. These days you can you just peruse a copy of Newtype USA and walk into a DVD store and the choices, as well as the pseudo-wannabe-new-American Otaku culture that has sprung up in its wake, are a little overwhelming.

Anyway, all that aside the series itself concerns a psychic mutant by the name of Lucy. Or at least it starts out that way. The opening sets the tone for the rest of the series, that is dark and brutal at times and sweet and adorable, randomly and unpredictably taking turns from one into the other. Lucy can rend human beings to shreds simply by thinking about it, and is in confinement at some high tech research facility, and the first episode is about her break out. The level of violence is staggering and ends with Lucy making her way outside only take narrowly avoid death when a sniper bullet grazes her and instead of killing her, gives her amnesia to the point where she is now effectively a tabula rasa, a sweet, wide-eyed girl who can only say “Nyu” and doesn’t even know how to eat, use the bathroom or put on clothes. She is eventually discovered by some college students who take her in, and the government begins its intensive search. Because all she can say is “Nyu” that is the name given to the sweet, innocent, tabula rasa version of Lucy unaware of its powerful homocidal psychic abilities. Giving away the rest would be a disservice, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything, let alone a cartoon, balance such a seemingly psychotic combination of domestic, soap operatic emotions with an unimaginable level of brutality. I actually flinched at certain sequences in the anime not simply because there was blood or severed limbs but because of the deliberate, sadistic intent behind the suffering.

But it’s that weird balance Elfen Lied has struck that has me most impressed. The show perfectly manages to mimic the psychotic break of Lucy/Nyu’s personality in terms of tone and mood. It seems like the mundane, every day concerns of the two college students, Khota and his female cousin (who has a thing for him) Yuka are in stark contrast to the epic psychic warfare and sadistic, nihilistic underpinnings of Lucy and her pursuers. These two narrative elements shouldn’t be in the same story, working together like this, and yet they do. I’m blown away by that, and keep thinking there’s something I can learn here for my own writing if I just sit down and absorb it enough.

Suffice to say if you’ve got a strong stomach for both melodrama and ultra-violence, then this series has got a lot to offer. It’s been a long time since an anime story really punched me in the face like this and left an impression, and it’s because of the emotion that they’ve successfully worked into the tale, rather than an excess of character or mecha design that sells it.