Commentary by Hiroki Sato (Fooly Cooly Producer)
When reading books, please do so in a well-lit room, keeping a good distance between your eyes and the book.
Reading for extended periods of time may damage your eyesight.
Reading on a moving train has been known to cause motion sickness.
I'm kidding.
I didn't really have to write that stuff, did I? After all, you buy books and read them however you choose. Yeah, that's true. Great, isn't it? This time, we have a medium that you can appreciate however you like. So, why isn't the FLCL OVA (for sale and rental) like this?
Leaving that topic aside…
A boy hero, three female companions, robots in other words, it's the archetypical
"Japanime" story. The set-up is already very familiar, so I decided to twist it quite a lot. The Akihabara district populace demanded, "Please, make it all GAINAX-weird so that the old men who follow subcultures, all the Shibuya teenagers, and the girls who read cute comics won't get it." I kept my end of the deal but just this once.
When I said I wanted to "twist it," Kazuya Tsurumaki did so without hesitation.
Well, actually it took almost a year's worth of hesitation. We didn't want it to be limited by genre. Was it full of gags or was it serious? Was it Sci-Fi or was it comedy? To quote Haruko, "Whether it's a lie or the truth, does it really matter?" We described it as embodying Zeitgeist "the feeling of now." Then, we were told that phrase was lame, and that people thought it would read like any other young adult manga.
Leaving that topic aside…
As each episode was a little longer than twenty minutes, if we threw in too many gags, it would have become utter nonsense. Or there might have been people who wouldn't understand anything from it and would say, "This is boring." So, we kept it relatively normal. And we decided to do a novelization an additional link in the greater media mix.
Sharing media is easier now, and one work can have a big impact on other works out there. An element of the novel hints at one of the many interpretations of the anime, but what's wonderful is that the novel is also a completely independent work in its own right. Actually, I've come to realize just recently that a novel, as the medium that further expands the width of our imaginations, might be the most suitable kind of media.
Despite the random jokes, within the Sci-Fi anime genre, you want to keep telling the story whether you've decided on a deep meaning or it never develops one.
You might tell the story and it suddenly becomes boring; but if you don't continue until the very end, people often won't understand.
This sure isn't your typical Sci-Fi.
This sure has serious gags.
This sure is juvenile.
We were extremely fortunate to have found a writer who could conjure up the right mix of Sci-Fi and juvenility. Mister Enokido participated in each step of our planning.
So, for all those who've started reading the book by going to this commentary first (Director Tsurumaki definitely will fall into this group), I hope you enjoy Mister Enokido's delicate, creative touch. For those of you who have finished and are looking for the extras, I'd like it if you watched the anime after this. For those of you
who've already watched the anime, I guarantee that you will have various new reactions, such as slapping your knee and saying, "I see now!" or "I still don't get it."
It's that kind of work.
Leaving that topic aside…
In the beginning, Tsurumaki's original plot had many ideas that were very interesting when expressed in words but hard to express in art. The visual directors Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Tadashi Hiramatsu, and Tsurumaki himself shouted on many occasions, "This is hard to draw!" (And they still are yelling about this now.) I can't thank Mister Enokido enough for patiently reading many revised manuscripts with difficult and abstract images, and then going back to novelize it. (At this very moment, he's still on chapters five and six!) Without you, Director Tsurumaki and I probably would not be alive right now.
Please, enjoy the second and third volumes, as well.