Elfen Lied

Warning: some readers may find images in this article disturbing.

I had heard alot of praise for Elfen Lied and I think it caused me to imagine all sorts of things about it without ever having actually seen it. Like imagining it was good, for example. I was on a forum one night and someone was complaining about a particular scene in the show with a link to Youtube. I was more taken aback by the juxtaposition of a cutesy, colorful, boringly mainstreamed, low-budget moe animation style with something that looked like it was supposed to be serious, dramatic and bloody than I was by the scene itself. To me it looked like it was pandering to guro fans, and the series didn’t serve to erase this opinion as I watched it out of sheer curiosity. I’ve seen about 10 of the 13 episodes and skipped around the last three for this article but I don’t think I intend to finish watching it. There will be spoilers because the plot is just too ridiculous for me not to rant about.

Let me first comment that the opening animation for Elfen Lied is deceptively artistic, of course it may only seem artistic because the entire thing is a reference to The Kiss and features an operatic song. The ending theme, it should be noted, is some shallow pop number.

The show is essentially about killer pink-haired catgirls (well okay, they have horns conveniently shaped like cat ears, but one of them even acts like a catgirl) with invisible stretchy hands that can explode peoples’ heads who are of some mutated race that is destined to destroy mankind and are usually killed at birth but some secret military place has kept a few alive, naked and tortured in the name of science. In the opening scene one such naked pink-haired girl escapes from the military compound, exploding guys’ heads as she goes, at one point twisting off the head of some unforgivably dumb, clumsy secretary girl who was introduced probably just to be killed like this and using her body as a shield for a million billion bullets. Where alot of men are killed throughout the series, it’s much more graphic, slow, and given alot more focus when women are killed. There also features alot of slapping, hitting and punching of women by men. Take from that what you will.

So killer pink-haired catgirl falls into the ocean before they can kill her and ends up with amnesia and some kind of dysphasia which instead of being serious of course leaves her only able to spout cutesy nonsense words; she’s discovered in this state by some boring stock anime guy and his cousin.  They naturally don’t go to the police when they find a disoriented naked girl wandering around on the beach but keep her at their house, and name her “Nyu” because that’s all she can say. She doesn’t know how to do even basic things and just acts like an all around obnoxious honto kawaii desu ne catgirl with lots of “accidental” flashings, precarious posing and boob groping thrown in. At this point I couldn’t tell if I was still watching the show or had accidentally loaded up an episode of Chobits instead. It’s supposed to be some sort of split personality but because it’s just so damn archetypal you can’t really take it seriously as one. This is also the point where the show teeters on the border of harem anime-land. Next stock guy and his cousin take in a runaway loli who has been raped repeatedly by her new stepfather, which brings the count up to three girls living in the house but luckily only two want to get into boring stock guy’s pants: “Nyu” and his goddamn cousin. I dunno what Japan’s policy on kissing cousins is, but, blech.

Anyway so another more loli killer pink-haired killer catgirl is sent out to retrieve the first one, she has a daddy complex about this antisocial scientist guy who apparently keeps her chained up and covered in blood somewhere. Okay then. She confronts “Nyu”, who at this point has bumped her head and gone back into psychobitch mode and so she mutilates killer pink-haired girl #2 in what can only be described as a guro fan’s wet dream, ending with pink-haired girl #2’s limbs being torn off.  Seriously, it needs to be seen to be believed (NSFW.)

The cutesy style, the moe look of the characters, and the overall lack of depth in the scene prevented me from taking it seriously at all and it really did just come across as some sort of bizarro world version of fanservice. Especially since the same girl gets stripped and beaten again toward the end of the series. Of course there is the aforementioned regular fanserivce too, we get to see “Nyu”’s boobs plenty of times, but it’s so often it just becomes boring, and of course she’s most often sexualized when she’s in cutesy, innocent, dumb catgirl mode.

And then it turns out “Nyu” (or her real name is Lucy) is in love with boring stock guy from a long time ago when he was the only one who was nice to her after a bunch of bratty kids at an orphanage she was at killed a puppy she had been taking care of for like a couple of weeks and she exploded their heads in return (this is the source of her deep, deep trauma and why she’s such a misanthropic bitch as the show will blatantly spell out for you.) She hung out and played with boring stock guy while at the same time murdering families in the night and staying in their houses because she didn’t want to go back to the mean old orphanage. It seems some sort of trauma makes these killer pink-haired catgirls realize they were born to eradicate mankind for some reason, and so Lucy hates people, all people except boring stock guy, except when she’s in catgirl mode then she loves everybody. You know, I never liked the whole “amnesia turns a violent, sadistic badass into a cute, squiggy all-loving sap” device, perhaps because it’s a shallow thing you generally see overused in bad fanfiction.

Anyway things went bad when killer catgirl killed boring stock guy’s sister and father out of jealousy and he delved into denial and decided his sister died of disease instead and has forgotten most things from that time, which had initially pissed off his cousin because they didn’t see each other for like 8 years after that and she thought he’d remember their last day together as fondly as she did despite the horrible, horrible murder. Have I mentioned that the cousin is a stereotypical overly emotional woman hung up on really stupid things? Because she is. Thanks, Japan! Oh yeah and later a third pink-haired killer catgirl is introduced who has explosives planted in her body so that the secret military/scientists/whatever can keep her at bay. What. It could be a serious plot device if they didn’t state it so blandly and it wasn’t obviously a convenient way to explain how they can keep the ultimate killer catgirl under control. And an easy way to get rid of her since she’s unbeatable and all. Oh and she’s also the real daughter of the scientist guy mentioned earlier who killer pink-haired girl #2 has a daddy complex about and they explode together in a sentimental scene blah blah blah.

I’m honestly confused by all the praise I’ve seen for this series. For one the animation isn’t that good, the characters aren’t that well designed, they’re also cookie-cutter and unrealistic, when the story attempts to be deep it just comes across as lame or not even trying, its themes aren’t anything that haven’t been explored before with much more thought, artistry and depth. It’s also got pretty clumsy writing and hits you over the head with plot points, like for example episode 12 having a long, near full recap of episode 9 in it, just in case you’re too dumb to get killer pink haired girl #1’s motivation for killing boring stock guy’s sister. Not to mention boring stock guy seems to take the revelation that she brutally murdered his family in front of him in stride. It’s not that I have something against graphic violence, hell Akira is one of my favorite anime films and manga, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this show was purposefully trying to attract a particular sex-and-violence niche. And I never thought I could describe an animation as having “fakey blood”, but boy does Elfen Lied ever. Usually I can finish watching even a mediocre series just to see where it’s going but even though I went and confirmed how boring stock guy’s sister died (a “plot twist” I’ve seen coming from nearly the beginning) as well as a few other things, I really have no desire to finish watching Elfen Lied.

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