Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=4444]The Yin and Yang of Fooly Cooly [/drupal]
*As you may have guessed, this contains plenty of spoilers about the series. Whether or not you read the essay, I still HIGHLY recommend Fooly Cooly.*
This is another essay based around another favorite anime of mine. Why have I’ve been writing so much about anime as of late? It’s mainly because I spent my graduation money on four series and six movies, increasing my anime collection by nearly a third. Along with Trigun, I bought another one of my favorite series because, until then, I only had the series on an old VHS that a friend recorded for me back in 2003. It’s called Fooly Cooly (Furi Kuri in Japan) and it played a major role in shaping how I saw the world back in high school. When the show first came to America, I was only a few years older than the main character and felt a lot of the same things that he felt: confused, apathetic, and, above all, fearful of what I was going to become in the future. I was stuck in the awkward stage between childhood and adulthood (and still am, truth be told) and it was nice to see someone more awkward than myself.
Fooly Cooly is weird…very weird. It’s wake up in the morning to discover you had a sex change overnight weird. It’s the guy who comes into a fancy restaurant wearing a ball cap and Crocs weird. It’s mustard poured on Oreos weird. For starters, it’s only six episodes long and every episode has a different animation style. From there, “normal” gets on a bus and goes to Montana to find itself in the countryside. It’s about a twelve year old boy named Naota who’s about to start high school. He’s a loner and the only person he ever really spends time with is his older brother’s ex-girlfriend (Mamimi), another loner who’s a wonderful mix of naïve, smothering, and a little psychotic. Like many teens, Naota just wants something interesting to happen in his life but he gets way more than he bargains for when a pink haired woman from outer space named Haruko comes to charging into town on a yellow Vespa.
Naota’s first encounter with Haruko sets the stage for the indescribable weirdness that follows. She accidently runs him over with her Vespa and when she goes to check on him to make sure he’s not dead, she then hits him in the head with her guitar. Naota’s knocked out cold and Haruko wakes him up with a first kiss so awkward it could almost count as date ****. From there, the story becomes a coming-of-age tale where Naota tries to grasp what it means to be an adult amongst robots coming out of his head, doom’s day missiles shaped like baseballs hurtling towards his hometown, and advances from three girls that he either loves or hates depending on how his raging hormones are acting that day. The series is meant to capture the awkwardness of adolescence by basically being a mix between “Are You There God; it’s Me, Margaret” and “Scott Pilgrim Versus the World” with robots and enough sexual innuendo and euphemisms to make your grandparents disown you for watching it. It’s a truly wonderful series that is loved by sociopaths and delinquents the world over.
One of the best things about Fooly Cooly is that every character in the show has at least one serious character flaw that makes you want to stab them in the neck with a potato peeler. Every character teeters on being completely unlikable so, in a way, it’s just like real life and how you secretly resent your friends. There’s so much that can be said about the characters in this show that I’ve even considered writing a thesis on the show itself but for this essay I want to focus on four of the adult characters. With Naota trying desperately to figure out what it means to be an adult, he doesn’t have very good role models to go off of. One of the most unnerving things about the show is that the two main kids of the show, Naota and Ninamori (the mayor’s daughter who’s Naota’s class president) are more mature than most of the adults that try to tell them the right way to approach adolescence. The adults in the show don’t necessarily represent “wrong” ways to go about adulthood but it’s hard say that their behavior is good for them and the people around them.
The first of these adults is Mamimi, who I already talked a little about already. She’s a high school senior who spends most of her time giving hickies to Naota, who’s too lethargic to stop her, under a bridge by the town’s river when she isn’t stealing from her classmates, playing with stray cats, or setting fire to things to vent her frustrations. Aside from not defecating in public and flashing strangers, she fits the bill of “mentally disturbed” to a T. Naota sticks around her because of a strange mix of pity and resentful love as Mamimi has a hard time coping with life with Naota’s older brother now living in the United States to play minor league baseball. Mamimi has issues that are apparent to everyone but she continues living the life of a basket case because, like she writes on her cigarettes, she believes she “never knows best.”
Mamimi represents an adult that can’t let go of the past and I tend to label them as “Emotional Black Holes”. She’s basically a person who spends her life walking backwards and being dependent on others. She smothers Naota because she can’t get over being dumped by his brother. I think we all know at least one adult like this and it’s almost like they act the way they do because they live on pity. If they get fired or laid off from a job, they don’t look for work for years following. If they get dumped, they spend months whining about how cruel reality is when you have people out there that have to live with cleft palates and elephantitis. If they had a bad day, they make groan worthy posts on Facebook that make you want to drill out your own heart with a corkscrew. They basically drive themselves and everyone else around them crazy with negative emotions when the problems they are facing aren’t really that big to begin with.
The next adult in Fooly Cooly with maturity issues is Kamon, Naota’s dad. Kamon is what I would label as a “hipster dad.” He’s basically one of those adults that tries too way hard to be cool and fails epically in the process but doesn’t realize it. Apparently he used to be an editor for a major magazine but was probably fired for incompetence. Now-a-days, he writes a tabloid “zine” (mini magazines that used to be all the rage… in the early 90’s) about rumors around town. As Naota mentions in the series, it has virtually no readers and most store owners flat out turn down keeping it in stock. Making it a success is clearly the main focus of Kamon’s life which, as you may have imagined, has left him with no friends seeing how even his son and father find him irritating to put up with his immature behavior. One of the things that a lot of fans wonder about is where Naota’s mom is throughout all this and, although it’s never said outright, it’s pretty strongly indicated that she left because of Kamon’s behavior or Kamon left her because he didn’t think she impressed his co-workers by not being young enough, not having hooters large enough to smash walnuts with, or something else spectacularly shallow. To sum up Kamon’s behavior, what drives him is catching other people’s attention with what he has and what he does despite the fact that it’s far from impressive.
Despite probably being in his 40’s, Kamon lives like a frat boy and people openly resent him for it. As a person who likes to go to bars from time to time to throw back a few to unwind, I’ve run into my fair share of people like this (two words: karaoke night) . I’ve even run into people who are in their late teens that have already been divorced once or have had to give up their kids because of their behavior. What’s worse is that people like this usually act unphased and seem relieved more than anything else that they are freed from such responsibilities. In a way, they are reluctant to grow up because that would require them to come to terms with all the mistakes that has led them to become a middle aged woman who’s 250 pounds who still tries to wear Daisy Dukes or the compulsive lying uncle who’s only tolerable to be around if you’re drunk or unconscious. It’s awkward to see adults who try to act like their teenagers but it’s even more awkward to see adults who try to act more mature to impress others which leads me to our next character to analyze.
Commander Amarao is an odd man. His job is to monitor aliens and prevent them from coming to Earth but, maybe deliberately, Haruko slips through his fingers. He wears dried seaweed for eyebrows because he believes that they make him appear manlier and that they will prevent Haruko from making robots come out of his head. He appears half way through the series and cryptically explains to Naota that he shouldn’t trust Haruko, something most of the audience has already gathered by this point. Commander Amarao doesn’t seem that odd at first but, by the end of the fifth episode, you realize that a good percentage of his persona is just for show to try to impress Haruko. He’s an adult that thinks other adults will be impressed by how adult he is and has basically shaped his adult life around this.
Like Kamon, Amarao boasts about pretty unimpressive things to try to get his point across. He tries to cover up the fact that he’s obsessed about sweet foods because he thinks they’re only for kids and brags about being old enough to buy insurance. It’s strongly implied that he always wears a business suit and works the job that he does to, once again, show how “grown up” he is to Haruko. As you may have guessed, it’s all a façade and sometimes people are like this because they are scared to death of what people would think of them if they showed their true self. It’s understandable though because, when you’re a kid, you believe adults have everything under control and I think there are a lot of adults out there that try to uphold this ideal. Needless to say, there are people out there like Amarao that are trying too hard to be something they’re not for the sake of people around them that probably wouldn’t notice if they ran around naked covered in chocolate sauce and cotton balls.
The last adult in Fooly Cooly that I want to focus on is the person who sets all the stage for all the chaos in the show in motion, Haruko. She’s crazy but people gather that much within the first couple minutes of the show when she causes a multiple car pileup, runs over the main character, bashes him in the head with a guitar, makes out with his unconscious body, and then angrily drives off, causing even more cars to crash and drive off the road. She’s impulsive and yet unsettlingly calculating. She’s an enormous flirt and incredibly self-centered. She uses people and doesn’t even try to hide it. All in all, she’s the worst kind of person and yet she’s mine and most fans’ favorite character. If she was real, she’d probably still have just as many people like her despite the fact that the only crime she probably hasn’t successfully pulled off is genocide (but, to her credit, she almost triggers the apocalypse in the series finale).
Haruko is a bit of a sociopath who does things simply because she can. I think everybody knows at least one person like this who if they saw you were on fire would ignore you if stopping to help meant them missing part of their favorite TV show. They’re the people who openly tell you that they have done pranks to their friends that just about killed them and have conspicuously cheated in relationships just because “they were bored.” These are people that have a pretty good idea at just how awful they are but couldn’t care less and usually dismiss what they do because as downright hilarious. It takes a mature person to consider the feelings of others and not callously toss them aside which notably makes Haruko the most immature character in the show. Naota puts in best after his first encounter her as he notes that she’s “another stupid adult that doesn’t know how to grow up.”
It’s not easy being an adult and I think one of the things that hits you like a ton of bricks upon entering adolescence and emerging adulthood is that adults aren’t always right and that there are adults out there that are more immature than you were in elementary school (minus eating scabs and purposely running into walls to entertain your friends). Fooly Cooly is a wonderfully weird reminder that maturity is not about how old you are but how you conduct yourself around others and how you go about difficulties in life. A wise painter who painted whatever he hallucinated once said nobody’s perfect. With all his weird insight and his magnificent moustache, he became an international model for one of the best ways to approach adulthood: with a sense of balance.
One of the questions that remain unanswered in Fooly Cooly is what exactly Fooly Cooly is. My interpretation of it is that it is finding balance in life by trying to be just the right mix of immature and mature, Fooly and Cooly. Some people try too hard to be either while some don’t try at all. Growing up is a natural part of life and all in all it’s important to avoid becoming too mature or immature for your own good. You can finish off a long week of work by lounging around in your underwear, watching cartoons, and eating cereal out of the box and still be a respectable person at the end of the day (I should know). It’s highly probable that I’m grossly overanalyzing a cartoon about guitars, robots, and unwanted boners but I think it has a decent message about how maybe the best way to approach life is wearing a necktie and Family Guy boxers with pride and confidence.
Fatmanonice, July 13th, 2011
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”- Marcus Aurelius
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.”- George Carlin
*As you may have guessed, this contains plenty of spoilers about the series. Whether or not you read the essay, I still HIGHLY recommend Fooly Cooly.*
This is another essay based around another favorite anime of mine. Why have I’ve been writing so much about anime as of late? It’s mainly because I spent my graduation money on four series and six movies, increasing my anime collection by nearly a third. Along with Trigun, I bought another one of my favorite series because, until then, I only had the series on an old VHS that a friend recorded for me back in 2003. It’s called Fooly Cooly (Furi Kuri in Japan) and it played a major role in shaping how I saw the world back in high school. When the show first came to America, I was only a few years older than the main character and felt a lot of the same things that he felt: confused, apathetic, and, above all, fearful of what I was going to become in the future. I was stuck in the awkward stage between childhood and adulthood (and still am, truth be told) and it was nice to see someone more awkward than myself.
Fooly Cooly is weird…very weird. It’s wake up in the morning to discover you had a sex change overnight weird. It’s the guy who comes into a fancy restaurant wearing a ball cap and Crocs weird. It’s mustard poured on Oreos weird. For starters, it’s only six episodes long and every episode has a different animation style. From there, “normal” gets on a bus and goes to Montana to find itself in the countryside. It’s about a twelve year old boy named Naota who’s about to start high school. He’s a loner and the only person he ever really spends time with is his older brother’s ex-girlfriend (Mamimi), another loner who’s a wonderful mix of naïve, smothering, and a little psychotic. Like many teens, Naota just wants something interesting to happen in his life but he gets way more than he bargains for when a pink haired woman from outer space named Haruko comes to charging into town on a yellow Vespa.
Naota’s first encounter with Haruko sets the stage for the indescribable weirdness that follows. She accidently runs him over with her Vespa and when she goes to check on him to make sure he’s not dead, she then hits him in the head with her guitar. Naota’s knocked out cold and Haruko wakes him up with a first kiss so awkward it could almost count as date ****. From there, the story becomes a coming-of-age tale where Naota tries to grasp what it means to be an adult amongst robots coming out of his head, doom’s day missiles shaped like baseballs hurtling towards his hometown, and advances from three girls that he either loves or hates depending on how his raging hormones are acting that day. The series is meant to capture the awkwardness of adolescence by basically being a mix between “Are You There God; it’s Me, Margaret” and “Scott Pilgrim Versus the World” with robots and enough sexual innuendo and euphemisms to make your grandparents disown you for watching it. It’s a truly wonderful series that is loved by sociopaths and delinquents the world over.
One of the best things about Fooly Cooly is that every character in the show has at least one serious character flaw that makes you want to stab them in the neck with a potato peeler. Every character teeters on being completely unlikable so, in a way, it’s just like real life and how you secretly resent your friends. There’s so much that can be said about the characters in this show that I’ve even considered writing a thesis on the show itself but for this essay I want to focus on four of the adult characters. With Naota trying desperately to figure out what it means to be an adult, he doesn’t have very good role models to go off of. One of the most unnerving things about the show is that the two main kids of the show, Naota and Ninamori (the mayor’s daughter who’s Naota’s class president) are more mature than most of the adults that try to tell them the right way to approach adolescence. The adults in the show don’t necessarily represent “wrong” ways to go about adulthood but it’s hard say that their behavior is good for them and the people around them.
The first of these adults is Mamimi, who I already talked a little about already. She’s a high school senior who spends most of her time giving hickies to Naota, who’s too lethargic to stop her, under a bridge by the town’s river when she isn’t stealing from her classmates, playing with stray cats, or setting fire to things to vent her frustrations. Aside from not defecating in public and flashing strangers, she fits the bill of “mentally disturbed” to a T. Naota sticks around her because of a strange mix of pity and resentful love as Mamimi has a hard time coping with life with Naota’s older brother now living in the United States to play minor league baseball. Mamimi has issues that are apparent to everyone but she continues living the life of a basket case because, like she writes on her cigarettes, she believes she “never knows best.”
Mamimi represents an adult that can’t let go of the past and I tend to label them as “Emotional Black Holes”. She’s basically a person who spends her life walking backwards and being dependent on others. She smothers Naota because she can’t get over being dumped by his brother. I think we all know at least one adult like this and it’s almost like they act the way they do because they live on pity. If they get fired or laid off from a job, they don’t look for work for years following. If they get dumped, they spend months whining about how cruel reality is when you have people out there that have to live with cleft palates and elephantitis. If they had a bad day, they make groan worthy posts on Facebook that make you want to drill out your own heart with a corkscrew. They basically drive themselves and everyone else around them crazy with negative emotions when the problems they are facing aren’t really that big to begin with.
The next adult in Fooly Cooly with maturity issues is Kamon, Naota’s dad. Kamon is what I would label as a “hipster dad.” He’s basically one of those adults that tries too way hard to be cool and fails epically in the process but doesn’t realize it. Apparently he used to be an editor for a major magazine but was probably fired for incompetence. Now-a-days, he writes a tabloid “zine” (mini magazines that used to be all the rage… in the early 90’s) about rumors around town. As Naota mentions in the series, it has virtually no readers and most store owners flat out turn down keeping it in stock. Making it a success is clearly the main focus of Kamon’s life which, as you may have imagined, has left him with no friends seeing how even his son and father find him irritating to put up with his immature behavior. One of the things that a lot of fans wonder about is where Naota’s mom is throughout all this and, although it’s never said outright, it’s pretty strongly indicated that she left because of Kamon’s behavior or Kamon left her because he didn’t think she impressed his co-workers by not being young enough, not having hooters large enough to smash walnuts with, or something else spectacularly shallow. To sum up Kamon’s behavior, what drives him is catching other people’s attention with what he has and what he does despite the fact that it’s far from impressive.
Despite probably being in his 40’s, Kamon lives like a frat boy and people openly resent him for it. As a person who likes to go to bars from time to time to throw back a few to unwind, I’ve run into my fair share of people like this (two words: karaoke night) . I’ve even run into people who are in their late teens that have already been divorced once or have had to give up their kids because of their behavior. What’s worse is that people like this usually act unphased and seem relieved more than anything else that they are freed from such responsibilities. In a way, they are reluctant to grow up because that would require them to come to terms with all the mistakes that has led them to become a middle aged woman who’s 250 pounds who still tries to wear Daisy Dukes or the compulsive lying uncle who’s only tolerable to be around if you’re drunk or unconscious. It’s awkward to see adults who try to act like their teenagers but it’s even more awkward to see adults who try to act more mature to impress others which leads me to our next character to analyze.
Commander Amarao is an odd man. His job is to monitor aliens and prevent them from coming to Earth but, maybe deliberately, Haruko slips through his fingers. He wears dried seaweed for eyebrows because he believes that they make him appear manlier and that they will prevent Haruko from making robots come out of his head. He appears half way through the series and cryptically explains to Naota that he shouldn’t trust Haruko, something most of the audience has already gathered by this point. Commander Amarao doesn’t seem that odd at first but, by the end of the fifth episode, you realize that a good percentage of his persona is just for show to try to impress Haruko. He’s an adult that thinks other adults will be impressed by how adult he is and has basically shaped his adult life around this.
Like Kamon, Amarao boasts about pretty unimpressive things to try to get his point across. He tries to cover up the fact that he’s obsessed about sweet foods because he thinks they’re only for kids and brags about being old enough to buy insurance. It’s strongly implied that he always wears a business suit and works the job that he does to, once again, show how “grown up” he is to Haruko. As you may have guessed, it’s all a façade and sometimes people are like this because they are scared to death of what people would think of them if they showed their true self. It’s understandable though because, when you’re a kid, you believe adults have everything under control and I think there are a lot of adults out there that try to uphold this ideal. Needless to say, there are people out there like Amarao that are trying too hard to be something they’re not for the sake of people around them that probably wouldn’t notice if they ran around naked covered in chocolate sauce and cotton balls.
The last adult in Fooly Cooly that I want to focus on is the person who sets all the stage for all the chaos in the show in motion, Haruko. She’s crazy but people gather that much within the first couple minutes of the show when she causes a multiple car pileup, runs over the main character, bashes him in the head with a guitar, makes out with his unconscious body, and then angrily drives off, causing even more cars to crash and drive off the road. She’s impulsive and yet unsettlingly calculating. She’s an enormous flirt and incredibly self-centered. She uses people and doesn’t even try to hide it. All in all, she’s the worst kind of person and yet she’s mine and most fans’ favorite character. If she was real, she’d probably still have just as many people like her despite the fact that the only crime she probably hasn’t successfully pulled off is genocide (but, to her credit, she almost triggers the apocalypse in the series finale).
Haruko is a bit of a sociopath who does things simply because she can. I think everybody knows at least one person like this who if they saw you were on fire would ignore you if stopping to help meant them missing part of their favorite TV show. They’re the people who openly tell you that they have done pranks to their friends that just about killed them and have conspicuously cheated in relationships just because “they were bored.” These are people that have a pretty good idea at just how awful they are but couldn’t care less and usually dismiss what they do because as downright hilarious. It takes a mature person to consider the feelings of others and not callously toss them aside which notably makes Haruko the most immature character in the show. Naota puts in best after his first encounter her as he notes that she’s “another stupid adult that doesn’t know how to grow up.”
It’s not easy being an adult and I think one of the things that hits you like a ton of bricks upon entering adolescence and emerging adulthood is that adults aren’t always right and that there are adults out there that are more immature than you were in elementary school (minus eating scabs and purposely running into walls to entertain your friends). Fooly Cooly is a wonderfully weird reminder that maturity is not about how old you are but how you conduct yourself around others and how you go about difficulties in life. A wise painter who painted whatever he hallucinated once said nobody’s perfect. With all his weird insight and his magnificent moustache, he became an international model for one of the best ways to approach adulthood: with a sense of balance.
One of the questions that remain unanswered in Fooly Cooly is what exactly Fooly Cooly is. My interpretation of it is that it is finding balance in life by trying to be just the right mix of immature and mature, Fooly and Cooly. Some people try too hard to be either while some don’t try at all. Growing up is a natural part of life and all in all it’s important to avoid becoming too mature or immature for your own good. You can finish off a long week of work by lounging around in your underwear, watching cartoons, and eating cereal out of the box and still be a respectable person at the end of the day (I should know). It’s highly probable that I’m grossly overanalyzing a cartoon about guitars, robots, and unwanted boners but I think it has a decent message about how maybe the best way to approach life is wearing a necktie and Family Guy boxers with pride and confidence.
Fatmanonice, July 13th, 2011
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”- Marcus Aurelius
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.”- George Carlin
It certainly keeps things interesting and, as the saying goes, everyone needs a hobby. Also, yes, I like both subjects and in August I start graduate school to become a mental health counselor.