Flop
(This review contains spoilers!)
Whenever an anime season ends, I’ll
usually spend the time before the next season starts to catch up on any popular
shows I missed out on when they were airing. For this Fall season I tended to
hear people talking about two shows around the internet. The first was Hot
Dudes Figure Skating, a show I will not be reviewing because I’m pretty sure
I’m as far from the demographic for it as possible. The other was Flip
Flappers.
And honestly? I don’t get it. Is this
part of some massive joke? Did I miss something? Because the show I got was one
of the most cookie-cutter stories plot-wise that goes absolutely nowhere and
only got worse and worse as it progressed.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one
before. The story (or lack thereof) is about a girl named Cocona, and she’s
stuck in the boring doldrums of life. Then, out of nowhere, a girl named Papika
shows up, and the two of them begin adventuring in the alternate realm of Pure
Illusion. What is Pure Illusion, you ask? Good question, because even after
watching all 13 episodes, I’m still not sure! I think it’s supposed to be like
a mix of dreams and imagination or something like that, but it’s never made
clear what this place is or what its rules are, despite 75% of the show taking
place inside of it. Shortly after, the duo is recruited by an organization
called FlipFlap to explore Pure Illusion and retrieve magical stones. FlipFlap
and the magical stones are never explained either, by the way.
The one thing Flip Flappers has going
for it is the animation, which in all honesty is actually really nice. The
world of Pure Illusion is very trippy, using lots of weird colours and
distorted motions to really make you feel like the characters have been
transported to a magical world. The backgrounds alone completely steal the
show, looking almost Miyazaki-esque.
And with that, I’ve run out of nice
things to say about this anime! Time to rip it to pieces!
The first and biggest problem Flip Flappers
has is a lack of focus. More often than not each episode consists of little but
throwing wacky and bizarre animation in your face, as if the director was
screaming “NOTICE ME! LOOK HOW WEIRD THIS IS! NOTICE MY DIRECTING!”
This is at the expense of developing the two leads, Cocona
and Papika, who have absolutely nothing to go on for the near entirety of the
show. They both get a little character development in the form of backstory in
the final episodes, but too little too late. For most of the series, Cocona is
as dull and lifeless as a rock, not interesting in the slightest. In the
complete opposite direction, we have Papika, a shrill voiced cutesy character
who is so annoying that I imagined the perfect ending for the show would be her
finally shutting up. Papika exists for one purpose and one reason: cute anime
girl equals merchandising! Who needs interesting character traits and
development when you can have this adorable red haired flying surfboard girl acting
like a spoiled child all the time! It also doesn’t help that their dialogue is
basically just screaming each other’s names over and over again. If I ever have
to go through another round of “Cocona!” “Papika!” “COCONA!” “PAPIKA!” I might
just lose my marbles.
The side characters aren’t much
better. There’s the crew at FlipFlap, all of which have personalities that can
be guessed just by looking at their character designs. Let’s see here, we’ve
got the mysterious boss, the wacky scientist, the cute robot companion, and the
token female secretary. The gang’s all here! The most hilariously awful part of
the cast has to be the villains. I’m starting to believe the title Flip
Flappers refers to them, because they flip flap back and forth from helping the
protagonists to half-assedly trying to stop them so much that by the end you’re
questioning whether they were even meant to be the villains at all. The Pokémon
anime’s Team Rocket got more done than these guys. They serve this weird secret
society, but that really doesn’t matter because, again, it goes absolutely
nowhere.
Also there’s a green rabbit that
occasionally turns into a macho green rabbit dude. There’s really nothing to
say about him, I just wanted to let you all know that he is a thing that
exists.
The other thing Flip Flappers’ lack of
focus leads to is a mashing of genres that has more variety than a bag of trail
mix. All your favourite anime storylines are here, including school, sci-fi,
fantasy, espionage, magical girl, and even some mech stuff at one point! I think
they’re trying to have the primary focus be the magical girl stuff, but with
everything spread so thin there’s no backbone to it. It just feels like the
showrunners threw every single anime trope they could into a pot and hoped the
resulting soup would taste good.
It didn’t. It was 13 episodes of
horrible soup.
The designs of the magical girl
outfits are some of the most generic and forgettable I’ve ever seen, by the
way. After seeing how creative Magical Girl Raising Project was at
differentiating the characters through unique costumes, these characters just
look pathetic in their plain white dresses.
The story doesn’t even make any real
progression until towards the end. Before that, it’s nothing but episodic trips
through Pure Illusion as things get weirder and weirder with no real rhyme or
reason. At one point it’s a desert with some weird Jawa-like villagers. Next
it’s a haunted school. Later it’s a futuristic city. I get that it’s supposed
to be random and bizarre, but the way it’s different every time is just
staggering. There’s no reason for why it changes, no districts or anything like
that. You just have to accept that this is what they’re doing now and go with
the flow.
I think that sums up the show the
best. You just have to accept that this is what’s happening and go with the
flow. Who cares about story progression and narrative flow, right? If Papika’s
surfboard is lost early on in the series, no one will question it when it
randomly reappears much later on, right?
And I think that’s what made me
angriest about Flip Flappers. This boring, paint by numbers anime expects you
to just shut off your brain and look at the pretty pictures instead of wanting
a decent story. That is completely and utterly inexcusable. If I’m going to
spend 6 hours watching your show, give me a reason not to jump ship at the
halfway point aside from wanting to rip it to shreds in an eventual review.
It doesn’t help that when the show
actually tries to have some plot
progression, it’s always muddy, confusing and just makes you want to turn the
episode off early. At one point, the two girls enter the memories of one of
their school friends. Or at least, that’s what it implied they were doing. None
of the plot is ever really made clear because the directors can feel like
they’re creating a mysterious and strange environment. Anyways, after they
explore this girl’s memories and learn about her tragic past with her aunt, she
never appears again. Literally. Except for a brief cameo, she’s just written
out of the show. If they were going to just give this random friend character
the boot, why give us this lengthy explanation of her backstory!? Why not use
that precious time to, oh, I don’t know, give the main characters some
development!?
And then there’s the ending, which in
all honesty, is about as good as I was expecting it to be. There’s a lot of
nonsensical plot that seems like it’s trying to make you care, but at this
point it’s way too late for anything and you’re just continuing on because you
need to see how it ends. They go through the lazy video game ending trope of
fighting old enemies again before defeating the final boss through sheer deus
ex machina bullcrap, go home and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for
the audience. They just wasted 6 hours of their life.
Flip Flappers is completely atrocious
in all respects…except for the visual design. They wanted trippy and weird
worlds, and they accomplished that. Unfortunately, with all the focus on how
pretty everything looks, the plot and character development are completely
lost. The leads are either too dull or too annoying, the side characters are
walking anime tropes, the villains go nowhere, there are way too many genres
being used without any rhyme or reason, you never learn anything about the
world or the magical items they’re hunting, and the ending is a lazy cop-out.
If you want a show about magical girls exploring trippy stuff, watch Madoka
Magica instead. Flip Flappers can go flip flap as far from me as possible.
FINAL SCORE
2/10
Awful
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