At the turn of the millennium, American culture exited an era of ‘tude, grunge, and MTV nihilism. FLCL was passé at its release, missing the zeitgeist by a couple years. To an American teenager, that may as well be an entire lifetime. My teenage self was not ready to appreciate FLCL.

Now, we are both certifiably old, with the minutiae of the anime’s release window lost to time. Though a product of the year 2000, it’s a nostalgic capsule of 1990s zeitgeist — of divorced families, confusion and angst bubbling under a poker face of feigned indifference and aimless rebellion. Nobody wears the mask better than the teens of FLCL. Space Pirate Haruko plays the trickster, bashing their masks to bits with her spirit guitar, accessing a portal “between the left and right brain” through which all manner of inner demons and 90s trash culture manifest.

While FLCL inadvertently commemorates an end of a cultural era, it also features two important beginnings. Though not the first digitally composited anime (4°C’s Tobira wo Akete and Satelight’s BitCupid take that honor), I.G’s larger-scale effort was nevertheless cutting edge and became a trendsetter for all looking to ditch animation cels, paint and physical film from their production workflows. For all the hemming and hawing over the loss of traditional photography’s “warmth”, FLCL looks quite normal today. But unlike most anime, including its own sequel, FLCL actually has a look.

A towering alien monolith shaped like a clothes iron smothers the city of Mabase in a persistent haze, rendered in stylish watercolor backgrounds that fade into the wistful hues of dusk & dawn, the inky blue of night, and the oppressive grey of midday. Its lack of warmth matches its bleak, teenage nihilism; a world that threatens to vanish into the fog of indifference.

Hiroyuki Imaishi (of studio Trigger fame) is its other important beginning. Though his animation is noticeably present in every episode, the gun-crazy #5 is where Imaishi creates a frenzied look & feel that plays like a prototype Dead Leaves. He would later redefine Gainax’s identity before whisking its animators away to studio Trigger, but nevertheless, it feels like Trigger's primordial beginnings are here, in the newfound swagger of its setpieces from animators like Imaishi and Yō Yoshinari (Little Witch Academia).

In the modern day, FLCL can be watched as a period anime depicting youth culture before the onset of full-blown emo, moe and social media. The ashes of a cigarette enjoyed in teenage rebellion fall from a bridge like snow. The director’s hand hovers over the fuzz knob for its turn-it-up action scenes, and sure enough the vintage guitars and nonsense mecha of idle youth come spilling forth from the cranium alongside a 90s alt-rock anthem.