Flowers of Evil

An interesting show with a very creative premise, blending roto'd subject capture with incredibly vibrant backgrounds with a solid grasp on blocking movement within a frame, the show has an incredibly solid base for presenting a narrative that relies on more subtle character acting to communicate mood and tone.

It succeeds quite strongly in presentation, really leaning into its art departments skills to properly create and atmosphere suitable for its tone and message. The sound design is among the best in anime, really putting you into each environment and connecting you inside the subjects perspective and subjectivity. Going further into economical presentation the repeated elements, shots and sounds are not offensively conservative or obtusely reused. You really get the sense that it's building the grammar of the show, with each repeat using itself as a piece of vocabulary instead of existing because they needed a shot to fill that time.

Its key failures is in its script. Key character moments come off as an act of whimsy instead of built up towards, and the overall pace of the narrative arc seems to lend itself far more towards an omnibus presentation than an episodic show. You get the sense that with a larger time window, both in a per-episode sense and in an overall runtime, it would have had the time to get you to understand the head of the character enough so that the snaps felt earned. Instead you're left with the impression that you're not given all the information you needed to have.

I almost feel that the show felt it could get away with some of its omissions because the culture it was made of comes with an understanding of stresses and perspectives that are just not communicated through the show. Perhaps if I came from the same environment as the creators I would have been able to infer those struggles or emotions and superimposed them onto the story during the viewing, but I just lacked that background or desire to insert those anxieties into the character. I wanted to feel the characters anxieties, but instead felt that they were more capsules than personalities.

Overall, it's a very interesting watch. Every presentation decision was clearly thought about lending itself to repeat viewings to really soak in all that they're giving you. However, it doesn't earn the message it presents and betrays some of the more interesting character moments by not properly building towards their decisions, blunting the climaxes.