Clara and Twelve
Johanna’s Top 5 Anime of 2013
#4 - Flowers of Evil (Aku no Hana)
Without a doubt this was the most divisive show of the year. So many people looked at the art and immediately gave up on the show. To me, the art was one of the top selling points. All of the main characters in this show were ugly on the inside and did ugly things, so why shouldn’t the art reflect that a little bit? The rotoscoping wasn’t always executed properly, but when it was, it was magic. This show created tension and a mood of unease better than almost anything I saw this year. The still shots of a nondescript city with sparse music in the background made the town feel both like every place you’ve ever known, and like no place you’ve ever known. It was perfect. I wish I could rate this show higher, but unfortunately it suffered from massive pacing problems. Still, when this show worked, it truly felt like a piece of art.
The classroom scene from the end of episode 7 was up there with the ending of Breaking Bad’s Ozymandias, the Red Wedding, or even some of the harder to watch parts of 12 Years a Slave, for the most brutally memorable things I saw this year. So even if the next episode started with an interminable sequence of Nakamura and Takao holding hands and walking, we still had one of the greatest scenes of all time.
(previously, #5)
