FLCL: The Complete Series [Blu-ray]

A Review of the Blu-ray Disc Presentation
FLCL, or Fooly Cooly is standard definition digital animation. As such, you'll never see a true HD presentation for this wonderful show. This Blu-ray Disc is an upscale of the SD material.

What's the benefit then to owning this show on BD instead of DVD? Artifacts. I own the original SyncPoint DVDs. Despite only having two episodes per disc and being derived from a digital master, those DVDs are ridden with very visible and distracting macroblocking and mosquito noise. It's a matter of how old the discs are and how inefficient the MPEG-2 codec is.

This BD presentation of FLCL is not perfect. It's been sharpened a bit, so the line work stands out a bit more than I think it's supposed to. The colors are also more saturated than they were on the DVDs and I found it a bit distracting. Aliasing is present, but that's unavoidable with SD material. The aliasing is far worse on the DVDs.

Despite being an imperfect upscale of SD source material, the BD for...
Your head is empty!
Anime can be pretty weird -- just look at series like "Paranoia Agent" and "Boogiepop Phantom." Really weird, sometimes impossible to totally understand.

But for sheer strangeness and kookiness, the winner has got to be "Fooly Cooly (FLCL)." Even as it pokes fun at typical anime, it tells the surrealist story of a very odd coming-of-age, complete with strange plots, oddball characters, and robots sprouting out of a young boy's head.

Naota is a young boy living what he sees as an oppressively dull existance, in a quiet city dominated by the Medical Mechanica building. The closest thing to excitement is fending off the advances of his brother's troubled girlfriend Mamimi.

Then sudenly a girl on a Vespa runs him over, resuscitates him with a smooch, and then bashes him over the head with a bass guitar. That evening, Naota finds that instead of a bump, he has a horn growing out of his head, and no idea what it is or how to get rid of it.

Despite...
The Blu Ray is a GOOD UPSCALE
I own the new Blu ver. Its sitting in front of me. I also own the US DVD from the first time it was put out on shelves on this side of the pacific. The difference is minimal but on some of the area shots or even the background shots, like the first scene of the bridge or building shots, things look a lot better, which I can't really figure out, but everything else is just a slight improvement as one would think it should be since it is an upscale. The new cover art though is what really makes it for me though. The packaging is amazing and it looks like some one in funi's graphic arts department had been working on this for a while, one might even think before they had it. I am such a huge fan of the series that all the before mentioned was enough for me to re-buy.

If you already own the series though and it didn't change your life as a teenager or lead to you finding your unified theory on life, then its debatable if the $20-30 for the Blu is worth it. Its good but I would...
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