#The FLCL Archives

[artbookisland]

Scan from The FLCL Archives.

[flclarchives]

Illustrations for Animage magazine by Sushio with finishing by Harumi Takaboshi

[hiyutekivigil]

FLCL art book [x]

[schoolbookdepository]

FLCL featured in newtype magazine

[centrally-unplanned]

Those hip to the Ash Lore might remember me trying and failing to extract something from the FLCL Collectors Disc:

Namely, a collection of screensavers - we in the 2000's boys - that came with the disc. Everything else is pretty easy to pull, but screensavers are OS-based, these were built for a 2002-era Japanese version of Windows, which is not the easiest thing to emulate these days! My attempts to do so failed.

But the Power of the Internet cannot be so easily deterred; yesterday after posting about the abandoned fanwork FLCL fighting game, god-tier hero of the internet @m-accost messaged me that it reminded them of the CD, and being the coder I am not they were able to extract the data from the .exe directly. That revealed that its actually an SWF aka Flash file, which you can just emulate with any of the extant flash players, no Japanese OS bullshit required. So they did, and now you can play the screensavers from your browser right from the Internet Archive!

Discovering the images would have been nice but honestly a bit useless - as I had guessed, its all screenshots from the show. But extracted as screensavers, they have really cool transitions, music from The Pillows Soundtrack, and fun coloring effects. The coolest are absolutely VESPA.exe, which has a chaotic tiling effect:

And MANGA.exe recreated the 'moving manga' style sequence from the show. Ironically, GIRLS.exe is the *most* boring - cashing in on the name on that one GAINAX.

Making such things accessible is of course an exceedingly tiny win, but A: any Lost Media found is good, and this was pseudo-lost media due to its inaccessibility; and B: these kind of things were way more valuable in their original context. The internet in 2002 did not have readily accessible dumps of every frame of the show, gifs of key sequences, easy downloads of whole episodes, every promotional image digitized, etc. Some of it existed in some form for savvy users, but the median person would not ever transition an episode of TV to their computer at all. As such, recreations of things like the ending credits and the moving manga sequence, even in this very different form, was for some people the most accessible way they had to put a piece of media they loved on their computer. For someone somewhere this CD was a big deal in 2002, and its great to be able to see what they saw in it.

Also fucking screensavers man, just an amazing relic of computer tech. Gotta prevent burn-in of the pixels on your cathode ray tube monitor! And if you are doing that with HARUKO.exe you have won at life.

(tagged @flclarchives since I think you will be interested in this, and ofc @m-accost thank you for the amazing work, I am just the reporter on this one)

[slowlycolorfulavenue]

[skalerd]

official art of FLCL (Naota Nandaba)

[mage26]

If Looks Could Kill #ILCK

[inaries]

The flcl art book is here!! FLCL Archive!!

[immloveanime]

FLCL Archives Art Book

[manga-and-stuff]

Source: The FLCL Archives Artbook

by GAINAX

Link to the full Artbook

[8zu]

from Gainax's "The FLCL Archives"

[flclarchives]

Illustration for Newtype and Animedia magazines by Hiroyuki Imaishi with finishing by Harumi Takaboshi

[hiyutekivigil]

from FLCL artbook [x]

[bernkastel-ao3]

Some other flcl fics of mine apart from the main one I reblog.

[centrally-unplanned]

FLCLick Noise - Archival Scan

We should be a go!

[Internet Archive Link]

FLCLick Noise is a book published in 2010 that is a deep dive into the production of and creative influences that went into the 2000 anime FLCL by Studio GAINAX. Framed as a conversation between FLCL director and series lead Kazuya Tsurumaki, and FLCL character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, the two creatives watch the show together and record their thoughts episode-by-episode, alongside a prologue and a “bonus track”. It is in Japanese, with primarily text and screenshots from the show for use as conversational reference, though there is some art as well (almost all of which is available elsewhere).

FLCL is pretty infamous as a show for its free-wheeling compositional style and loose production process; everyone involved was able to throw in visual ideas, dialogue, plot concepts, and so on. Additionally, FLCL slots pretty clearly into GAINAX’s “Otaku commentary” oeuvre - it is very much anime, *extremely* anime, it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise; but in addition to being anime it was also a vehicle for the creative team to put in ideas and influences that they believed the anime industry was not utilizing at the time, such as its rock-album concept soundtrack or its josei/seinen manga inspired-character designs.

It is this backdrop that makes a book like FLCLick Noise simultaneously more valuable for understanding FLCL than most other shows, and even possible to exist in the first place. Much of it is fun asides, many of the creative decisions are personal whims, but there is so much to those whims that it is worth reading a book about them. If you want to answer the question “why does FLCL exist the way that it does”, this book will answer that question in more detail than any other source will.

Alas this is a complex and large book - I will aim to translate it someday, but I cannot guarantee neither the timeline nor the quality of that translation as I am by no means a professional in that regard. If you want to get a sample of what the book contains, anime-youtuber-extraordinaire Hazel quasi-coincidentally just released a video essay on FLCL that has an entire section on this book and its contents (I learned of this book from her tweeting about it during research for the video, so the timeline is not pure kismet). If you want the highlights and so much more, it is an amazing video. Meanwhile, I do hope to post a “raw text” version of the different sections somewhat soon, to assist those who do want to read it themselves and would find that would help with the translation.

As always, I hope this is a valuable addition to the ‘akashic record’ of 90’s-era anime history, and gives something special to the FLCL-heads out there like me.

(I'll tag @flclarchives for the two-for-one this week, if they don't mind! And I apologize for the scan quality here - I wanted to do it non-destructively, as this is not a large print run book, which meant my typical flatbed was a no go and the new overhead setup I used was a comedy of errors. Fortunately this is a book about reading text, and despite the errors it's all perfectly readable.)