Oh my god this looks so fucking amazing. FLCL is my favorite anime by a longshot and my only 10/10 in any medium and it looks like I’m getting two more 10/10s. Yeah, I know, don’t expect too much, but that’s impossible when you got the pillows running. Anyway.
We can divide all the footage between Progressive and Alternative. By seeing which characters and scenery are in scenes with headphones girl, we can determine what’s Progressive (so we can determine what’s not) and by seeing what characters and scenery are tied to this girl we can determine what’s in Alternative. There’s this little moment where we can see a red spot on her head, meaning NO, which pretty much confirms she’s the protagonist of Alternative plus how much focus the trailer already had on her. Next…
There’s not much more on Progressive from what we already know, but a distinct lack of Haruko is certainly worth noting. We never see Haruko in Progressive footage. We know she’s there due to the key visual and illustration, yet nothing. Is this because the trailer wants to focus on the new characters or perhaps she isn’t a major player at first to much at all? The white-haired girl however is displayed prominently a few times an with her car. Her car does get a classic NO opening scene but that begs the question, can her car open NO? But she does have a guitar, so if her car can do it, what’s up with the guitar? We do see the setting of Progressive and if a fight doesn’t happen here I will be sorely disappointed. The most interesting stuff is in Alternative and not apparent at first, something FLCL specializes in. This is the setting. You might notice the lack of an iron. No, the iron isn’t in any other Alternative scenes. But that black building is in multiple Alternative scenes. We see the black building with text here, but it’s impossible to read. Medical Mecahnica’s logo is absent from any of the robots. All of Medical Mechanica’s robots were modeled after household appliances yet none of the robots here look like household appliances, and all of the robots are confirmed to take place in Alternative due to the black building in the background or the Alternative characters. But what happened to Medical Mechanica? Who are these new people? I advocated for a Haruko-less new FLCL, and that’s mainly because I want to new FLCL to tackle new concepts and make it’s own identity. Alternative seems to be doing just that and god I’m fucking excited. We can also see in Alternative the protagonist has three good friends. I’m interested in seeing how big of a role they play.
The visuals of FLCL were perfectly updated. It has the same feel, though it is missing some half-drawn backgrounds. There’s a multitude of phenomenal looking scenes we see and it also nails those quiet peaceful moments with headphone girl just on her computer. I really love how FLCL can make small style changes, like just on the face and make it so it doesn’t look out of place at all. From that screenshot, they nail it yet again.
But it just keeps getting better. The music is just… holy shit. That new song at 0:15 or so sounds absolutely fucking amazing. Both that and Spiky Seeds are FLCL-tier if not better. I gotta be honest, watching this shit makes me want to cry. Out of excitement/joy. Is that a thing? It’s just so beautiful to see this being handled so well.
I’m extremely happy to hear Haruko’s old VA back, she sounds just as good as she did in the original. The new dub actors don’t sound bad either. The voice at 0:23 sounds like it’d match white-haired girl to me, but we’ll see. Sounds cold and cool, like her design.
These are all actually Pillows albums. The first one is from their Little Busters album. FLCL had a lot of meaningless visual gags so I don’t think this is some world-ending paradox, it’s a fun little easter egg.
I’ll probably notice more stuff and update this but I’ll put this out for now. This trailer looks really really amazing, I don’t think we’ll be disappointed when this comes out.