7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Kasuga Takao is a boy who loves reading books, particularly Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. A girl at his school, Saeki Nanako, is his muse and his Venus, and he admires her from a distance. One day, he forgets his copy of Les Fleurs du Mal in the classroom and runs back alone to pick it up. In the classroom, he finds not only his book, but Saeki's gym uniform. On a mad impulse, he steals it. What comes next?...
Starring: Shinichiroh Ueda, Mariya Ise, Yoko Hikasa, Sayuri Hara, Shin'ya HamazoeAnime | 100% |
Foreign | 100% |
Comic book | 18% |
Romance | 13% |
Drama | 8% |
Psychological thriller | 2% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (2 BDs)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Anime is frequently the refuge of strange bedfellows, but Flowers of Evil combines a number of patently weird elements that may put the series permanently in First Place in this highly specialized category. A mere smattering of personages and ideas running rampant through this odd but almost hallucinogenically compelling series includes French poet and provocateur Charles Baudelaire, a stolen gym outfit (with an unstated emphasis on panties), the oddly guilt prone psyche of a Japanese adolescent, blackmail, school cliques, and (just for good measure) an animation aesthetic that utilizes rotoscoping, giving the whole enterprise a kind of quasi-surreal look at times. Flowers of Evil takes its name from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, a volume of poetry that pushed the envelopes of both content and style to the point that the book and Baudelaire himself were put on trial for public indecency. The anime takes some of Baudelaire’s ideas, notably the almost proto-Nietzschean concept of evolving by breaking taboos, and twists them into an often overwrought story of a young boy who finds his life devastated when he makes a rash decision to purloin one of his (female) classmate’s gym bag which contains her physical education outfit. It may seem like something rather feeble upon which to base an entire series, and in fact it probably is, but Flowers of Evil casts such a hypnotic spell that despite its really kind of unsettling ambience, those who have grown tired of the many anime tropes which are regularly trotted out again and again with little to no innovation may cotton to this series if for no other reason than it at least is something different.
Flowers of Evil is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. If one simply accepts the fact that this series is not going to look like "traditional" anime, there's some really interesting visual content here, most of which pops excellently in high definition. The characters appear to have been rotoscoped, and that gives a hyper-reality to humans, at least when they're fairly close up. Unfortunately, the animators choose not to give any detail—as in any detail—to humans when they're further back in the frame, and so you'll have elements like a very real looking body with absolutely no facial features whatsoever. This is not an overly colorful series by design. Even fleshtones are fairly pallid, and one of the series' most striking uses of hue—the odd orange color of Nakamura's hair—really isn't an overly vivid event. Line detail is exceptionally sharp in this presentation, and occasionally backgrounds will offer more in the way of a varied palette. There were some very brief instances of negligible banding on display here, but this is overall a beautifully sharp and clear high definition experience.
Flowers of Evil's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix gets the job done quite nicely here, for there really isn't that much opportunity to exploit massive immersion or even expressive dynamic range. This is by and large a quieter show that has large scenes built out of the interactions between the three main characters. Fidelity is excellent in this problem free track.
There are no supplements offered on this release.
Flowers of Evil won't be to everyone's taste, and even those who like it—as I do—will be able to nitpick its various shortcomings. But it's refreshing to see a series like this that, like Baudelaire, attempts to push the envelope a little bit. This Blu-ray offers great video and audio, and even without supplements, Flowers of Evil comes Recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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