Another lost highlight is up on Vimeo. This was my only attempt at doing something other than a combat sport. Youtube didn't like it despite the entire actual anime being up on there lol
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I would say I’m a casual anime fan. You know... ya Ghiblis, ya Death Notes, the classics... and relatively few deeper cuts. I was turned onto this series by the unmissable smash of last year, Stranger Things, as I found myself snooping around after the show ended, eager for more. Series creators, the Duffer Brothers, referred to the anime as a “hyper-violent E.T.” (a key influence on Stranger Things itself) and specifically cited it as a key source for the construction of the Eleven character. Some commenters had made a big deal out of its connection to the show.
So for me, Elfen Lied was certainly more of a curiosity at first. A fun game; picking out the common ground from the two shows. And well, the similarities are there, right from the start, especially in the government lab scenes, such as the one pictured here - but what else was I presented with?
Elfen Lied centres around the story of a young girl, with dangerous telekinetic powers escaping from the secret government lab she spent her life in only to wind up, with no memory of her past, in the house of cousins, Kohta and Yuka. This might sound familiar but do be aware, I am leaving a lot out.
At times cutesy then sombre, gratuitous then subtle, violent then beautiful - Elfen Lied is a show full of contradictions. This bizarre spectrum might be best illustrated in the contrast of its gorgeous opening (main) theme “Lilium”, a Gregorian chant in ecclesiastical Latin, and its end theme “Be Your Girl” - a straight forward J-pop song. For this reason it could be something of a hurdle for the average viewer (especially one not familiar with anime), regardless of its extreme, near Fist of the North Star, levels of violence and a potentially troubling penchant for nude depictions of its young, female characters. It certainly perplexed me to begin with and struck me as an odd influence for Stranger Things, but as the series progressed it began to shine revealing that apart from the surface story elements that make their way into the Netflix hit series its particular gift for unravelling powerful, affecting character backstory within a fantastical setting seems to be something else which the Duffer Brothers repeated to similar effect.
Elfen Lied kept me watching in the beginning because, whilst my reception was initially fairly lukewarm, it ultimately came to feature at least as many striking, engaging moments of character or story as apparent banal anime asides - sandwiched amidst its trademark extreme visuals. However, it was only towards the end that I found that whilst at times it is clunky and seems to have plot-holes (although I always give some leeway for translation) at its core there is a subtly constructed, touching story - best exemplified in the latter half of the series - that surpasses both the extreme universe it exists in and its strange genre/anime appeal (thankfully not hindered, by its decent English dub), and would make Elfen Lied easily recommendable if not for some of the trickier elements of the show.
