On the whole this blog has covered shows I really like, mostly because I’ve been watching the “classics” of anime, and have thus been exposed to a lot of quality productions. Frankly I don’t really like Elfen Lied, and don’t think much of its quality - so I’m going to qualify the praise this post chucks at it later on in advance…
Elfen Lied plays a pretty clichéd traumatised child/psycho line and all it really adds to the mix is a fairly gratuitously cutesy alter-ego and some invisible killer powers. It suffers from having a truly godawful male lead. Not because he’s “wimpy”, but because he’s dull, witless and worthy beyond belief.
It throws in overused elements with enthusiasm - ruthless hitman, redemption, cute little girl of ultimate powarr, evil corporation, parental absence, convenient memory loss. The most interesting thing abut the series as a whole is the way in which it curtails the ten-a-penny wider (manga) plotline which seems to threaten the fate of the world, and instead is all about the central romance. Not that I find that romance at all convincing, or touching.
But overused plot elements can always be delivered astoundingly well. Mostly I think the astounding thing in Elfen Lied is the abundance of severed limbs and red splashes. But not always. No I am not about to talk about some precise moment of dramatic excellence (because I never invested enough in the characters to notice any, if there were any). I’m on about that moment when Elfen Lied seems like it’s the alpha and the omega of the grotesque, the horrific. Yes, that means I’m talking about the start of episode 1, the gore-fest. Spoilers, I guess.
Elfen Lied takes a superpowered escape from a research lab (seen that before) and makes it nigh on impossible to see as just an escape sequence. Yes, the visceral element is important here, it’s overwhelming and thus dramatically effective. Its prominence is also a big statement of intentions aimed square at the viewer.
The OP starts it off. It’s an alien slice of elegance, ambitiously appropriating Klimpt into a creepy montage of corpse-ishly pale nudity. A case of Elfen Lied feeling remote and unassailable, something that’s lost as the plot becomes more apparent. Aesthetic boldness is the great strength of the series as a whole, and it’s important that from the first moment it demands our attention.
And then, in an instant, we’re in severed armsville, and watching a chap having his head blown away. The next death is shown through intercutting of twisting metal with a blank shot of a door. Elfen Lied starts out with the harshest of offences to the eyes, then cuts back into implied violence. It’s like the history of the horror film backwards - uncensored cruelty followed by a more psychological nastiness.
Next Lucy starts to hum a mockery of that opening theme song in her slow slow walk to the door. A man is watching her from a bloodied room. Her metal mask bears a distorted skull look, straight out of Alien. The show emphasises its own creepiness, then cuts to a clueless ditzty secretary archetype. Yes, this is established territory for horror, and Elfen Lied makes no secret of it.
This mixture of explicit and implied violence is rhythmically driven home as Lucy strolls along corridors. Again and again, atmospheric lighting, bloody corpses. There may be no other route to sickening a modern desensitised audience than to simply hammer home the cruelty of the violence we are watching until its pointlessness sticks. The faceless girl stares down a man before killing him slowly, this isn’t just gore, it’s repulsive as an idea, not just an image. Elfen Lied has taken that hyper-stylised opening and moved firmly into the morally unpleasant.
Vitally important to the sense of boldness is the stark visual presentation of these scenes. The cruel intercutting with real life for the office girls in the lab is equally blunt. In that moment when Lucy kills the secretary Elfen Lied leaps from a cruel purposefulness to total excess - the visceral gone insane. When Lucy leaves the lab and gets her helmet pinged off by the sniper it’s like an ending. It’s a condensed horror film, gone within 9 minutes.
I don’t know if that 9 minutes is really essential viewing. I certainly don’t feel that the series it leads into has much to say or even says it with great eloquence. But there’s no question in my mind that that opening sequence was captured on screen with all the vividness of a nightmare. They say that great music can be a single note played beautifully, Elfen Lied plays a bunch of ugly ugly notes, but manages to do so perfectly, just the once.
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