Aku no Hana is certainly not for everyone. It's different, both visually and in content: it's not an anime that makes you feel happy or good about yourself, no escapism at all here. You don't watch it for the fun of it; it took me a good three weeks to finish it, I couldn't watch more than two episodes at a time. It's a psychological anime with a dark atmosphere and bucketfuls of tension. I honestly think it's quite perfect. And not because I particularly liked the story or the characters, and not only because it's different from your standard anime set in a school with clichèd characters, banal dialogues and a storyline we've seen repeated infinite times with little variation. What I really appreciated about it is that it makes clear that anime is an artistic medium to express feelings - very intense feelings, in this case.
The story is about Kasuga, an average middle school student, who likes to think of himself as being different and superior to his peers because he loves reading difficult books like Baudelaire's Le fleurs du Mal. It's quite a common attitude in teenagers, you need something that can differentiate you from others, you need to feel special and different and better. He has a long-standing crush on his classmate Saeki whom he sees as an unattainable muse. One afternoon after school, having forgotten his book, he goes back to the classroom and realises that Saeki forgot her gym clothes. So he can't resist the urge to take them. But Nakamura, another classmate of his, a weird girl in full-swing rebellious phase, foul-mouthed and seeping hatred and anger from every pore, sees him. And so the story is set in motion, with Nakamura blackmailing Kasuga in doing all sorts of perverted things in order to "tear down his walls" and prove that he is a "deviant" just like her. In the mean time, Kasuga manages somehow to confess his feelings to Saeki who, surprisingly, accepts them. The story then starts to escalate, with Nakamura forcing on Kasuga her own beliefs, Kasuga putting up just a pretense of resistance and Saeki trying to sever his tie with Nakamura and draw him to her. It's clear that Nakamura and Saeki symbolise opposite worlds, Nakamura representing all that is forbidden, dark and sexual, the destructive urge and the rebellion to authority, as well as the aspiration to freedom and knowledge; while Saeki is the lumionous, kind, pure-hearted girl who just wants a normal life within the boundaries of what is commonly accepted as good and proper. And Kasuga is in the middle, the object of this power struggle between the two, divided between the two different ways in which he sees himself. It seems a love-triangle, but in reality it's not at all. There's little love involved. They're all using each other to establish their own identity.
I was also intrigued by the background, this town where everything looks old and rusty, with weeds creeping out from cracks in the pavement, surrounded by hills that seem to isolate it from the rest of the world. Nakamura has the strong desire to see what's beyond the hills, she wants to break the shell, she finds everything and everyone in her home town "boring". Is there really nothing beyond those mountains? Can they really never escape? We don't know, because the story doesn't end. There was probably supposed to be a second series, but it didn't happen.
Being a psychological anime, it's all about the characters. They're not very likeable, eccept maybe for Saeki. She surprised me in showing a resolve I didn't think her character would have. She really did put up a fight for Kasuga and she was willing to accept him and not brand him as a "hentai" as Nakamura was dying to see her do. But Kasuga, in a moment of honesty, admits that he just isn't capable of reconciling the "angel" image of Saeki he had been cultivating in his mind for so long with the real blood and flesh girl who wants to be his girlfriend. As for Kasuga, he's a typical confused teenager. Nakamura turns his world upside down, makes him doubt everything he thought he knew about himself. He feels guilt for stealing Saeki's clothes, he's scared of Nakamura, he does a lot of crying and trembling and sweating and stammering, but he never openly rebels to her, he accepts what she forces on him and goes back to her looking for more. And finally there's Nakamura herself, she's angry, furious sometimes, she hates her family, her town, her classmates, she rejects everything. She thinks of herself as a deviant and when she sees Kasuga stealing Saeki's clothes, she's overjoyed because she thinks she's finally found someone like her. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it's all about the psychological relationship between Nakamura and Kasuga. The focus is on personal identity, how it is defined, how other people's perception affects it in the contest of a teenager's clash against society. More than once Kasuga chickens out and states that he's empty, that there's nothing to him; Saeki desperately tries to understand him; Nakamura decides that he's like her and forces on him her own feelings. In the end, he seems unable to establish his own unique personality and gets himself into a situation where he has to choose one of the girls.
The animation is different. I have to admit that initially I wasn't fond of it. But it grew on me and I ended up really appreciating it. It's the rotoscope technique, whereby the animators trace over live action film movements on each frame to reproduce realistic images. I think initially I was disturbed because it's so unlike the normal animation style that I am used to. But it's refreshing. The characters look like real Japanese people and towards the end I was thinking that this animation style is actually better at communicating expressions than the completely unrealistic usual one where the characters have huge starry eyes, small lips, inexistant noses and shiny weird coloured hair. The backgrounds are nice and detailed. I loved the silences. There are quite a few long scenes dominated by silence, which is sometimes more expressive than a thousand words.
Voice-acting is really good. As for the soundtrack, I found it fitting and suited to the story. It helps a lot in conveying that creepy, dark feeling of suspense and psychological tension.
I'm aware that many people think the animation style ugly and the story dull and slow-paced to say the least. But I don't agree. I think it's a very effective, dark and disturbing portrait of teenager struggle for personal identity.