Flip Flappers

Episode 13

You know, I underestimated this Flip Flappers finale. I wasn't sure it was possible for one more episode to clear up much of the show's lingering plot threads, much less cement its unstable emotional and thematic ambitions, but this shaky little production really found its feet in the thirteenth hour. (I assume Pure Illusion's clocks have at least 13 hours.) The episode starts off by clarifying the last few plot points we needed to fully process the more concrete evil-mother plot we've shifted to in its final quarter. Then it middles by giving us a blast of the jaw-dropping animation and production design that have defined its strongest moments. Finally, it concludes by not shying away from its thematic convictions, bringing the focus back to Cocona and Papika where it always belonged. Before passing out of our hands for good, Flip Flappers used the last of its strength to deliver the best of itself, leaving me just satisfied enough to recommend the show to anyone patient enough to give its gorgeous brand of confusion enough elbow room to shine.

So we finally get an explanation for why Cocona ended up in the "real world," why Papika lost her memory, and why evil-Mimi and good-Mimi are in their respective positions. Now there aren't any concrete answers for this since the show is working entirely on metaphors for emotional concepts, but I think I was wrong last time about evil-Mimi and good-Mimi representing Pure Illusion and the real world, respectively. I'll come back to this in two paragraphs, when I come back to Salt, but it's really important so just put a pin in that for now. First, it's lore-time.

When Mimi was about to disappear into Pure Illusion with Cocona, Papika leapt out and stopped her with a gesture of love at the last second, causing Mimi to EXPLODE into a thousand emotionally conflicted fragments. This concretely establishes a lot of really important things all at once: amorphous fragments are literally part of Mimi's psyche, Cocona was never taken into Pure Illusion due to this calamity and therefore never had to be retrieved, but most importantly, the "real world" does not actually exist at this point. This is meaningful not only for plot reasons, establishing a kind of dream-world transition period between "second and third impact" that this show's own NERV and SEELE are running down the clock on as their chosen child pawn waffles between the inevitable choices that come with their unstoppable adolescence, but it's juicy material for thematic reasons because all that stuff is equally super-loaded on a metaphorical level.

From what I can tell, Mimi blew open a portal between the real world and Pure Illusion that marries other people's psyches to her own through the amorphous fragments. On a plot level, this means the creepy horror school we saw in episode 5 was probably the specific nightmare of a specific person in the real world, but it was connected to Cocona through the mutual fears that it represented for her, her mother, and the dreamer all at once. It makes sense, and it's a great detail for rewatches; the goop-witch of episode 3 is immediately more interesting as a dark reflection of Mimi's bitterness and Cocona's self-loathing inside of someone else's dream. On a thematic level, this reveal also gives us what is probably Flip Flappers' most powerful visual metaphor: Cocona's "real world" was no more real than the convictions of a teenager who believes they see the world for the way it "really is" when they start going through puberty. It's not Pure Illusion per se, but it's definitely not the drab and logical real world we see at the end of this episode. It's in a temporary state that we just accept as normal, even though so much of our behavior and worldview as teenagers seems alien to us looking back, neither childlike or adultlike, just bizarre and scary and transient. If childhood is (optimistically) a time without conflict that cannot last, adolescence is a time without consequences that cannot last.

This brings us back to Dr. Salt, who's most known for loathing the idea of a world without conflict, bringing us back to the dynamic of evil-Mimi and good-Mimi. While evil-Mimi definitely is meant to represent Pure Illusion in its darkest aspects (Papika is its brightest aspects), I don't think good-Mimi represents adulthood and reality. I think that honor actually belongs to Dr. Salt. Childhood and Pure Illusion are not inherently bad, but evil-Mimi represents a regression to childhood that Cocona cannot take, now that she is an adolescent who will eventually become an adult. Conversely, Dr. Salt represents the positive agency and accountability of adulthood (he's definitely made mistakes in the past, but despite a grumpy attitude and lack of communication, his actions in the present have turned out to be nothing but righteous), while the dangers of growing up too fast are reflected instead by Yayaka. What do the good and bad versions of each sides have in common? The good sides of each world (Papika and Salt) stay totally aligned with those worlds, while the bad sides (evil-Mimi and Yayaka) try to force Pure Illusion on reality or reality on Pure Illusion. So what is the show trying to say through this symbolism and seeming segregation of childhood from adulthood? Unfortunately, I have to put another pin in that for a few paragraphs, because the more pressing question is where does that leave good-Mimi?

I think good-Mimi represents a perfect yet powerless force, the ultimate platonic ideal of a being that can transcend the worlds of childhood and adulthood, both wise as a snake and harmless as a dove. She could drift between Pure Illusion and the real world effortlessly because of this power, but this also led to her being exploited by forces that quickly destroyed that balance. It's not a perfect metaphor because it once again takes the focus away from Cocona as the agent of symbolism in her own story, but at least I get what they were going for now. If Cocona wants to bring this kind of power back into being, she has to arrive at her own answer for setting the balance right. So what's the answer?

Well, the answer is fearless love, and that's an answer I can get behind! Flip Flappers' greatest victory comes from tying its central romance back into its overall coming-of-age arc, pushing through all the superfluous falderal (stop giving Bu-chan and the amorphous-trio screentime dammit) to deliver a powerful message by the end. Before her mother can suck the entire universe up into her black-hole-sky-womb, Cocona has to completely admit her love for Papika. At first, this is treated like a childish expression of trust and societal transgression that hearkens back to the first time they met, in a pretty shameless lift of a scene from Penguindrum that's nonetheless powerful in the exact same way. (When you run out of Anno references, start ripping off Ikuhara! Eh, since Flip Flappers did start doing the "food as symbolism for emotional connection" thing early in its run before dropping it on its butt along with half of its other ideas, I guess it's justified.) Either way, this shows that Cocona isn't giving up on the positive, "selfish" values of childhood just because she's decided to grow up and move forward despite her fears. She's not making the same mistakes that Salt made in his youth by abandoning his feelings out of fear and obligation to his own father, so she'll turn out to be a better adult.

At the same time, a more adult sacrifice is still required of Cocona. Papika belongs to the world of childhood, and when Pure Illusion starts fading from reality for good, it looks like Cocona will have to part ways from the one she loves. The only way to drag Papika into the future with her is to shatter Pure Illusion completely, so after ripping the portal into glass shards to rescue her girlfriend, Cocona is forced to wake up in a much duller world. Hidaka is just a crazy old loon. Uxekull is just a rabbit. The yard behind the school is no longer a wonderland of doodads, but a dumping ground for miscellaneous garbage. Growing up sucks, let's face it, and there's no physical way for them to run back to Pure Illusion anymore. However, because Cocona was able to bring Papika (and Mimi!) back with her, she finds Pure Illusion within the one she loves.

This is the answer to the incompatibility between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, as adolescence fades and our many sparkling and raging facets crystallize into the person we must live with alongside others in an imperfect universe. When you discover yourself and commit to who you truly are, you can finally connect with others honestly, and the people you connect with in honest love will make the world feel more perfect and pure than it was before. True, honest, courageous love makes the drab reality we must live in a place of wonder and magic again, through the dreams we share with the right person for us. The Pure Illusion that unfolds when Cocona and Papika hold each other's hands at show's end isn't literal, but metaphorical. Mimi and her optimistic purity can be whole again in the harmony of worlds that True Love represents, where you can live with the physical freedom of an adult and the emotional freedom of a child. Childhood is illusory, adolescence is terrifying, and adulthood is depressing, but the people you love can make even the darkest stages of life's journey magical. I think that's a beautiful message, and I'm glad Flip Flappers was able to deliver it clearly before the curtain fell on what could be a very disorienting experience up to this point.

Ultimately, Flip Flappers feels like a slightly dimmer version of what it was initially trying to achieve. Just because I was able to parse its ideas with a lot of digging and rewatching doesn't mean those ideas were conveyed super-well. (More character development all-around would have been great, and why did they even bother with episode 8, among a few other big chunks of time wasted?) But in light of the uniquely glowing ambitions at its heart, not to mention the phenomenal artistic endeavor on its surface, it's easy to give Flip Flappers' occasional stumbles into derivativeness and extraneous detail a pass. Would it have been a stronger show if the original writer's vision hadn't been reworked so heavily? Maybe, but maybe not. Given the minor but important weaknesses in Flip Flappers' first half, it's entirely possible that the show's latter half was a necessary patch job on a story that was too vague and conceptual to really connect, and the left turn into Anno/Ikuhara theft in the latter half resulted in an ultimately more accessible show. Or maybe Yuniko Ayana's original story trajectory really was leading us to a masterpiece that we'll never have now. Nobody knows (yet)! Regardless, the fact that this show has roughly 1.5 butt-looking episodes out of thirteen gorgeous ones is incredible considering its apparent production woes. Director Kiyotaka Oshiyama is absolutely the MVP of this package, and if his artistic instincts and time management are this exceptional on his first original series, I can't wait to see what he does with his next project.

You done good, Flipper Flaps. May your financial failure be only a mildly dark cloud in the silver lining of future careers for the incredibly talented artists who worked hard to give you a troubled yet beautiful life. At least we'll always have episode 6. Episode 6 was fantastic.

Rating: A-

Flip Flappers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Jacob has had enough surrealist emotional metaphors for a while, so he's looking forward to the gleeful goofiness of Little Witch Academia next season. You can follow Jake here on Twitter.