I'm afraid, despite its obvious technical and stylistic pyrotechnics, this is another anime parody series which basically just overloaded my brain - though I have to say it's much better than the shrieking 'Excel Saga', which I could only bear to watch one episode of.

The pace is often frenetic (thought not as relentlessly so as 'Excel Saga'), the allusions to other anime shows and conventions pretty relentless, and it has a very weird plot involving bass guitars, vespas, aliens and robots growing out of people's heads. Usually I like this sort of madness, but my nerves just got on edge after about the fifteenth time someone shrieked "fooly cooly!" (apparently as a psuedonym for sex).

There is one passage in one of the early episodes where the storyboards are sort of animated. It's completely manic and as I said, stylistically audacious and jaw-dropping, but somehow the series just didn't capture my attention, and I actually did give up on it before the last episode, though I watched more than half of it.

The commentary track which comes with the DVD is possibly the most useless thing I have ever heard. It's the writers making a lot of in-joke references to in-jokes that you don't get in the first place.

I can understand how this could be top of someone's list, but it was just overload for me - and this is from someone who thought 'Serial Experiemtns: lain' was great.

For me the two anime parody series which I've really liked were the old Project A-Ko movies, which were hilarious to the average person and didn't rely on a specific knowledge of films and series, just a general knowledge of the genres - and of the more recent stuff, 'Magical Shopping Arcade Whateveritwascalled', which again was less frantic and more generic in its potshots. You could even enjoy it just for its parody of Dungeons and Dragons.

FLCL is definitely worth a look, because ultimately you're going to have to make up your own mind about it. Probably a love it or hate it series. Expect to be utterly confused if you haven't watched quite a lot of anime already, and probably even if you have.

NB: 'Excel Saga' not to be confused with the much more promising looking 'Last Exile', which I haven't gotten around to watching yet.

It's hard to describe to the uninitiated exactly what FLCL or Fooly Cooly is about. Words don't do it justice, so it's far easier to say that the show just IS. It seems to possess a life of its own. Yeah, there's a plot, but it's buried under all that. . .weirdness. The best description I can give you is that it's about a boy who has robots come out his head. But that's not everything. Whether you can't make heads or tails of it or you love it to death, one thing is clear. The show is a visual work of art. The animation is jaw-dropping gorgeous, and it's not just about pretty pictures and fluid animation. Too bad the DVDs are expensive and only have two episodes per disk. The show is really quite something. And maybe perhaps the best way to describe FLCL is that of a really long music video divided into six parts.