Flip Flappers – A Slow Start

• Titles: Flip Flappers
• Genre: Adventure, supernatural, Magical Girl, school
• Episodes: 13
• Studio: Studio 3Hz

It can be tough to make friends. Even when you’re in middle school, sometimes it’s not easy to find someone to really relate to. But it’s not like Cocona is all alone. She has her grandmother and her childhood friend Yayaka. The senpai at school is really kind as well. But when Papika explodes into her world, she suddenly realizes that maybe she never truly got to know the people around her. And Cocona would like to do that now but she’s a little busy. She did just find out that she’s some kind of magical girl on a mission to recover the shards and all that.

I kept getting Flip Flappers confused with Hand Shakers in my head. I don’t actually know if the two have anything in common but because everyone told me not to watch Hand Shakers, I ended up not watching Flip Flappers. Brilliant!

As some of my more shrewd readers will have figured out by now. I did in fact eventually realize that Flip Flappers was not in fact Hand Shakers and promptly put it on my watch list.

I gotta say, for me the production of Flip Flappers was its greatest asset. I just loved the visuals in this show. The art style has that scratchy quality to it that almost makes it look like animated sketches. Something that is right up my alley. The colours are just gorgeous and the animation plays a lot with perspective and moving camera angles to create some truly memorable action scenes.

It’s a show that is beautiful to look at. There were some occasionally rougher moments in fighting sequences or for far away characters but unless this thing had the premium budget attached to it, I really can’t blame them for that. Studio 3Hz did a tremendous job and I will try to look into their titles more.

I can’t say much for the sound design, I mostly didn’t notice it. As for the acting, for reasons I will explain below, I switched to the English dub fairly early on so I can’t say much about the Japanese cast. The English cast was alright. A bit forced at times but not offputting.

So the basic premise of Flip Flappers is actually pretty cool. Cocona meets Papika and together they find that they can enter a world called Pure Illusion where they have magical girl powers and need to collect shards. Every time they enter Pure Illusion it’s a completely different place with different rules and dangers.

On paper this sounds wonderful, in practice, I could barely get through the first few episodes. I just found it boring. So I switched to English and put it on while I was cooking or doing activities that would allow me to still pay attention to the episode but have a little something else to pass the time.

I should say, I really loved episode 5. It was an amazing episode!

So why didn’t this gorgeous show work for me? It had all the elements I like. Well, for one thing, I just didn’t have any connection to the characters. They stay fairly undeveloped for a while and for me the classic Genki girl with serious girl combo just wasn’t enough to keep my attention. I should say, there is a twist in the story that is revealed around episode 9 and the characters start to get a lot more development after that point but before that, they are kept purposefully vague.

Unfortunately, the relationships are also kept at a very superficial level and that is something they never find time to rectify in the show. So I couldn’t latch onto that either. I should say, I’m sure some people will (did) love the early characters as well. From what I can tell from my comment section, most people prefer plot-driven anime. I’m sort of a stickler for character stuff.

Similarly, the worlds of Pure Illusion suffer a lot from too restrained world-building. Partly because some of the information is kept for the reveal, but mostly because they only had one episode to set up an episode-specific plot, get a lot of action in and then establish an entirely new universe, every week. As a result, most of the time the stakes felt very unclear and as such fairly inconsequential.

I said it a few times already, Flip Flappers has a twist. Maybe everyone else saw it coming a mile away and it wasn’t really a twist for them, but it was for me. And although I do think a bit more consistent foreshadowing would have served it better, I did enjoy the reveal as a whole. I found it added to the story and characters and it wasn’t so out of the blue as to feel contrived. Good twist!

My experience with Flip Flappers was peculiar. The first episode I actually enjoyed was episode 5 and only those amazing visuals kept me going before that. After that, I started to consistently enjoy episodes 9 to 13. so that’s not a great track record. But I do think even the parts that weren’t for me would appeal to a lot of viewers.

In many ways, I think Flip Flappers is the type of show that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who enjoyed Kill la Kill on a textual level. Not saying it’s the same type of show but there are elements in common and the camera work and framing is very reminiscent. Flip Flapper also has its share of fanservice but it’s mostly trying to look up the skirts of middle school girls. So if that freaks you out, be warned there’s quite a bit and it’s offered up without commentary.

Also, if you had heard that Flip Flappers is a Yuri title, you should probably know that it’s not. Well not really. It’s just one of those shows with a lot of scenes where two girls lean into each other really close, tell each other they love each other and end up naked in tubs together so the fans can super easily ship them. However, there are zero canonical elements of any sort of romantic relationship. And considering the reveal, that’s actually a really good thing!

I started up not really liking Flip Flappers and I really thought it was a show that was worth it only for the production. But the story did win me over in the end. That’s pretty exceptional when I think about it. For me, it’s still a series I could have skipped but I can understand how someone else would be way into it despite some of the hiccups.