Full disclosure: I got a tattoo of Nakamura from the manga of The Flowers Of Evil earlier today. When a friend linked me to the trailer for the upcoming movie, they had no idea I was in the middle of getting a tattoo based on the series. The trailer for The Flowers Of Evil, still called its Japanese name Aku No Hana by many, actually hit a few weeks ago but I honestly hadn’t seen it until today. The film was announced a number of months ago and, while normally live-action adaptations fall way short of the original, the fact that anime’s darling scriptwriter Mari Okada was tapped to add her touch to this project has given me some hope. This first trailer does too.
As a long time champion of The Flowers Of Evil, this trailer is hitting all the right notes. You have Nakamura calling people ‘kusomushi’, shit-bugs, and Kasuga screaming naked in the rain. A lot of the scenes in the trailer look extremely accurate to the manga which is exciting too. If you’re one of the fans of the anime and are still bummed they never made a season 2, like me, you can see parts of scenes that take places way after the anime ended. With Mari Okada behind the script, this will probably be the next best thing to a proper season 2 we get.
If you haven’t read and watched The Flowers Of Evil, originally created by the incredible Shuzo Oshimi, you are really missing out. The anime off-put many with its unique artstyle, due to being entirely rotoscoped, but if you like slow burns, its one of the best tv anime of the decade. It’s the story of a handful of broken junior high school students, although they may be aged up in this film, who get caught up in an emotional whirlwind of events that includes everything from stealing panties to a 13-year-old girl taking a bat to somebody’s legs. I can not recommend both the anime and manga enough.
The Flowers Of Evil live-action movie will hit Japanese theaters on Septemeber 27, 2019. Further information is made available via the film’s official website.