Chainsaw... Horny... Robots
A few years back, I was handed a non-subbed copy of FLCL and told this basic premise: "There's this kid who's brother goes away to play Baseball in the US, and the kid falls in love with the brother's homeless girlfriend, and then gets hit on the head by this girl on a scooter with an electric chainsaw/guitar, which causes giant robots to explode out of his head whenever he gets horny." I watched it then, and thought that the animation was fantastic, the way it pokes fun at other Anime brilliant, and the story completely incoherent. After watching it on The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, I have become completely convinced of one thing. This is probably the most non-sensical Anime ever.

The style of the show drastically switches, in parody of the Dragonball type shows, going from Akira-esque hyper-reality, to colored shadows on a distant horizon. The mech battles, aside from having no purpose other than to show to giant robots beating the hell out of each other, are superbly executed with the designs and plot of the combat well above most of it's contemporaries.

FLCL = WTF
Then there's the really innovative stuff, for example, on the pilot episode, there's a scene of the protagonist and his family sitting around a table arguing. This has all the possibility in the world to be tedious, but instead, the scene is played out using pages of the FLCL Manga (Japanese comic book), with transient coloring and the non-animated art coming to life. It's really a daring, first time done type stuff.

Unfortunately, it won't do much to improve Anime's stereotype of incoherent scantily clad girls screaming at the top of their lungs about god knows what, as there's at least a good ten minutes per episode of that, too.

All in all, FLCL, or as Cartoon Network calls it "Fooly Cooly," is one of the most superb pieces of art in the wide dearth of Anime, it just doesn't make any sense in Japanese or English.