Elfen Lied is a classic. By that, I mean that if you were a nerdy 90’s kid going to high school in the first half of the following decade or so, you were probably aware of a few anime shows by name even if you didn’t watch: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Beebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, and in all likelihood Elfen Lied would be among them.

Though I didn’t really get into anime until far later, at least in terms of shows rather than films like Princess Mononoke, that was basically my youth interface. I didn’t watch them owing to trouble finding copies or catching the right time slot in the days before streaming (with the exception of FMA –I watched it and in those days, we really believed its greatness was the world’s one and only truth) but I knew them by reputation, and their reputations were all more or less sterling… but to be taken with a grain of salt seeing as they were generated largely by other youths. Since really becoming a full fan of the art form as an adult, I’ve gone back now and then and watched the big names of the past with fresh eyes, as though to frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little understanding.

Some titles, such as Evangelion, have largely held up. They were praised then and they deserve praise now. Others, well… Others are Elfen Lied.

I try to not cuss in these reviews, but this time I make no promises.

So, the basic plot of Elfen Lied starts about like this: a mysterious, pink-haired woman with horns escapes from some extreme, over-the-top containment, bloodily dismembering loads of guards, some scientists, the secretary who just happens to wander through, with her killer invisible hands… it’s a hell of a sequence to open a show with. Don’t get used to it.

The pink-haired girl takes a sniper bullet to the horn on her way out, which gives her a moderate case of severe brain damage. She’s found by Kohta, a college student moving in with his cousin/girlfriend Yuka who starts a practice of treating strange girls with nowhere to stay like stray cats and takes her in. Kohta and Yuka dub little miss horns (properly Lucy) “Nyu”, as that’s the sound her bullet-addled squeak toy persona seems capable of uttering.

The evil mad scientists continue being the worst interpretation of the SCP Foundation ever, sending first a murderous psychopath and then another pink-haired horn girl with invisible murder hands (properly a Diclonus, this one named Nana) to capture and/or kill Lucy, who snaps into her badass adult persona pretty much just long enough to fight and dismember them. Kohta and Yuka stay oblivious to this and pick up stray #2, a little girl named Mayu (along with her dog, Wanta)

Our lead pair of idiots take Nyu to school, where she’s very temporarily acquired by a bizarre professor who reveals himself as part-Diclonus and babbles about ending the race of homo sapiens before Lucy comes out and unceremoniously decapitates him. The psycho soldier from earlier and Nana both escape and team up to fight Lucy, but when Nana (being taken in as another stray) finds Nyu, the fight really just launches us into a multi-episode flashback sequence

The first flashbacks cover Lucy’s history, how some frankly kind of unfathomable bullying drives her to kill for the first time and puts her on the run, and how she met and befriended Kohta when they were children, only to go on a berserk killing spree when she finds out that the cousin Kohta said was a boy fearing Lucy’s potential jealousy was, in fact, Yuka, a girl, and someone she needed to be jealous over. Kohta, of course because of the show’s convenient writing, has total amnesia for the whole horrid event and everything Lucy-related.

The second flashbacks cover the past of the one scientist who seems to have a soul in this setting, Kurama. It’s not much of one since his typical work day still involves torturing little girls to death, but compared to some of the other golems of fecal matter posing as humans in this show, he’s actually been pretty alright, caring for Nana and sometimes objecting to taking the bloodiest, most evil, most insane route possible. We see how this insane system began (with Lucy infecting people so they sire or birth Diclonus children, and a truckload of unethical experiments) and how Kurama was a part of it, up until the birth of his Diclonus daughter… who isn’t Nana, but rather a new Diclonus, Mariko, with even more and longer invisible murder hands.

Mariko is sent after Lucy (and Nana. And just to kind of be a barely contained vector of murder). Kurama goes rogue. Kohta FINALLY spends half an episode going through the same flashbacks to his childhood with Lucy that we already went through, but out of order and disjointed. We get a disjointed final confrontation between Mariko and Lucy resulting in Kurama’s death along with Mariko, the psycho soldier escaping, a Bolivian Army ending for Lucy as she faces down a bunch of armed guards and at least her other horn gets obliterated by gunfire, and our incestuous little family of Kohta, Yuka, Mayu, and Nana settling down. All’s well that ends well, or awful as the case may be.

And you might look at the summary and think that doesn’t sound too bad. The summary doesn’t, but for the love of Haruhi permit me to explain how and where this show screws up before you make the mistake of watching it. There’s a lot to get through, so let’s get started.

First problem, and I know the summary doesn’t sound like it: nothing happens for the better part of this show. All those battles and intrigue beats that I described? Those make up less than half the screen time of most episodes, sometimes radically less. And that in and of itself might not be terrible, but the problem is that the rest isn’t really filled with much of anything. There’s not a lot of good character growth and development: Kohta is astoundingly generic, Yuka gets no personality until they go for “Slightly clingy and/or jealous” and we can’t really do anything with Lucy because she spends the vast majority of her time as a lobotomized puppy at Kohta’s heels. And there is so much of this assorted space-filler that the episodes feel slow and bloated and the entire thing drags in a miserable way.

This is exacerbated by the structure of the story. I feel like this is the best way to describe what is in some ways the show’s major malfunction – in a lot of stories with younger protagonists, you’ll find the “Useless Adults”. These are the individuals that should have the agency and power in the narrative, owing to them being adults and often in theory the parents, guardians, or otherwise caretakers of the child protagonists, but who abdicate agency and responsibility in the narrative because they get locked out of the loop one way or another. If something evil is happening, or even just something supernatural, it will never happen where the Useless Adults can sense it, resulting in them dismissing any extraordinary claims for a lack of evidence. The advanced types will even be willfully blind to the circumstances of the story they’re in, explaining away any evidence they might encounter or that is presented to them. And in context, this makes sense: Kids naturally don’t have a lot of agency and should run to their adults when something weird starts going on, but the adults being Useless Adults takes this option away without needing to kill off everybody’s parents or make everyone over a certain age evil.

In Elfen Lied, Kohta and Yuka spend the vast majority of the story as the Useless Adults. But where the typical Useless Adults are incidental characters, Kohta at least is focused on as our lead character. He’s the main protagonist of the story, and he’s not involved with the story because he keeps missing it by inches, and this despite some events that would normally draw a character in. Even when he discovers a murder scene, he still plays the Useless Adult part, treating everything as normal with police reports and the like the way a responsible citizen should and also the way that keeps him from getting involved with the intrigue that’s going on around them.

As the show goes on, the situation gets worse. The flashback episodes aren’t bad in isolation, at least when it comes to pacing and not content, but they are two and a half episodes of scenes from the past for which our present day is suspended, meaning that there’s close to a quarter of the show in which the show simply isn’t moving, delaying the entry of our lead into the story intolerably long. And when he does come in, we spend a huge amount of time seeing scenes that we’d already scene before in Lucy’s flashback episode, spending minutes on something that, with our background from previous episodes, could have been done in seconds.

And when you get down to it, and really think about the story of Elfen Lied, a lot of it is really superfluous. The basic plotline is that Lucy breaks containment, she ends up as Nyu in Kohta’s care making her harder to track than “Follow the trail of bodies and the sound of screams”, so the evil scientists hunt her down. Since neither Bando nor Nana’s initial attacks really add to anything, nor does her temporary kidnapping by the creepy professor, these could either be trimmed or cut down. In a basic sense, we need Nana to come in conflict with Lucy, setting up her own release by Kurama and Mayu’s association with the leads. At that point she can knock Lucy into flashback land and Mariko can be unleashed for the final confrontation. At most, this should have taken five episodes, and you could probably do it in three. It would be different if the earlier conflicts left meaningful marks on either Lucy or Kohta, but since Lucy keeps going back to Nyu and Kohta is a Useless Adult, they don’t; the entire run of Elfen Lied could be reasonably compressed into the opening arc of a better show.

I guess that makes sense; from what I’ve gathered, the anime of Elfen Lied only covers the material that basically forms the prologue of the manga, giving it a new ending before the meat of the plot really even began. If that’s true, it explains a lot… but excuses nothing. The anime has to be able to stand on its own. And when it comes to pacing and meat, it really doesn’t. It’s empty and wasteful and I begrudge this show its running time.

Issue two for Elfen Lied would have to be the gore. And I don’t mean the quantity, I mean the quality. I talked a little about what makes for good and effective gore in my review of Another, but I intend to go into more depth here, because the gore in Elfen Lied is as bad as it is plentiful; very.

The purpose of gore is to get an emotional response out of the viewer. Depending on the context this could be fear, revulsion, disgust, sorrow, or any of a host of other usually negative emotions. To do this well, gore needs at least a few traits to work: it has to be creative and visually intricate so that we focus on the images and register and remember them; it has to be well paced in order to draw the viewer into the scenario, neither coming out too fast and losing its impact nor overstaying its welcome and invoking numbness; and/or it has to exploit a pre-existing emotional connection in order to cause the audience to empathize with the victim of the gore. You can mix and match these points, using some more and others less, but to properly inflict the experience of gore on the audience, those are the essential building blocks. This is why good horror pieces will, for an important gory moment, create a unique and memorable image and linger on it long enough for it to be seared into your mind.

A lot of the gore in this show is both fast (not well-paced) and consists of faceless mooks (so no emotional connection) being cleanly cut and overflowing with red blood (not really creative or interesting). I’d go so far as to say that Elfen Lied actually doesn’t have a lot of anything that could really be classified as gore. It has plenty of blood, absolutely no shortage, but seeing as most of it flows from red hoses embedded in the homogeneous mass of “human” bodies, it doesn’t really qualify as gore.

There are a couple exceptions. When, during her escape, Lucy kills the random secretary who wanders in… it’s a little comical because of how over the top it is, in a “Bambi versus Godzilla” sort of way, but at least the actual kill has Lucy taking her time and showing us the act of killing someone in a way that’s more horrific than clean dismemberment by those infomercial knives that slice through hams like air. And the couple of times Nana is put in the victim seat I can say she’s at least one of the characters I don’t entirely want to be reduced to a fine red mist. But by in large the gore of Elfen Lied is somewhere between substandard and unworthy of the name.

Nana, however, brings me to the third big problem with Elfen Lied. This world and everyone in it is just too miserable. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy dark material, even oppressively dark material with a bleak outlook on life and humanity, when it’s done well. If you want to see this handled properly, look at Mirai Nikki, which features a cast of gray and black morality in a fundamentally twisted and broken world… but presents them in such a light that you still care about them, even like them. This was because, even though folks like Yuno and Minene were terrible people, they still had redeeming traits. We could empathize with them as they might have been, and perhaps even see tiny parts of ourselves in the warped and violent diary holders (except Third). What’s more, even the more reprehensible characters in that show can at least be entertaining to watch, because they’re cunning and capable and playing a cat-and-mouse game of speed chess with their plans and actions.

In Elfen Lied, Earth appears to be populated primarily with soulless shit-stain excuses for humans, possibly because just about anyone with more moral fiber in their bodies than the dietary fiber in their diarrhetic stool is operating with an IQ generated by playing “guess the age” with Price Is Right rules in place. The exceptions to this rule are Mayu (Who actually has both a brain and a functional moral compass) and… she’s the only full exception. Partial credit to Nana (who doesn’t seem stupid until she’s out the second time going above and beyond the call of duty to prove that life as an experimental victim didn’t prepare her for the outside world. There’s sheltered and then there’s failing basic logic and problem-solving) and Kurama (who at least attempts to redeem himself enough that, given the anemic selection of watchable characters, you’ll take him).

And I don’t just mean that the rest of the named characters are awful – this extends beyond people who get involved in the plot to what seem to be some pretty basic assumptions about the human condition. I think Steven King’s Maine has more decent humans than Elfen Lied. Hell, I could probably restrict it to adult residents of Derry and say the same.

The biggest example, I think, comes from Lucy’s flashback. Not the only example, not by far, but the biggest. It’s what drives little kid Lucy to kill for the first time: she adopts a cute little stray puppy, and her resident school/orphanage bullies mercilessly beat it to death and taunt her with the corpse.

It’s fucking sick. And I’m not saying that in a normally functional world there aren’t some disturbed people, even sick, disturbed children, who would do such a thing. But Elfen Lied doesn’t portray this breaking point as the action of a twisted individual, but rather of “the group”. This is what the show thinks the faceless majority masses are like, and that presumption is all over the place. If there’s one stance that Elfen Lied takes, it’s that humans are basically cruel and myopic. And… it’s not fun to watch. That’s the real problem. Other shows can have rotten, twisted worlds but they know how to make the scenario one we can relate to and one that we can enjoy. Elfen Lied is both out of touch and miserable. Even if you’re going to have a universally hated character, thanks to prejudice or what have you, you need to approach the topic with some nuance and skill. Show us how the scenario, the acceptable target, takes a basically normal person we would empathize with or relate to and lets them become something awful, drawing the audience into the experience on both sides, making us think or feel.

Elfen Lied doesn’t do that. Elfen Lied goes for the strategy where pretty much everyone is Satan’s scraggly scrotum hair from frame one and that’s not a world people are familiar with, which makes the persecution and suffering that people face at its hands feel disconnected and manipulative. A lot like the gore, it tries to shock you by going extreme without understanding the underlying factors that allow extreme moments to function in an effective manner. As a result, it’s awful to watch largely in the wrong ways and absolutely for all the wrong reasons. I’m not mad at the kids that get the blender treatment from Young Lucy for being puppy-murdering psychopaths. I’m not incensed at Mayu’s stepfather for being a domineering rapist. I’m not sickened at Mayu’s mother for being an abusive piece of garbage who entirely takes the stepfather’s side. I’m not disturbed at Kurama and his mad scientist buddies because they routinely torture little girls to death in the name of nebulous and largely unspecified data. I’m frustrated and disappointed with the writers for how they handled all those things. It’s like watching an old scifi movie and seeing the strings moving the flying saucers and the zippers on the backs of the monster costumes: the production, not the fiction produced, is transparently on display. And it’s not good.

Fourth, and this is more of a side note, this show really annoyed me with how pretentious it was. I normally have a high tolerance for pretentious material, and even think that moments can be given a pretentious treatment in effective ways. But Elfen Lied was really grinding my gears on that score before I realized just how critical its other problems were – especially the opening. Normally, I love watching anime openings, because they’re an art form all to themselves, but I quickly came around to skipping the one for Elfen Lied because it was just that over-the-top pretentious.

I’m actually left somewhat at a loss when it comes to Elfen Lied. I don’t get it. Why did this become one of the bespoke of landmarks? Why did anybody even watch this crud the whole way through and come away with a positive response? Was it just a case of Western audiences being overawed that you could show animated breasts and bloodshed on television?

I, for one, can’t come up with another reason, and even that reasoning is flimsy because there are surely other anime that offer as much. What few good moments and redeeming features it may have are vastly overwhelmed by the negatives. The story is a joke, literally just the prologue for a real story that’s never told. The characters are atrocious. I hope to never encounter their like again. The presentation is despicable, reaching for shock or goresplotation and then failing to even make that low bar. Elfen Lied is a terrible show, one that gets a firm F from me. While many old classic anime deserve their status, and ought to be remembered and watched along with newer generations of work, Elfen Lied deserves to be buried and forgotten. There are bits and bobs here and there that could be used to make a good show, but Elfen Lied isn’t it. It’s garbage. My advice is to treat it as such.