lfen Lied begins by striking three completely different tones: The opening credits are hushed and arty, with a hymnlike theme song and sophisticated artwork that inserts the series' main character into richly colored images inspired by Gustav Klimt paintings. In the grotesquely, intensely violent opening sequence, that same main character—a horned, naked, metal-masked girl code-named Lucy—escapes from a high-tech facility by telekinetically rending a series of guards into bloody chunks. And then the story veers into what seems to be an idealized teen-romance series as cousins Kohta and Yuka meet for the first time since childhood in a gorgeous seaside town where they both intend to go to college.
The tones never really merge; they just splinter into more fragments. As the story continues, Kohta and Yuka encounter Lucy on the beach, but she turns out to be a squeaky, clumsy, cutesy thing who sparks a lot of slapstick comedy and a little drama as she fails to understand clothing or toilets. Instead of speaking, she makes a cat noise, so they name her "Nyu" after her sole vocabulary word, and they take her home to the immense disused restaurant in which Yuka's family has installed Kohta as caretaker. When the police come looking for Lucy, calling her a missing person who needs to get back to her family, Kohta protectively denies knowing anything about her, even though he already has plenty of reasons to hate her.
Meanwhile, the organization that was holding and experimenting on Lucy sends soldiers to kill her, including Bandoh, a rabid dog of a man first introduced acing a virtual-reality shooting test, then yelling, "What the hell's the point of shooting at targets that don't scream or bleed? It's getting old! I'm ready for real people!" They also send out Nana, another telekinetic horned test subject, who calls her head torturer "Papa" and has convinced herself he loves her. Meanwhile, Lucy veers between her murderous, heartless personality and the babyish Nyu personality, while Kohta and Yuka, oblivious to the danger, move into the restaurant together, explore their shared past and adopt a runaway girl with an ugly history.
Dumb people, dumb decisions
There's a lot going on in Elfen Lied (pronounced "Elfen Leed"; it's the title of a German poem, which translates as "Elfin Song"). It's crowded with characters whose paths cross and intercross, and its intense extremes pile tightly on each other. One theme holds steady, though: The characters are all idiots. Kohta is an idiot who never really considers the responsibility of concealing and caring for a language-impaired idiot girl, much less his responsibility to get her some help. Yuka is an idiot who's built her childhood crush on Kohta into an irrational obsession that causes her to gush over him one minute and smack him the next. Bandoh is a crazy sadistic idiot, but at least he's meant to be; his bosses, however, are total idiots for ignoring the warning signs he gives off every time he opens his mouth. Most of the series' plot twists are dependant on people behaving like morons.
That aside, Elfen Lied is certainly memorable. Chobits fans will find a lot familiar here, from Nyu's cat-ear-like horns to her cute, cuddly, borderline sex-toy helplessness, and they may also get a twinge of satisfaction out of seeing her snapping and slaughtering people in droves. Fans of 3x3 Eyes will find Nyu's cute-and-dumb/smart-evil-and-powerful dynamic familiar—and still a guaranteed tension inducer. Both those series were big hits, and Elfen Lied borrows a lot of their central elements, adding in a great deal of blood, female nudity and a very adult vibe that extends to a pretty graphic child-molestation sequence.
It may sound exploitative, and it is, but Elfen Lied has a lot more going for it. For all their stupid decisions, the characters have strong motives and strong feelings, and the tangly plot effectively brings their many different facets to the surface. The explanation of who Lucy and Nana are, what they really want, and why their personalities are split is fiendishly interesting, and all the death and intimations of sex lend the show an anything-could-happen vibe. And, of course, it's all gorgeously and colorfully rendered. Halfway into this 13-episode series, it's easy to find the whole thing a bit distasteful, but hard not to be curious about the rest.
There are a lot of very striking moments in Elfen Lied, mostly having to do with abrupt tonal shifts or gory combat, but I think my favorite scene so far comes when Kohta and Yuka (stupidly, of course) drag Nyu to college with them, and their professor, a cunning (yet stupid, of course) guy with an evil agenda of his own, confronts them about her. Within about three sentences, which amount to "What were you two THINKING when you took in an obviously disturbed minor and hid her from the police and her family for no reason?!", he completely demolishes them. If only more people in this series asked questions that incisive.
— Tasha
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