Before this review gets underway, I need to let you know that unlike my usual approach I did not make any effort to avoid spoilers, so consider this your sole warning if you really do want to avoid that. Also, this anime contains a lot of graphic content, be it sexual in nature or in how it handles violence, I don’t go too far into details about that stuff but it’s still worth a content warning nonetheless, especially if you were planning to watch the anime and didn’t somehow already know about that from its reputation.
Elfen Lied is a story that needs no real introduction. In the almost twenty years since it was first released it’s become a permanent fixture in the anime landscape, either you already watched it as one of your first few shows or you’re still planning to out of simple curiosity over the attention it received and its eye-catching aesthetic. I found myself in the latter category until I finally sat down and watched through its 13 episodes over the course of the last week. The very beginning of the first episode does a great job at setting this apart from anything else you might watch, the anime’s opening song has an almost operatic feel to it and genuinely interesting visuals – mosaics and patterns that when taken together with the song’s lyrics possess a clear religious quality. It all draws you in and gets your mind trying to work to figure out what you’re seeing or what significance it might have for the show itself before the visuals cut and the music dies down as the single best sequence in the entire anime begins. Lucy, one of this story’s main characters, completely eviscerates everyone in her path, using her psychic powers to behead or dismember the armed men sent to prevent her escape from the strange facility the first scene is set in. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of blood, and above all a lot of mystery over who precisely she is, or What she even is, what her relation to that facility was, and the significance of the religious connection the show advanced in this scene through the sound of church bells as she began her escape. As far as intros go, Elfen Lied gets a perfect score, but it doesn’t manage to maintain that level of quality throughout its relatively short run. That mystery that gets built up doesn’t quite have a satisfying resolution, and its overt religious symbolism and other concepts it presents ultimately don’t lead anywhere significant either.
Rather than keeping a somewhat consistent tone and fully exploring the mysteries it sets up or the ideas and themes it hints at, Elfen Lied very quickly reveals its true form as two separate anime in a trench coat. There’s the gory, darker story we get to see whenever it does venture into darker ideas like trauma, abuse and the effects of violence and prejudice, then there’s the ecchi harem stuff (with a dash of incest, because why not). Lucy’s breakout lands her in the company of Kohta (our harem protagonist) and his presumably Alabaman cousin Yuka, who occasionally grows extremely jealous towards Lucy or any other living thing with a vagina that Kohta pays any amount of attention to. Far from the merciless killer that left a locked down and well guarded government lab in disarray, when Kohta encounters her Lucy has reverted into a state of amnesia, and has taken on the persona of a little child. You might think it would be the logical course of action to go to the relevant authorities, whether doctors or police, when you’re strolling on the beach and find a concussed catgirl, but fun fact: no! They literally just take her home, name her Nyu (the only sound she really makes at first) and turn her into a founding member of Kohta’s harem. I understand that by the second episode they deliver sufficient justification for why they wouldn’t take her to the police, but this is just the first example of characters in this anime being just stupid enough to make the plot happen, and it does start to get more and more frustrating with every instance. It’s also an example of the broader pattern to this story’s writing, that being how Forced everything starts to feel after a while.
I leveled the criticism that a lot of things felt forced against another story I reviewed that dealt with trauma and other dark topics, accusing it of making certain characters cartoonishly evil in different moments or depicting sexual violence just for the sake of shock. But Elfen Lied takes that to a completely different level, without really delving into its ideas enough to have any redeeming qualities. Lucy’s backstory is a tragic one, she was abandoned by her family and raised in an orphanage where she was routinely bullied by some of the other children due to her physical appearance – primarily the horns sticking out of her head. Her sole respite from her awful existence was a stray dog she’d taken under her care. The bullies found out about the dog through someone Lucy thought she could trust, and pummeled it to death right in front of her, causing her to lash out at them in desperation in a burst of power that left everyone in the room dead. The whole sequence might have an impact on you if you’re really invested in it, but I don’t think I was personally sold on those children – even if they were bullies – doing what they did in that scene. Over and over again in this anime the absolute worst thing possible will happen and that makes it painfully predictable and uninteresting in a way I haven’t really felt about anything since I watched Akame Ga Kill and all its pointless deaths. A few things even happen just for the purpose of setting up later violence or conflict without any regard for how much sense it makes for characters to make that decision in context. Nana, another character that had been imprisoned in the same facility as Lucy, was marked for execution before that facility’s director (Kurama) freed her. It was established that they had some kind of a caring, parent-child relationship in a twisted way so I don’t have trouble with him having acted to save her, the problem arises in him having released her into the exact same environment that she had previously been grievously injured by Lucy, and where the facility he wanted her safe from was actively conducting searches. I can’t reach any other conclusion than that he chose to do what he did because the story needed the extra bit of conflict, tension and action. Then there’s characters like Bando and Kakuzawa who exist solely for having someone Evil™ to oppose our main characters. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Back to the ecchi harem stuff I mentioned earlier, this anime spends an obscene amount of time on unfunny sexual “comedy” largely focused on Lucy/Nyu and the incestous romance between Kohta and his cousin Yuka. There’s an element of incest you can read into Kohta’s dynamic with Lucy, who was framed as a stand-in for his dead sister at times, but we are Not going to be unpacking that today. You can think about the incestous sub-text in your own time. Instead we’re gonna talk a little bit about Yuka, whose entire character is defined by her feelings towards her cousin. I’m going to be entirely honest and say it was so overt I wasn’t able to tell anymore if they were meant to be related, they both just accepted it so readily and the story never addressed how strange it was in any way at all. I mean there’s even an episode where they’re fully kissing in the rain and Yuka says something that seems to suggest she got wet – and the rainwater had nothing to do with it. It is bizarre. Then on the sexual comedy, it just felt deeply inappropriate because as I said before Nyu is functionally a child, and even without the amnesiac second personality she’s still physically a teenager, so there’s no circumstance in which I would be laughing along when she sexually assaults Yuka or gets naked in an awkward situation or something. These moments contribute significantly to the anime’s tonal dissonance, perhaps even more than the forced and/or stupid character choices. You’re presented with this show and its serious subject matter and ideas, and just constantly get whiplash from its back and forth between being dark and introspective then overly sexualised and light hearted. The experience falls apart even before you try to pick the story apart.
After all that, it also doesn’t come to any kind of satisfying resolution. Mayu’s trauma at being neglected and sexually abused completely disappears when she joins Kohta’s harem. Kohta doesn’t even momentarily dwell on Lucy having killed his entire family, they kiss and then right afterwards she’s randomly alone again and seemingly gunned down. Kurama does try to atone for his actions at the lab by killing himself and his daughter, and you’re probably supposed to feel bad about it but he’d been an unsympathetic character all the way through so there was very little impact to it, and it was undercut by a random person from the lab in the very next scene just switching back to being comically evil again out of nowhere. I would normally try to have a section at this point to cover the themes of the story, except in cases where It’s Really Not That Deep, and this is definitely one of those cases. But unlike the Jujutsu Kaisen movie or Vampire In The Garden where the story or experience was generally still good, Elfen Lied veers more in the opposite direction. It tries to go into different concepts, but it all ends up too shallow to be worth much of a comment. Honestly, even if it did its ideas justice, that would do nothing to redeem it. For instance, there’s something you could say about what Lucy’s character represents, that being a question on what really makes someone who they are. Was she a murderer from birth as some characters insisted, or did she become that monster because of the circumstances she was confronted with? The same question is a central part of Naoki Urasawa’s masterpiece of a story, Monster, and while that story had me on the edge of my seat for its entire run trying to piece together an answer, it would’ve been something else altogether if Johan started groping Nina every episode or two.
So in the final assessment, while I wanted to enjoy this anime a lot more and did enjoy some sequences and ideas it presented, it’s just far too messy for me to rate it highly or ever want to return to it beyond its first few minutes. This review might have been a little bit too harsh, because for as bad as Elfen Lied gets I would watch it a million times before I would watch something completely devoid of life like the Skycrawlers movie or something. Its biggest sin is just that it tried to do too much, and I can respect that. All its (flawed) effort nets it a 65 out of 100, because there’s the skeleton of a more interesting story buried beneath all of its problems. I mean I didn’t even talk about the vectors (invisible arms that the Diclonii like Lucy have) and how cool they are conceptually and in some of the fight scenes throughout the anime. As a final side-note though, just because I couldn’t fit it anywhere else, it’s more than a little weird that nobody in the story acknowledged that the “horns” of a Diclonius look just like cat ears. It was hard to take seriously at first, idk.
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