Elfen Lied
It should be immediately obvious to anyone that Elfen Lied is no ordinary anime. There is something entrancing about the opening, written and sung in Latin, asking God for mercy, and there is something deeply dehumanizing about the way that we first see Lucy, tearing through guards like paper dolls, sending blood and guts everywhere, her face covered by a helmet and her body naked. All of this brings me to the first thing that has to be said about Elfen Lied to people who are unfamiliar with it and might be interested in seeing it – Elfen Lied is not for the squeamish or children. It’s not generally what you would show to a friend to introduce them to anime. It is bloody and gruesome, and make no apologies for this, for it is art. The dramatically tragic backgrounds of the characters include torture, murder, rejection, poverty, and rape. Again, Elfen Lied gets away with this because it is deeply artistic and filled with deeper meaning, albeit meaning which can be difficult to see through the veil of violence.
Kotah is a college student who moves into an abandoned restaurant, but not before discovering Lucy while visiting the beach with his cousin. Lucy has just escaped from a secret detention center, mysteriously and brutally killing almost everyone in her way using invisible hands, or “vectors”. Lucy has lost her memory and is unable to say anything other than “Nyu!” after being hit in the head with an anti-tank round. With her background as a killer a secret, she moves in with them. It’s revealed that Lucy is not human, but a Diclonius, and has two small horns sticking out of her head.
Lucy is hunted by the police, special forces, and a more human-friendly but naive Diocletian named Nana, or Number 7. Nana has, as a character, an extremely serious message. Nana is blindly loyal to the director of the detention center, but is a prisoner like Lucy and has endured terrible experiments. Unlike Lucy, who is only further enraged into a murderer, Nana is docile. Perhaps Nana is an idealization of what would happen in such a situation; the idea of someone enduring treatment like that without becoming violent is initially comforting, but is, in actuality, a terrifying thought. Nana is unaware of her situation. Nana’s nightmare of money coming after her for revenge has always stuck with me as one of the most powerful scenes of Elfen Lied, even though it’s not at all graphic and not very long – it is a description of a frightening innocence.
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