Character · FLCL
Naota Nandaba
Twelve years old, determined to look unimpressed, and growing machinery out of his forehead.
In Otakana the clue reads: Twelve-year-old who grows a horn from his head
- Type
- Character
- Series
- FLCL
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Naota Nandaba lives in a town whose largest building is shaped like an iron, works hard at being bored, and drinks his coffee black because his brother's ex-girlfriend does. Then a woman on a Vespa hits him in the head and a horn starts growing out of the dent. Robots come out of it. Everyone around him treats this as an inconvenience rather than a miracle.
The horn is the least subtle metaphor in anime and the show knows it. Everything embarrassing about being twelve is on the screen: the older girl he cannot read, the brother he is measured against, the adults who are no better at any of this than he is. Naota spends six episodes insisting nothing is happening to him while visibly changing shape.
FLCL came out of Gainax and Production I.G, directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, six episodes released between 2000 and 2001. The animation changes style whenever it likes, including a long stretch drawn as manga panels, and the pillows play over most of it. At roughly two and a half hours in total it is one of the shortest complete stories the medium has.
Spelling NAOTA
NAOTA is five letters, three of them vowels, and the AO pair in the middle is the awkward part. English rarely puts those two together, and the ear hears something closer to now-ta, which sends people towards NOATA. Two A's, one O, one T. The family name is Nandaba, but the game is asking for NAOTA.