FLAG Episode One Review

FLAG BandaiChannel 


FLAG Official Site 

Congregatio de propaganda fide

Giant robots. Mecha. What kinds of images do these words propagate in your mind? What kinds of ideas do these words initiate? Complex concepts or programmed precepts? Have you ever considered why these images and ideas fill your thoughts?

FLAG is about a picture. A photograph of a flag. The image is powerful, iconic. The photo is seen on magazine covers, newspapers, billboards, behind the talking heads of the cable news channels and projected behind politicians and military peacekeepers who stand behind podiums. The photo of the flag becomes propaganda.

All the visuals in FLAG are presented to us as a kind of media collage. We see this story through the viewfinders of digital cameras, video cameras, and webcams. Sometimes we watch video clips on laptops, other times we watch as photos are brought up from the memory cards of the digital camera interface. We never actually see anything in FLAG directly, only filtered and recorded media. Where there are gaps in the media document we are guided by narraration, a voice over a dark, empty frame.

We are introduced to the photographer who took the photo of the flag. The flag in the photo has been stolen from a temple. The photo has turned the flag into a near religious relic in a middle eastern country torn by civil war. The United Nations decides to recover the flag and sends the photographer to document the special forces unit on their mission. But you have to ask yourself why are they sending the photographer?

FLAG challenges you, the story and the storytelling is dense and non-traditional. There is no simple story arch, but lots of lots of little fragments that don't fit together seamlessly. Images change their meanings and we can not use them as simple visual shorthand out of context. Photos of the people in the middle eastern country torn by civil war that we see at the beginning of the episode are juxtaposed with a demo video of a UN giant robot that looks like an SUV commercial as it speeds through the desert with dynamic camera angles. Video of the giant robot shooting a big gun at a jeep are intercut with those photos of women crying for the dead and refuges and a soldier carrying away a body. Yeah, it's obvious. It's also propagandistic. This isn't gonna be a giant robot anime, it's aiming much higher.