I thought about what it means to be a grown-up and what it means to be a child.
As the twentieth century comes to a close, I don't believe that all children will become grown-ups. They may get older, get taller, pay taxes, and get married, but there are people who will never become grown up. Take someone who ends up having to climb the ladder to being an adult two steps at a time due to some intense trauma. While this is happening, he may look at trivial things such as manga, sex symbols, railways, and fantasies. Then, there are the rest of us in the year 2000 a.d., whom those people pass on the stairs. More people fit into the latter group.
According to [Japanese] law, you're considered an grown-up as soon as you turn
twenty, but this isn't the case. When I turned twenty, I was still in front of the television, critically hitting Metal Slimes in the Dragon Quest I'd bought at a used game store, and resetting when I got frustrated. A real grown-up wouldn't have reset.
It's a kind of "Time out! Time out!" cheat particular to children. If Nintendo started to make an adult system that could play erotic games, I'd ask them not to include a reset button. Grown-ups, who don't have the luxury of resetting as they walk through life, have a right and duty to experience that struggle in games, as well.
Being a total kid, I buy a BOMB every month. To a proper adult, BOMBs are more childish than multicolored bonbons for kiddies. I can tell simply by comparing how they smell. Just as Kenzo Kitakata said, to be an adult is to smell like squid and breasts. (No, he didn't really say that.) However, once you pass thirty, another problem arises. In my workplace, there are seven desks, and four of them have BOMBs on them. What do you think about this? And it won't do you any good to run away saying, "Oh, but I want to read Lilly's column" or to take out an adult's secret weapon, a balance sheet. That only makes it worse. At a nearby Sunkus, seven or eight BOMBs are stacked up every day, and we ask ourselves, "Isn't this a first in Japan to have these at a convenience store?" Even if we were to talk about economics, we'd still be kids. Those people who still can't accept it should shut up and go observe Haruka Suenaga or Masami Nagasawa. A Lolita complex is merely an adult admiring a child a grown-up metamorphosis.
I think I've become a bit too preachy, so I'll change gears. This sort of improvisation is kind of grown-up.
I like Diet Coke. This is grown-up. The children I want to direct (being the adult I am) will choose Pepsi. It's like what Koikeya is to potato chips, Lee is to jeans, and the Dom is to mobile suits. To choose the main road of Coca-Cola is adult. If you're looking for zero calories, you have Diet Coke for the same price. But how much is really for your diet? Drinking Diet Coke won't make you lose weight. The cool thing about it is the accompanying positive thinking that tells you, "This won't be an obstacle to your diet." Because simply taking the main road is adult and will turn you old-geezer-like before you know it, you try adding the negative value of "diet" to control this. Then, you have the really off-the-wall Fanta. Grape, no less. Be careful with those, or it'll be, "If he's so grown-up, why is he messing around with that stuff?"
You might fool your mother, but the girl at Sunkus won't let it slip by her.
Many of you will say, "He didn't talk about FLCL at all." I'm sorry. You know, deciding what I should write is tough. As a director, interpreting your scriptwriter's novelization of your original anime is tough even for a proper grown-up. If I'd been too intricate in my wannabe-Kenzaburo Oe interpretation, the book itself would've become vague. The very adult Mr. Enokido said, "Isn't the best way to understand Fooly Cooly to read into all the various subtleties yourself?" I agree.