Fool Night arrives for Thanksgiving, and it's about a man who wants to become a flower
Kasumi Yasuda's manga gets its adaptation on November 26, animated by Sunrise and Shaft — a pairing that looks wrong on paper and looks extremely correct in motion. The Anime NYC drop included a new trailer plus additional voice cast, and a making-of featurette that has since gone public.
The premise, as presented: a depressed man elects to undergo transformation into a flower. The seed does not do what it's supposed to do. Something parasitic grows inside him instead.
What the footage sells is atmosphere. Environmental horror staged against a dense, gorgeously rendered city, with the kind of extreme facial work Shaft has been refining since the Monogatari years, now attached to material where the distortion means something. Sunrise brings the structural discipline. The combination is doing a lot.
Netflix is releasing its most upsetting title of the year during the week most of its audience is trapped in a house with relatives. Bold scheduling.
The manga has a devoted following and a reputation for being difficult to describe without sounding either pretentious or ridiculous. The trailer suggests the adaptation has found the tone. Whether a general Netflix audience follows it there in late November is a different question.