Flowers of Evil is based on a manga written and illustrated by Shuzo Oshimi.

The main character of Flowers of Evil is Takao Kasuga, a high school boy who is a bookworm; his favorite book is Les fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. He has a crush on Nanako Saeki, the beautiful and smart girl in his class.

When he goes to his classroom after school one day to retrieve a book he had left in his desk, he sees Nanako Saeki's gym clothes sitting out. Impulsively, Takao grabs the clothes; however, he is seen by his classmate, Sawa Nakamura.

Sawa is a girl who is lonely and isolated, and is considered by many of her peers to be "creepy." After she witnesses Takao taking Nanako's gym clothes, Sawa blackmails him into becoming her friend.

After watching the first episode of Flowers of Evil, the most notable thing to me about the series was the animation. The backgrounds are very well done, and are the best-looking part of the series.

When it comes to the characters, they look rather realistic when you get close-ups of their faces. However, when you see characters in long shots, there are absolutely no facial expressions; all you can see is a flesh-colored blob for a head. As the episode progressed, I figured out why the long shorts were done this way; several of those long shots were re-used in later scenes, so not drawing the faces makes these shots easier to re-use because the animators don't have to worry about lip flaps. Unfortunately, this does give the series a bit of an odd feel, and it kind of freaks me out when I see these long shots where the characters don't have faces.

To me, the pacing in the first episode felt a little on the slow side. It really didn't help that the first two minutes focused on establishing the feel of the neighborhood with nothing really happening. And it really didn't help that a lot of the footage from those first two minutes were re-used in the exact same sequence later in the episode.

Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to read any of the manga series that this anime is based on, so I don't know how the two mediums compare. Perhaps Flowers of Evil is a story that works better as a manga and doesn't translate well into an anime. Ultimately, watching the first episode of the anime made me interested in reading the manga, but it didn't really entice me to want to watch the remaining episodes of the anime series. I think anime viewers who already have familiarity with the Flowers of Evil manga will have a greater appreciation for this series than the average viewer.

Personally, I would recommend Flowers of Evil to anime viewers who are 15 or 16 years of age and older.

Title	Episodes	Release Year(s)	Director	Studio	N.A. Licensor
Flowers of Evil	13	2013	Hiroshi Nagahama	Zexcs	N/A