Stark700

Once in a while, there may come a show with complex storytelling and character roster that is much more than what it seems. The light novel medium is such a style of Japanese novel literature where imaginations are endless. As one of the earliest light novel originators, Boogiepop Phantom’s presence could be felt as far as back in the early 2000s. While I have seen that show many years ago, it felt like Boogiepop Phantom was missing something, or perhaps needed a boost to regain its popularity again. It’s 2019 and here we are again, connected by a powerful entity known as the Boogiepop, alegend among community who came to judge humanity. Consisting of 22 light novel volumes, it’s obvious the show doesn’t have the time to adapt every single one. The 2000s’ series ended up being an anime original while this show commits to a much more faithful adaptation. Jumping into the new Boogiepop may seem like a walk in the park but make no mistake, this show is not so easy to understand. In fact, I would recommend re-watching scenes and episodes at any chance to get a better experience. And it all begins with the first 3-episode arc: Boogiepop Does Not Laugh. Before I venture deeper, do be aware that while the anime overall has interconnecting themes, it follows non-linear storytelling structure. In fact, it adapts an arc format where each arc consists a series of episodes together. From this adaptation, we get four arcs with “Vs The Imaginator” being the longest. That being said, I should mention that the first arc will most likely make or break for most viewers. Essentially, we are introduced to a supernatural entity known as Boogiepop, the urban legend with a keen insight on observing human behavior. But as the show progresses, it’s shown that her ambiguous actions may be more puzzling than what it seems. Who is Boogiepop? What exactly does it want? Why is it here in our world? These are some of the questions many will have in their mind for this first arc. Indeed, it shouldn’t take long to realize humanity is in jeopardy with the presence of “Synethic Humans” among society. On the outside, they may look like us but on the inside, they are beings with a twisted ambition. Their existence also proves how weak humans are by manipulating our free will. It’s a fate worse than death when you realize the atrocious acts manipulated individuals can commit. Spooky E is a prominent example during his reign of terror during the “Boogiepop vs Imaginator” arc. Having no second thoughts about harming or even killing humans, he represents pure evil as an agent of the Towa Organization. That also brings in a big question. Just what exactly is the Towa Organization? While it’s an organization responsible for creating synthetic humans, no one truly knows their real agendas. The catalyst of this mysterious group is a character named “Echoes” who came to Earth to judge humans. The first episode establishes him as a being who is confused about human behavior. The Towa Organization seems to organize ways to test humans through dangerous experiments, many which result in deaths or disaster consequences. Their main goal throughout the show revolves how to control human’s way of evolution. It’s a complex concept that may take untold amount of time to achieve. In addition, the Towa Organization is known to have great influence in the world, capable of escaping the law and defying authority. I think it may take some time for viewers to figure out their purpose in the show because as I mentioned before, there’s multiple subplot building on in each arc that can get very confusing. The remainder of the course of the series also explores other important themes such as human choices. Some characters in the show (who are ordinary humans) play important roles to make differences in certain outcomes. If you remember before, free will allows people to accomplish great things if they put their mind into it. On the other hand, Boogiepop is someone that has potential to accomplish imaginable feats. It’s why she is perceived as a main adversary against the Towa Organization. In a way, I even see her as a successor of Echoes. However, Boogiepop isn’t necessarily an “overpowered character”. In the final arc, she wonders if defeating the King of Distortion is possible. But in essence, it’s her wise words and wisdom that I find more appealing than other characteristics. Her words may be interpreted differently depending on how you perceive them but by the end of the day, she really lives up to her name of being a legend. Madhouse is responsible for once again to bring Boogiepop to life and for what’s worth, it’s somewhat well made in terms of accurately committing to its ominous atmosphere. There’s no doubt the quiet and eerie mood lives throughout the entire duration of the show. This especially applies to the static shots in the opening episodes. It also uses a clever amount of raw character emotions to show how humans react under extraordinary circumstances. My main criticism though lies with some of the raw animated scenes as at times, it feels off . This shouldn’t hold the show back altogether but can weigh down the enjoyment on occasions. Luckily, the music, OST, and theme songs for make up for this with its well-timed choreography and directing. We live in a world now where almost anything is possible. For a show like Boogiepop, its world contains ideas that you can’t even begin to imagine if any of it became real. Being one of the most influential light novels, many writers have followed its origins and made work that became worldwide attractions. Now I will say this anime is really not one aimed for the casual audience. Many episodes may require re-watches as any scene may hold significance or clues to the show’s plot. It’s also recommended to watch this in marathon sessions than a weekly airing. But hey, once you get hooked into the world of Boogiepop, you may want to stick around for more.

SingleH

The name Boogiepop is pretty stellar. It’s catchy and unique, of course, but it also has a wealth of meaning behind it not many people are aware of, at least not here in the West. The name Boogiepop is a self-deprecating inside joke Kouhei Kadono, the author of the original novels, thought up to mock himself and his struggles in actually getting said novels published. Kadono has always been something of an arthouse writer, and he had quite a hard time getting any of his initial works published since he had yet to make a name for himself and all the publishers he approached saidthey simply couldn’t turn a profit printing pieces with such little popular appeal and no audience base, even after—according to Kadono—honestly admitting how good they were. To successfully break out into the market, Kadono made a compromise with himself. He decided to tone down his more abstruse, niche stylization, his self-proclaimed “boogie” writing, and tone up the more accessible, popular style which the inherently cynical publications were willing to print, hence the name Boogiepop: a forced dichotomy between the imagination of an auteur and the creative restraint of a corporate shill, “boogie” and “pop.” The original anime adaptation of the series, Boogiepop Phantom (2000), which was also produced by Madhouse, is founded on that so-called “boogie” style. It seeks to be tonally expressive, narratively experimental, visually symbolic, deep seated in the thematic gravity of the novels which the adaption team clearly had an genuinely intimate understanding of, and most importantly, it sought to market itself toward a largely mature target audience. On the other hand, this new adaptation, Boogiepop and Others (2019), is founded on the “pop” style, which seeks merely to appeal to the lowest common denominator of kids and teenagers with obtusely frenetic action, archetypal writing, generic self-insert character designs, spoon-fed theming, and as much modern anime pandering as they could fit in the package. While my irrepressible love and respect for the masterful novel series this terribly disappointing and wildly misguided adaptation was based on will inevitably turn this review into a thinly veiled diatribe, there is a fair deal of credit to give where it’s actually due. Firstly, the show looks gorgeous…in ways. As mentioned, the artwork is stylistically abysmal. It doesn’t look like Boogiepop should look nor feel like Boogiepop should feel; it’s simply the most accessible, basic art style imaginable which has completely abandoned the textured, almost brooding darkness which characterized the original novels and the atmospherically brilliant original adaptation. However, the actual technical quality of animation—while plagued with about as much inconsistency as any other anime these days—can get stupidly high and make the show a feast for the senses if not for the discerning eyes. I remember hearing the Natsume Team at Madhouse had dropped One Punch Man and being utterly dumbstruck. Why in the world would they’ve dropped one of the industry’s most profitable titles in decades? The manga is always best selling and the anime was an international success, so what could possibly have taken precedence over such a commercial giant? Apparently, this. Director Shingo Natsume utilized many of the same connections he called upon for One Punch Man and Space☆Dandy and landed the show with some positively daring fight choreography and bombastic sakuga—sometimes even to a fault, seeing as a significant portion of episode directors working on the project clearly did not share his creative vision for Boogiepop, but for now I’m getting ahead of myself. Despite the exceptionally clever, thoughtful, and inventive antagonists of the novels being reduced to needlessly enigmatic, vapidly motivated, edgy shounen-style villains, I’d be lying if I said their respective confrontations and subsequent defeats weren’t animated about as well and with about as much personality as Madhouse could’ve managed, and even if the moment-to-moment of the show looked boring as hell, when it occasionally went all out, it brought to life scenes I never thought I’d see outside my imagination, and even I can’t deny that gratification. Even with the visuals being so strong, at least technically, the audio is even better, and more importantly, more emblematic of what Natsume was actually going for with this evidently fallacious adaptation. While the sound design—a facet of production which is seemingly overlooked to a greater and greater degree with each passing day as studios realize their main audience, young people, lack any critical sense for quality soundscapes—is expectedly lackluster, the actual score is outstanding. The composer, Kensuke Ushio, truly is the rising star of the anime industry, praised for all his rightfully acclaimed work from Devilman Crybaby’s revolutionary synthwave, Liz and the Blue Bird’s outright emotive orchestra, Koe no Katachi’s SFX-based composition, and Ping Pong: The Animation’s unforgettably rousing, electrifying soundtrack which amounted to one of the best anime has ever seen. While his music for Boogiepop and Others (2019) doesn’t quite reach the heights of his more legendary work, it’s still as magnificent as you’d expect given his repertoire, but the fact his distinct style is what Natsume was looking for in a composer speaks volumes about why this adaptation feels so off. If you’ve had the pleasure of listening to Ushio’s music before, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but the fact Natsume thought Ushio’s calming aesthetic jibed with the experimental identity of Boogiepop in any way whatsoever really shows why he missed the mark. The novels are mature, and therefore root their humanity in their nuanced characterization. Almost every novel after the first is fueled not by character, but by mystery, spectacle, and metric tons of Kadono meticulously expounding on his genius theming and bizarre concepts, all of which simply do not play well with Ushio’s soft, ambient sound. Boogiepop is contemplative and poignant, certainly, but while the first book wherein these few chapters of concentrated emotion lie would fit well with Ushio’s music, these moments are cut from the anime in their entirety, or worse yet, edited around to such a degree they lost all the catharsis which they had in the original. And this is the problem with Boogiepop and Others (2019): if you’ve read the novels, then the characters and themes will’ve lost all thought, and if you haven’t, then how could you even invest in such a hollow cast or be intrigued by such vacuous symbolism in such a seemingly aimless storyline? Natsume has more than proven himself as a talented director in the past with his work on One Punch Man, the action spectacle you all know and love, and the infinitely better yet infinitely lesser known police procedural, ACCA: Jusan-ku Kansatsu-ka, and if One Punch Man showed us his phenomenal action direction and ACCA his equally phenomenal character direction, then Boogiepop and Others (2019) showed us just how well he could combine the two into a show as (potentially) exciting as it is (potentially) contemplative. Sadly, the script absolutely annihilated any sense of flow which those two works had and greatly limited his skill as a director. The writers of this adaptation very blatantly ordered scenes as if checking off boxes on a bulleted list and make no attempt to add characterization, style, personality, or nuance, simply wanting to show X, Y, and Z just for the sake of having shown it. Myriad scenes had frankly choppy execution, were poorly edited, had awkward pacing, and were made with poor sound design and messy audio mixing. Additionally, what exactly is shown on screen has been greatly edited and sometimes completely censored from what the original anime adaptation was willing to show in gore and what the original novels were willing to show in nudity. The characters are empty husks, since they’re given no time to be anything otherwise. It absolutely speeds through the narrative and character arcs alike, zooming past all the central themes, every chance to humanize the cast, and the alluring tone which had me and so many others in love with the original works. I know I sound like a broken record, but this is all yet another manner in which this new adaptation derails itself from its more adult source material and constricts its own charisma to sell out to the younger, more vast, more accessible audience who just want to watch some flashy action sakuga and go home. They cram an entire chapter of the novel into episode one alone—one of the most dense setup chapters to a novel I've ever read in my life into a single twenty minute episode—only to then cram the next three chapters into episode two, unceremoniously blazing through a major character death which served as the entire emotional crux of the original novel just so they could get to the fight sequence in chapter five as soon as possible, even though their speedy pacing totally killed the tension it would’ve had if they had properly built up to it. To be fair, this problem lessens as the show continues because Natsume entrusted more technically pivotal scenes to outsourced key animators, episode animation directors, and in the case of the Boogiepop Overdrive arc, even a whole new storyboarding team. There were some Ex-Sunrise/Bones animators, some WIT Studio animators in both the show and the opening, and even some Trigger boys. Obviously, this had them ending up with the drastically inconsistent levels of quality I mentioned forever ago, which just so happened to align the “worse” at the beginning and the “better” at the finale. I mean, in hindsight, that opening itself told me everything I needed to know about this new adaptation in a hopelessly forthright fashion. With MYTH & ROID being as invested as they’ve historically been in the projects they're involved with, the opening theme for Boogiepop and Others (2019) is great. It’s nowhere near as unique, striking, tone setting, and memorable as the opening theme for Boogiepop Phantom (2000), but it still got it right more than the rest of this show did, and it warns of what the show had in store for me by being paired with an opening animation which is just a bunch of pseudo-symbolic bullshit having nothing at all to do with Boogiepop or its original message. MYTH & ROID’s theme, “Shadowgraph,” is about loss of self and general despondence and dissociation with social norms and stigma, which, while not directly touching on Boogiepop’s central theme of normalcy, is at least directly relevant to the narrative and characters, but the visuals and animation itself are nothing of the sort. And speaking of theme songs, the lack of insert songs in this show was actually, physically painful for a fan as obsessed as I am. They didn’t play Oingo Boingo’s “No One Lives Forever” during the big Manticore scene even though a song that old would've been a breeze to get the license for—especially for a production team able to get the permission to air five weeks worth of made-for-TV anime back-to-back, by the way—nor did they have Boogiepop appear at the school whistling Composer Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” despite the fact it MADE that scene in the novels, only to then use it later in the Boogiepop VS Imaginator arc anyway. I swear, it’s almost like the staff forgot when and why they should care. I apologize for dropping my eloquence and devolving into a ranting, raving fangirl in the last little moments there, but hey, I warned you it would happen. Bringing it all back to a place of critical review, though, I think it’d be healthy to unbiasedly examine what we ultimately have here. We have me, some fanatical Boogiepop Superfan who recognizes the perfection of the original novels and will criticize anything and everything which isn’t equally infallible, and a well made yet emotionally, thematically, and stylistically unfulfilling and often destructively unfaithful adaptation. If someone watches this and likes it despite everything I’ve bitched about, then that’s awesome. They have another anime to enjoy. And if someone watches this and sees its hollow core for what it is, then they’ll just read my review or others like it, go check out the originals, and love them instead. Neither scenario is negative. Sure, I’m disappointed a godsent novel series and its superb original adaptation weren’t followed up with by an equally outstanding work of art, but nothing it did offended me, because while it certainly fails to fan Boogiepop’s flaming brilliance and all which makes the series so legendary, it didn’t go and make Boogiepop downright bad. So, at the end of the day, I honestly recommend this show if you’re for some reason hesitant about getting straight into the classics, if only as an introduction to the Boogiepop franchise and giving you that initial push. I know that’s cheating, but I’m honestly just worried if I’m too critical, then I’ll scare people away from one of my favorite titles to date and force them to miss out on what could be one of theirs as well. The last thing I’d want is for you to shy away from a timeless masterpiece because a less than competent adaptation team failed to fully capture its magnificence and some hack asshole on MAL gave the whole property a bad name by going in too hard on their work, which itself is both the worst version of the story, and not even all that bad. Thank you for reading.