Boogiepop Phantom #1

85 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 10/30/2001
Reviewed: 06/28/2005

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Many years ago in an apartment far, far away (as much as 15 minutes by car) Jerry and I sat down to watch a show he had just purchased via The Rightstuf, an anime retailer turned licensor who's known for their prolific and value-filled website sales. For $50 Jerry would unlock the door to something that would renew my vigor for the animated medium. I was stuck in a deep malaise of Knights of Ramune and it's ilk, unable to survive in the tepid morass of harem anime that companies seemed to realize were the new 'hot button'. I needed a life preserver... and a slice of carrot cake, preferably the kind with the chocolate chips baked right into it.

But that carrot cake has little to do with what I'm trying to relate to you right now.

One would be wise to be wary about anything the majority of anime fans find worthwhile. These are the same people that can sit down and find junk like Hyperdolls not only palatable, but actually entertaining! If my neighbor raped my dog, I would not let that same neighbor give me advice on the next poodle I should buy. Selfsame I was with Boogiepop Phantom, whose downright silly name belies it's much more serious intent.
Boogiepop has no time for genre conventions like humor and panty shots. Usually it's too busy sending out possessed highschool students to feast on the souls of their classmates. In a stylistic choice that any devout reader would know I enjoy, the stories of early Boogiepop episodes are a series of episodic events that all center around a giant explosion of light that happened somewhere in the middle of the city during the recent past.

This explosion sends out a wave of what I'm going to call "freak juice" to infect the teenage populace. Many of them have now have very little time to manage houses filled with beautiful women or daydream about the promise they made to their lost childhood loves. Such anime cliches are quickly thrown to the wayside when your halcyon days are filled with the devouring of psychotropic spiders which, in fact, are people's memories of their painful past. I know it's a little out there... but I think it just might be true! The characters relate their tales of woe as if they were speaking to their therapist at the weekly session, narrating their own stories (sometimes from beyond the grave) so blandly it reminds me of James Woods's performance in... any movie James Woods has ever been in. It works a little better here than it did in John Carptenter's Vampire$.
Boogiepop is tried together with an excellent visual style (farmed out, of course, to Korean animation shops) and a score that, at first listen, sounds like it was composed by insane German foley artists, with or without berets. A cursory perusal will show, indeed, that the sound design was contributed by none other than my secret love fetish Yuki Kajiura. Better known for her work on .hack or Noir, she lets her talent soar here with a cacophony of typewriter crashes and telephone rings. Do not be surprised if the pervasive slide whistle makes an appearance in next week's episode.

The only problem is the show's eponymous character. Boogiepop, featured right, makes it her business to appear at the end of every episode and spout off words of wisdom so lame a Chinese restaurateur would laugh at that them. But that's easy enough to bear, it's her character design that gets my goat. She wanders around the city attired like a 15th century Aztecan princess. Who wrote her into the show? The only explanation I can think of is that the creative staff realized Boogiepop Phantom was so good that any moral would immediately fall under its spell and be unable to function in the modern world. They would tell their friends, who would tell their friends, and (provided there's an anime fan out there that has actual friends) all six billion people on planet Earth would be turned into zombies nursing at the teat of Boogiepop! So, egalitarian people that the animation staff are, they set their plan into action! The crew re-enacted a choice scenes from the hit musical Stomp... on the stomach of seventeen year old artistic intern Hideki Inafune. What poor Hideki would eventually vomit out -- a vile concoction of beef curry and half-digested natto -- became the basis of the girl you've set eyes upon. With her inserted into the show it could no longer be considered the wanton ambrosia it once was. Without its hypnotic powers the show was demoted to just "really really good" and the world was saved!

...but for how long?