This Week in Anime

Just Who is Boogiepop?

Nicky
Maybe it's a vacation? Maybe we can go somewhere nice? Wouldn't it be nice to sit on the beach and get lost in a good book? A story where nobody has to deal with anything dealing with real world problems, maybe even turn the clock back about 20 or so years?

Also, what's a vacation without a bit of dance music?

Technically an anime-only sequel to the book that helped launched the Light Novel Craze, Boogiepop Phantom takes place after the events of Boogiepop and Others that ended in a beam of mysterious light launching into the sky and causing all the hormonal teenagers in town to start developing weird powers until the titular reaper comes to take them away. (Or is it?)

Boogiepop Phantom isn't told like your typical anime either. Even though there are a few recurring characters and a deep conspiracy plot, the Boogiepop series is more comparable to an anthology of cautionary tales, featuring several one-off characters playing out their own little dramas in a nonlinear fashion. It has more in common with episodes of the Twilight Zone or other western sci-fi/horror than it does most genre stuff we expect from Japan.

At first it feels pretty confusing to be a sequel with little to no explanation to the previous major events, and until 2019, there wasn't any anime adaption of the first part of the series proper, but despite all the supernatural trappings, what it presents is mostly down-to-earth stories about the changing world in the same tone of "spooky stories not to read before bedtime" kind of feel, with the character of Boogie themselves less of a player and more like an observer or a Deus Ex Machina in order to enact final judgement.

What follows is still an array of strange images and sounds certain to disorient and confuse many. The world of Boogiepop is sometimes bleak and unforgiving. The colors are washed out, the actors are plane-faced to the point of being almost forgettable. But it is nonetheless trying to capture something true to life in all its ugliness.

Apparently, this anime didn't always have a good reputation because of this combination of things and the Boogiepop Fever never quite caught on here because of it. But it still developed a cult following and that makes sense; it's definitely an acquired taste similar to Serial Experiments Lain or Kino's Journey which shares its character designer.

And there's no lack of bizarre here. You have a story about a boy who eats "Boob Bugs" that grow in people's hearts, butterflies that show people's memories, and various other ESP powers. But the stories at their core are ultimately mundane and the direction is such that you can always tell what the real story is based on the visuals. Any dedication to the gobbly gook explanation is more about extolling life's philosophy more than anything.

It also really sets up the plot for Manaka, a child with the power to make people view their traumatic memories, who is arguably more of a catalyst than either Boogiepop in the show. She also gets an ending very reminiscent of Batman: The Animated Series' Baby-Doll, another Western influence.

Also yes, there are TWO Boogiepops in this thing, we'll get to that

I feel like Manaka is a deep metaphor for what all the characters are secretly going through, which is to say, growing pains. These teenagers don't have the same control that adults have, are burdened with high expectations to take control of the future, and are way more perceptive than anyone expects them to be. You can see the view of the city move and change every day, but in the end, you're a prisoner of the world stuck in the limbo of neither being child or an adult.

Most of the kids have scenes where they're at odds with their parents, stressed from studying for entrance exams, trouble fitting in with their peers, or dealing with some sort of relationship drama. The first episode is about reconciling lingering grief and sexual desire for your friend's creepy ex-boyfriend to the point of becoming an extreme germaphobe. Did I mention that a lot of these stories are extremely psycho-sexual?

Also, gore. There's a lot of sudden and random death but that's just the blood icing on what's otherwise a pretty regular angst-cake.

Excuse you, that's just regular Boogiepop! Remember how I said there were two of them?

Fortunately, I came prepared. I still haven't read those novels yet (though they are available in English thanks to the folk at Seven Seas) but I actually did watch the most recent Boogiepop and Others anime on a whim that fortunately covered some of the events preceding this one. While it was still a lot to wrap my head around, I wasn't totally lost.

Also yes, you CAN watch the 2019 anime and then jump straight into this one from the year 2000, as weird as that sounds. Toka is an average 2nd year high school student at Shinyo Academy who carries around a big ole gym bag containing her cosplay outfit for her alternative personality that likes funny hats, whistling classical music, micro-filament wire, and dropping her voice two octaves to say ominous shit. It's Boogie's job to keep the world safe by taking away all the weird stuff that seems to threaten it.

Previously, Boogiepop worked to take down an evil called Manticore, a lab-experiment from the shadowy Towa Organization that was able to shape-shift, produce drugs, and eat people. Manticore was the result of trying to clone a highly evolved human who could only mimic the words of others, nicknamed Echoes, similar to Manaka. At the end of the story, Manticore tries to kill Echoes but Echoes burst into a beam of light creating the inciting incident. Manticore (Minako Yurihara) and their crony Masami Saotome both die but a new entity is born and takes Boogie's cloak and Minako's face to become Boogiepop II aka Boogiepop Phantom, and Manticore's consciousness takes on the appearance of Saotome, aka Manticore Phantom. They're generally the ones pulling the strings here with Boogiepop Phantom being the cause of most of the disappearances for their own machinations.


Cue: This is your brain on Visual Novels.

That's pretty much true of all Boogiepop stories FWIW, based on what I've seen from the previous anime. Boogie is simply an arbiter. A bit more interesting is the amateur detective, Kirima Nagi, but she doesn't do that much in this series other than ride a cool motorcycle and attempt to play Phasmophobia. She's more of a closer attempt to an actual hero.

She's basically there to help tie together some of the larger mysteries so the audience doesn't have to. She plays a bigger role in other stuff but people talking weird about her at school remind you how small the character's world actually is. Everyone has worlds upon worlds collapsing in on themselves. There's oceans to people that you may never know just by looking at them, and those kinds of dramas have always been appealing to me. All tinged by that creepy voice whispering Boogiepop Phantom.

I also suggest people check out the 2019 Boogiepop and Others if they're confused or simply want more of the same flavor with different paint. Stylistically, they're both very different, but they share the same structure and philosophy. And otherwise, there's always the novels just waiting there. I mean, after this episode, I definitely wanted to step away from my computer screen and read a goddamn book for once.