This was a very cool anime horror series, genuinely horrifying rather than just gory.
The writing in Boogiepop Phantom is as experimental as the animation in FLCL is. For starters there is no central character, although most characters appear in more than one episode. The stories intersect, and all take place in the same city during the same six year time span, but events aren’t always told in chronological order.
Five years ago, a serial killer stalked the streets of the city. A month ago there was a mysterious pillar of light in the sky and a massive blackout effected the city. Today there are missing kids in the news again, and the schoolchildren whisper legends of Boogiepop the angel of death.
Most reviews of this show have compared it to serial experiments: lain, but it seems to me to be more inspired by the post Ring horror boom. In fact, one of the first movies of that boom was Boogiepop and Others, also adapted from a series of illustrated novels by Kouhei Kadano.
The focus of the series is not so much on the supernatural elements as it is on the real horrors- episode six is especially poignant and disturbing, and there is no overt supernatural element.
In episode six the mother of one of the earlier killer’s victims finds her daughter’s diary. In reading the diary, she discovers why her daughter had become distant in the weeks before her death, due to a tragic misunderstanding.
The fates of several other characters are also truly horrific, from Yoko who suffers enormously for cheating on a test, to the stoner chick in episodes three and four who suffers a very gory fate, to the piano student who loses her dream.
The saddest story of all is Mayumi, who had a brain fever while pregnant and now has no memory of things that happen after the illness. Unlike Guy Pierce in Memento, she only carries a notepad rather than using homemade tattos.
One of the most disturbing things in this show is the way male characters are portrayed as sexual predators- even those who try to do good are seen as secretly predatory. In episode two Hisashi Jonouchi, who had dreams of heroism cut short by a bout with bone cancer, is granted the ability to take away the guilt and regret of others. He sees this as a spider eating at the person’s heart, and when we first saw him in episode one it looked as though he was a letch propositioning a girl to let him grope her chest. In fact, with one notable exception all of the people he saves are women and it seems he does have sexual motives whether he acknowledges it to himself or not. There is a very creepy character in episode four who is obsessed with hentai videogames.
What did anybody else who happened to see this think of it?
Has anyone seen Boogiepop and Others, the live action film? (I’ve found a bootleg of it, but it was unsubtitled Japanese).
