DESCRIPTION

CAST

NOVEL HorrorBoogiepop wa Warawanai
MANGA DramaBoogiepop wa Warawanai VS Imaginator
MANGA DramaYoake no Boogiepop
MANGA DramaBoogiepop wa Warawanai
ANIME DramaBoogiepop wa Warawanai: Boogiepop Phantom

REVIEWS

• 

  DeepEyes95

  85/100
  A Adaptation That Hinges On A Binge (no spoilers)

  

  (Non-Spoiler Review)

  Intro

  Boogiepop and Others (2019), is MADHOUSE's second attempt at the adaptation of Boogiepop light novel series by Kouhei Kadono. While to some it might be awful or flawed, too others such as myself it was quite excellent.

  ---

  Story & Pacing - 7.5/10

  The story is told through the perspective of several characters, which helps provide context to the story arc/event happening around them, then out pop Boogiepop or as she says "I am automatic". As for the story possessing any mature, depressing or dark kind of atmosphere, I felt nothing of that what so ever but it had something that pulls you in. The screenplay and dialogues doesn't get bog down by unnecessary exposition and speech, it strikes the right balance between dialogue & action. This story does however suffer from poor pacing which is why it is so disliked.

  ---

  Characters - 7/10

  While Boogiepop and Nagi Kirima are memorable, particularly their backstories, the other characters just fade away, they have nothing for you to really like about them or remember them by, which is why a lot of people get confused as to who these characters are. (Similar faces doesn't help either)

  

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  Audio and Soundtrack - 9.5/10

  Every single one of the audio effects were quite good, I really like the O.S.T done by Kensuke Ushio, as It helped convey the scenes well, I will only dock half a point for it's repetitive nature. The opening by MYTH & ROID is amazing as always they never seem to disappoint.

  

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  Art and Animation - 8/10

  The updated visuals look great but the production team would often cut corners by having faceless people in the background and characters with similar faces & hairstyles which I found quite distracting. The animation was great especially in the fight scenes which were fluid and well choreographed.

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  Conclusion

  While it was airing I continuously put off watching this series because I have the attention span of a fly and considering that this was a mystery & psychological anime, I knew I wouldn't return to it or would end up hating it because I thought it would dragging on and on with countless amounts of dialogue.
  What ended up being a great idea was to watch it 3 episodes at a time and I couldn't get enough and ended up watching the 4th episode and being completely confused because I didn't know that every 3 to 4 episodes was a story arc in it's own.

  So the key to enjoying this series is to binge watch it.

  ---

  Overall Scores (other things I didn't cover)
  Overall Story: 9/10
  Story Pacing: 6/10
  Story Climax: 8/10
  Characters: 7/10
  Art & Animation: 8/10
  Enjoyment: 9/10
  Audio (SFX): 9/10
  Audio (O.S.T): 9.5/10
  Screenplay and Dialogues: 10/10
  Voice Acting (Dub & Sub): 9.5/10

  Overall: 8.5/10

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• 

  CountZero

  70/100
  A solid first anime *adaptation* of the novels - though not without some issues, some tied to the source material.

  (Note: This review originally appeared on my blog, and has a link to my video review of the first 3 Boogiepop novels)

  Boogiepop and Others is, in a way, the first Boogiepop anime adaptation. It’s not the first adaptation in general. 2000 saw live-action adaptations of the first novel, and original anime series Boogiepop Phantom. That latter series was an anime original story, that assumed some prior knowledge of the novels. As the book series was tremendously successful in Japan, that wasn’t a problem there. In the US, on the other hand, this served as something of a barrier to the series success. Until 2019, there were no anime adaptations of the novels.

  Boogiepop and Others is an adaptation of the first five or so of the Boogiepop novels. As the second and third books are two halves of the same story, this makes for four stories. This covers the adaptation of the first novel and Vs. Imaginator, which I covered in my review last week. The other stories include Boogiepop at Dawn, which has the origins of Boogiepop. The finale is King of Distortion, which is probably the biggest challenge Boogiepop has faced over the series.

  Boogiepop Doesn’t Smile

  

  It is kind of impressive how much Touka fades into the background.

  As with the novels, while Boogiepop is the title character of Boogiepop and Others, they are never the viewpoint character. We only see Boogiepop through the perspective of third parties. We don’t even see Boogiepop from the perspective of their other self – Touka Miyashita. That is both a blessing and a curse for the series. Touka is just bright, cheerful and generic enough that she slips under the radar most of the time.

  Her presence is more notable when Boogiepop shows up, and the impact of that varies from the books to the TV series. In the novels, it’s rather understated. The weight of the shift varies from different viewpoint characters, and how well they notice the shift. In the anime, because there’s an audible vocal shift, it becomes much more pronounced.

  I’d compare it to the transition between Bruce Wayne doing his regular voice and Batman’s voice. On the page, it doesn’t come across unless the artist and inker do something to call attention to the difference. With Kevin Conroy on the other hand, well, listen for yourself:

  It’s most pronounced in the last 10 seconds of the video

  …And Others

  As in the books, the antagonists in the anime alternate between superpowered murderers like Manticore and thematic enemies like Imaginator. They aren’t a rogue’s gallery by any means, instead of existing to be a threat to Boogiepop, they are more of a threat for the viewpoint characters.

  In this respect, Boogiepop and the viewpoint characters are comparable to Walter Gibson’s The Shadow novels. In those novels, Harry Vincent, one of The Shadow’s agents, is the primary viewpoint character. Occasionally the novels shift to other viewpoint characters, as they put together the pieces of the plot of that novel’s villain – and only occasionally shifting to The Shadow. Even then on those instances, The Shadow was not generally a viewpoint character. Further, The Shadow was rarely personally in any danger – more often, Vincent or another agent was the one in peril.

  The same is the case here. Boogiepop is never personally in peril. The viewpoint characters are. They’re (generally) not hapless hostages-in-waiting, but they also aren’t a force of nature like Boogiepop. It makes the supporting cast a lot more engaging, and keeps the plot moving without always having Boogiepop being present.

  Room for Improvement Evolution

  That said, I really wish Touka was written more as a character instead of as set dressing that Boogiepop occasionally pops out of. It leads to this feeling that some of our point of view characters have figured out that Touka is Boogiepop (but doesn’t know it), and they’re hanging out with her as a weird crap sounding board. By which I mean, if they talk about something weird and Boogiepop chips in, they know they’re on to something.

  I’m very glad I watched the show, and I’m definitely continuing on to Boogiepop Phantom. However, I don’t know how confidently I can recommend the series. I came to this because the discussion of Boogiepop Phantom as a mind-fuck anime had been a large part of anime fandom in the early 2000s. If you came into this series without having ever heard of Boogiepop, I don’t know how much you’d get out of it.

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• 

  cybergami

  70/100
  An underrated jewel of the psychological genre

  "A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us" -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  

  Introduction

  Boogiepop is an automatic agent that "pops up" from the subconscious desires and possibilities of a person. They are said to appear when the person is near a "threat" to all humanity.
  In my view, Boogiepop wa Warawanai is a beautiful reflection on what would happen if people's subconscious thoughts - not only as individuals but as a community - would act and be like if they were given a life of their own. I guess you could say that Boogiepop is an embodiment of humanity's will to fight and protect itself upon sensing danger.
  Note: The reason I wrote this review is because I feel the show was confusing to some episodic watchers, and wanted to offer a detailed review for those who are still trying to grasp what the show was all about!

  Warning: From this point on the review contains heavy spoilers.

  ---

  Story:

  The story telling methods may seem erratic and confusing from a first watcher's perspective. And that is because there really is no space or time continuum between the scenes. Events that happened before in time will be presented after and vice-versa. This is specially true for the first arc. The series is composed of four different arcs, and I will proceed by reviewing them separately since they are so distinct. I thus apologize for the length of the review! Please feel free to skip these detailed arc reviews, if you do not have a lot of time.

  The Manticore Arc: 9/10
  This arc is without a doubt the one with the most erratic storytelling. You might need to re-watch to actually understand the real sequence of events. This arcs introduces most of the characters, including Boogiepop and the nature of his existence as explained above. "Manticore" is the name given to the clone made out of Echoes’ when he was captured and experimented on by the Towa Organization. This backstory is an interesting detail, since in the later arcs they refer to the Towa Organization having created artificial humans out of a blueprint of someone who had out-evolved the human race, and I wonder if Echoes is the one they used. Echoes' clone, however, escaped the Organization’s grasp by killing everyone in the facility and became a man-eating monster. It’s also interesting to see the duality between Echoes and Manticore since they are basically the same person but they couldn't be more different: Echoes is empathic and cares about humans while Manticore only cares for eating and using them as marionettes. Despite that, Manticore ends up sharing a deep bond with Saotome Masami, a high school boy who “was not evil on his own” but who, upon meeting the man-eater, “realized he had a deeply rooted hated for the living and then became a man-eater himself” as explained by Boogiepop later on, though he didn’t literally became a man-eater but instead allied himself to Manticore, to help them take over the world.
  The animation and use of soundtrack in this arc is particularly spot on.

  The Imaginator Arc: 6/10
  This arc follows the story of Minahoshi Suiko’s mission as the Imaginator. Suiko is an MPLS who can see people’s deaths. As she becomes the Imaginator she embodies “a possibility which can manipulate death”. She does indeed delay her own death, and all of this arc happens during the time lapse between her jumping out of a window and actually hitting the ground - don't ask me how, though!. After the jump, she meets Asukai Jin, another MPLS who can vizualize people's hearts as flowers and see what’s missing them, and convinces him to join forces with her. Their goal was to modify the human heart and fill up the missing gaps, by implanting in them the seed of a “standardized” heart with no flaws. This intention is later on addressed by Boogiepop as trying to “draw out the death from people and gather it so she could create something great”, though my guess is that “death” refers to a set of characteristics which might eventually lead to the person’s demise (such as grief, anxiety, aggressiveness, etc). As Asukai Jin seems to be on a spiraling descent to madness (becoming uncannily similar to Yagami Light from Death Note), delving in the power of manipulating people’s heart, on the other hand Minahoshi Suiko’s purpose seems to have stemmed from a pure desire to help all of humanity “break through” their suffering and get to the next level - the next stage of evolution. This arc also follows the love story between Orihata, an artificial human enslaved to Spooky E, and Masaki, Nagi’s step-brother. Personally I found this arc the least interesting which might be due to the story’s pace slowing down a lot, and also I didn’t find their love story that interesting. It is however, very rewarding to see Hana Kanazawa interpreting a villain as mentioned before, and also the last episode is spectacular and is honestly where my enjoyment of the show really started. This arc is also riddled with very curious reflections on the nature of being human, love and society.

  The Fear Ghoul Arc: 10/10

  This arc starts out with a tale about how Boogiepop came to existence and earned his name. Boogiepop first appeared as the result of the dying will of Scarecrow, an artificial Human working for Towa Organization as a detective. Scarecrow was tasked with a long-term job of finding MPLS (individuals with extraordinary powers) and occasionally the job of uncovering information about other agents’ betrayals to the Organization. He was a good detective, however he lived frustrated by the fact his job only brought about the downfall of others. In his quest to find intel about Teratsuki Kyouchirou he met Kirima Nagi as a young girl, hospitalized because of recurring pains caused by her evolution. Amidst their conversations about superheroes and justice, and touched by the suffering experienced by Nagi, Scarecrow ends up turning a blind eye on the fact that she is an MPLS and additionally steals from Towa Organization a drug which will help complete and stabilize the progress of her evolution. His rebellion causes his demise, as Mo Murder was sent to dispose of him, and with his dying breath he starts to regret the decisions he made (and feels much like a coward because of it). This is when Boogiepop appears for the first time and he confesses to him, admitting his will to be “judged and punished”. The name “Boogiepop” is derived from Scarecrow calling him “a creepy bubble that might disappear at any moment” (i.e. "pop"). However, Scarecrow misjudged the nature of his apparition as Boogiepop insteads leads him to his redemption by asking him if he could come back to the moment when he felt his heart was the most pure. Later, when Mo Murder assesses his dead body he is surprised with the facial expression with which he died (which is not revealed to us). However, I believe this scene mirrors the scene following the death of the drug dealer in the Imaginator Arc whereas another detective is surprised that the girl died with such a “peaceful expression, like all the thorns in her heart had been plucked out”. Although the ending of the episode is open to interpretation, I believe we can thus assume Boogiepop guided him to re-experience that moment in time and as a result died peacefully.
  A psychiatrist called Kisugi ends up discovering the vial of the evolution drug, and used it on herself as an experiment. Kisugi, who had lived all her life hunted by fear, becomes instead the hunter as she starts a wave of grisly murders, feeding on the fear of her victims, thus acquiring the name of “Fear Ghoul”. This is the cue for a journey of self discovery for Mo Murder, whose character grows as he searches for the killer along with child Nagi. This arc also introduces, quirky little details about other character’s past, namely how Minahoshi Suiko meets Kirima Seiichi as a child and the conversation they have not only explains where she got the phrase “sometimes it snows in April” but it is also an interesting meditation about the ending of the previous arc and how her future work as the Imaginator was not necessarily a failure.
  In my opinion, but the plot and animation in this arc was just a ball out of the park!

  The King of Distortion Arc: 7/10
  The last arc picks up on Teratsuki’s work, the artificial human who Scarescrow had been sent to investigate. Teratsuki had left behind a strangely distorted building called the “Moon Temple” (actually the literal translation of “Teratsuki”) whose purpose was unknown. Immediately after the building being opened to the public, we discover that Teratsuki set up an ingenious trap on the event of such situation, imprisoning the visitors inside and gassing them to sleep. The self-entitled King of Distortion then appears and takes advantage of the moment to conduct a massive experiment on the sleeping visitants. For each of them he gives voice and body to something lingering inside their heart, giving them an opportunity to overcome it and “turn their sorrow into gold”. It seems the King of Distortion is not entirely in control of the experiment though, and Boogiepop is forced to intervene when things take a turn for the worse as a boy’s imaginary father figure (a huge monster called Zooragi) gets out of control and tries to destroy the whole building. The boy’s pent-up feelings are of such magnitude that they break through to reality, interfering even with the spectators of the accident. The series refers to this ability as the power “to point out the distortion in people’s hearts and draw it out”, and hence the name King of Distortion. This entity, much like Boogiepop itself, was born as an alternate personality from Tanaka Shirou’s feeling of guilt towards Kamikishiro Naoko’s death, and the fact that he had not been able to fully retribute her feelings while she was alive. Unlike the Imaginator though, the King of Distortion is not Boogiepop’s enemy, the reason being that he is quite “flexible” and willing to consider several paths for the future, not opposing humanity, but rather insidiously trying to guide it further. Thus, Tanaka Shirou is let of the hook. Meanwhile it is revealed that Teratsuki’s purpose was to get back at the Towa Organization by exposing their existence to the few people who’d have managed to awaken and reach the top of the tower - which would mean they have out-evolved normal humans — and give them a word of advice regarding the threat they represent to Towa Organization’s plans.
  In my opinion, the use of sound was the real highlight of this arc.

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  Sound and Music: 8/10

  The use of sound is quite unique. To add tension and enphasis to certain key moments, the ambience music suddenly shifts or even stops. It is perfectly fitted to the plot. I personally find the ending and opening song very appealing and exquisite as well. I would have liked to see more variety to the OST though!

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  Art and Animation: 8/10

  The art and animation are not unique but they were certainly executed with great care, and it shows. I found that the few action sequences and character movements were very much above average, which is surprising considering it's more of a psychological anime.

  

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  Characters: 8/10

  It is difficult to get attached to the character or to get to know them intimately since the arcs are always changing and the "main" players in each one are different, the only main character throughout being Boogiepop itself. The world is rather small however, and it is very interesting to see how a seemingly irrelevant side character in one arc might be a protagonist in the next, or to see reoccurring characters have completely different roles throughout the whole story. However, I found myself wanting to know a lot more about each individual character, since they were all quite special. Every single one of them was a lot more than met the eye, a long ways past common character stereotypes.

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  Voice Acting: 9/10

  I absolutely loved the voice acting. Each one of the VAs seemed to have been carefully picked for each character and superbly executed. Aoi Yuuki's voice (Boogiepop) was intense and soothing and Kana Hanazawa's fit the Imaginator character like a glove! These were the ones which striked me the most, and also it was very interesting seeing these voice actor's voicing characters so different from their usual repertoire.

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  Conclusion
  Overall, a great anime of its genre! So often you see anime tagged "Psychological" or "Philosophical" which fail to make any insight about the nature of people or any point about anything whatsoever. This is not the case with Boogiepop. This is an anime that does not fail to deliver those insights, and does so very straight to the point. The characters, animation and soundtrack all very well-executed as well. It is true that the plot can be a little bit confusing, and it certainly isn't for everyone's tastes. However if you want a meaningful psychological approach to common science fiction themes, this is definitely an anime to revisit.

  Thank you for reading!

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