Boogiepop wa Warawanai

Boogiepop Phantom is a very interesting adaptation, mostly because of how different the experiences of watching it before and after reading the source material were for me. Personally, I try to view anime adaptations as standalone projects (unless explicitly stated by the creators otherwise), and that's how I'm going to look at this anime in this review as well, however, I will talk about how the adaptation relates to the light novels.

There's a way to write the plot of a story by splitting it into 2 "layers". The majority of the time the audience is shown the main layer, and only sometimes, through implications, ... allusions, maybe disjointed events, the writer shows what is happening in the background (the 2nd layer). This helps in a limited amount of runtime to expand on general plot, world-building and themes. However, this method of storytelling expects the viewers to be very attentive if they want to piece the plot together and sometimes expects them to come up with arbitrary explanations for the ambiguous parts of the story. Boogiepop Phantom does exactly this, the "2nd layer" of the story either refers to events that happened in the light novels, sometimes with anime staff's own interpretations of said events, or presents the original Phantom side story. Knowing the content of the source material, the plot of the anime becomes more or less straightforward. But as I said, I'm going to evaluate this anime as a completely separate project.

Boogiepop Phantom is an episodic anime about mental struggles people face in the modern city but with a twist that all of them encounter some sort of paranormal phenomena, all while an ambiguous sci-fi thriller plot unravels in the background. The plot is presented in a non-linear style, there are no clear protagonists, instead, each episode focuses on particular characters that sometimes reoccur in the background roles later in the show, connecting the whole story together in some way. The anime overall gave me a feeling that it wanted to present a city life/society rather than any specific person/character. There are a lot of psychological and existential themes, some of the major ones are dealing with negative events and memories, escapism, and the difficulty and necessity of growing up/moving forward in life.

There are going to be spoilers for episode 4 below.

One of the difficulties in making episodic anime, assuming the writing plays an important role in the work, is that you have to tell a separate, fleshed-out story in a relatively short amount of time. In my opinion, not all of the Boogiepop Phantom's episodes were able to achieve that; however, the ones that did were done excellently. To not clog my review with every single episode analysis, I'm just going to talk about only one of my favorite episodes as an example of what I liked about the show. Episode 4 is about a troubled young guy without any major aspirations in life. He lives with his parents, doesn't have any friends, and, besides school, spends most of his time working, browsing the internet and playing a dating simulator. Eventually his unhealthy social lifestyle leads him to severe substance abuse and serious delusions, which in turn make him lose his sanity. While this brief synopsis does not seem exceptionally fascinating, the way the episode establishes the main character and his environment in a very short time period is remarkable. The relationship between main character Yoji and his dad is shown as very tense and stressful. The dad wants Yoji to get into a university, but Yoji either doesn't want to continue studying or can't decide his future path yet. As time goes on, both parties get significantly frustrated. Because of all the pressure, Yoji shuts down in conversations with his parents, and his dad doesn't understand Yoji's emotional state and why he doesn't follow the proper (in his eyes) path of studying for university. Parents were even willing to lower their expectations for Yoji's next university, and after not seeing any notable academic results and not getting any answers from him, his dad's frustration grows into almost anger. Yoji's frustration turns into resentment and disregard towards his parents. A brief flashback shows the dad reprimanding very young Yoji overly harsh for not doing well in his schoolwork, perhaps it was the dad who made Yoji feel indifferent towards school/university. All of this takes minutes to establish with just a few interactions of Yoji and his dad. Dad's intonation and choice of words and Yoji's dismissiveness and behavior when his father can't see him in his room. Later in the show, the tension between them heightens after the dad finds Computer Graphics School's pamphlet suggesting that Yoji might not be aiming to get into a university. The dad squeezes the paper with anger.
Another aspect of Yoji's life that seems to trouble him a lot is the lack of a romantic relationship that can be explained in part by Yoji's environment and in part by his extremely high, unreasonable standards for his potential partner. A lot of this is established just by Yoji's facial expressions and body language when seeing some other people or by him talking to himself. He winces seeing another couple on the street, he takes his eyes off the customer as soon as he sees her talking to a guy.
Yoji copes with the stress by ignoring some of his problems and turning to the dating simulator, the experience of playing which he treasures to an unhealthy extent but thinking about it, prioritizing it like an actual important event of the day helps him to suppress negative emotions he feels throughout the day.
However, there is another side to Yoji, all the emotional pressure didn't help him to form a good character. While Yoji is a relative loner, that did not make him bad at communicating. Quite the opposite, he's very good at understanding how to act to leave certain impressions of himself on other people. Yoji uses this ability to deceive and manipulate people to make them act out his weird fantasies.
The positive development of "Yoji character" is not shown. After the first half, the episode becomes way less about loner Yoji and more about a substance addict that is rapidly losing his mind. Eventually Yoji becomes unable to distinguish reality from fiction, starts to outwardly (as opposed to secretly like before) act creepy and weird towards his coworker, and loses his job. Later, because of a power outage, Yoji loses all the progress in his dating simulator, the only real passion that he is truly committed to. When the game gets deleted from/corrupted on his computer, he feels like everything meaningful in his life is gone. Yoji snaps, starts yelling and kicking the door. The outburst perhaps completely ruins his relationship with his dad. Later Yoji is shown mentally deranged. Instead of resolution to Yoji's life problems, the episode shows what eventually happens to the mind of the Manticore victim.

To portray relatively complex psychological states of some of its characters, Boogiepop Phantom deliberately chooses particular facial expressions, body movements, words the characters say and intonations they say them with. What makes this episodic anime's writing better than a lot of others is how much more information it manages to establish about its characters in the limited amount of episode runtime. However, I can't say this about all of the episodes, the better ones explore the characters and the problems they face more in-depth than the others. The entirety of the plot (assuming the light novel references are a part of it) is very difficult, if not outright impossible to fully piece together without conjectures, especially because the audiovisual presentation makes it seem like some of the events might not have happened as is.
Overall, the writing was done well. The "Phantom" side story is pretty simple once put together, the individual characters' segments are the strong point of the plot.

So how does the technical part of the show support the writing? With equal competence, in my opinion. There are 3 elements that stand out the most: the soundwork, color palette and visual effects. The show makes great use of distorted, overlapping, reverberated, unordinary loud, repeating sound effects and bursting-in soundtracks to keep the tense and dazed atmosphere. On the visual side, the anime staff decided to go with a limited/smaller and toned-down color palette and an uncommon vignette effect for the majority of the show, making it feel hazy/dreamy. All of it is aimed in part to try to communicate to the audience the mental states of the characters and in part to try to make it more difficult to understand if the events that are happening on screen are real. Although the animation itself is nothing special, it was very nice to see that the staff was willing to experiment with other visual aspects.

How anime relates to the light novels:
Watching the Boogiepop Phantom before reading the novels and then once again after were two very different experiences, at least for me. I already described more or less what it feels like to watch it without knowing information from the source material. So, watching the anime after reading the light novels renders the plot pretty straightforward and almost completely takes away all the dazed mystique the show tries to set up. It becomes obvious that everything that happens on the screen happens as is in the show's universe. There were no points where the story is shown through the perception of an unreliable narrator, nothing out of what was shown was a dream, it's just a collection of stories, with some of them connected to each other and presented in a non-linear style.
What is the better way to approach the show, before or after reading the light novels? Should the anime be treated as a standalone work that happened to borrow the Boogiepop universe to tell an isolated story, or is Boogiepop Phantom intended to be experienced within the context of the light novels? Two interesting questions to which I don't know definitive answers, however, I was only able to have 2 different experiences with the show because I watched it before reading the source material first. Not knowing anything about the Boogiepop universe and watching the show left me with an entertaining confusion of trying to decipher what was going on, what was real and what wasn't. While knowing what happened in the light novels and rewatching the anime, I got to experience the enjoyment of understanding the references and seeing the bigger picture clearer. Perhaps similar to being entertained by bewilderment from watching an unfamiliar magic trick and then experiencing enjoyment from following the execution of the same magic trick that you now know the secret of.
Maybe a stretch, but another factor that makes this adaptation very interesting is that watching it in a vacuum gives more ground to the brief references to the events that happened in the source material, in a sense that the audience is given disjointed facts of something that has happened or is happening, and the viewers have the ability to connect them and build/deduce the full story themselves. On the other hand, knowing what happened in the source material makes all of those light novel references very redundant to the anime's plot. It feels to me like the anime just decided to borrow the setting from the Boogiepop universe to tell its more or less independent story and doesn't really need any core attributes of the original stories. Feels to me like the show is wearing the Boogiepop mask, perhaps just to attract a bigger audience.


There are 2 points that make me give this work such a score. Firstly, while a lot of elements are very well done, at the end of the day, Boogiepop Phantom borrows from its predecessors a little bit too much for my taste. Similar soundwork style and plot structure, and even some similar themes, have been present in anime before. Secondly, not all of the episodes seem to be as well written as the others.

7.5/10

I'm torn on this anime because I think the more anthology-like parts of the show are fantastic, it's just... it kind of wraps up with a wet sparkler of an ending rather than a satisfying conclusion.

I think part of the problem is the main characters are barely in it. You see Touka Miyashita, Nagi Kirima, and Shinpei Kuroda introduced in the OP, Boogiepop, Boogiepop Phantom, and Kazuko Suema are also given main character roles on MAL, and I think Boogiepop Phantom is the only one who really deserves that title.

For fuck's sake, you don't even learn Kazuko's first name until the last episode.

I started the ... first book, to this show's credit, in the middle of watching this and Kazuko shows more personality in the first chapter she appears than this whole series. Kazuko's basically the definition of "scaring the hoes" in the book, one of my favorite moments being her getting so irrationally angry at her peers describing murder methods that are too time-consuming, she just blurts out how she'd murder someone if she had to. And everyone looks at her like she's got 3 heads.

You wouldn't know she had an obsession with criminal psychology if you only saw this series though. She's, at best, slightly nosy and she's Friends with Touka and... that's really about it.

That's not to say Touka gets it any better, for the host of BOOGIEPOP in BOOGIEPOP Phantom, she has no real connection to the story outside of a friend or two being a focus of the Episode of the Week.

Hell, even Boogiepop himself isn't really all that relevant, there's nominally a chase going on for Manticore and Boogiepop Phantom but they both just kind of... end without much notable effort from Boogiepop.

Boogiepop mostly wins (when he bothers to show up at all) by doing nothing except waiting for the opponent to show up and usually die.

We get bits and pieces of Kuroda but he's not really all THAT relevant except to be part of Nagi's backstory and the final episode.

I'd say Nagi gets the "best" treatment but that's really only in comparison, if she were the main character in a more traditional show, she would be pretty undercooked but, like, you at least get a sense of what her character is supposed to be and why she acts the way she does which is a depressing bar for the main characters to have to clear in this show.

Genuinely, there's more character development for random jackasses who end up getting sent to the Twilight Zone at the end of the episode for most of the episodes in the show.

Speaking of which, when it's not about the main mystery, it's actually a pretty gripping show. The direction clearly gets how to tell a slightly horrifying, avant-garde mystery, it's one of the more unique-looking shows out there with the washed out colors in the first 11 episodes, the score perfectly complements the tone, it gets to tell a lot of interesting mini-stories about disillusioned urbanites when they come into supernatural powers.

Honestly, if they were going to go this route, I'd genuinely rather they just try to sell the Boogiepop franchise off the strength of these vignettes alone and leave the main characters out of it.

Because honestly, the worst part of Boogiepop Phantom is actually the main plot and characters. Any time it's set on some bozo who dies at the end of the episode, it's great, gripping horror/mystery anime. Any time it circles back to one of the main characters? Eh...

I guess fortunately, it's not really all that concerned about the main plot and it DID get me to check out the novels so fair play, but I'm not sure if I can confidently recommend this.

While watching Boogiepop Phantom a question kept popping up in my very confused (but pretty) noggin: “am I missing something?” Turns out that I was indeed missing something. Boogiepop Phantom bridges the gap between two light novels that haven’t been adapted into anime and also happen to be prohibitively expensive in my secluded homeland, the great white north. In a way it’s like jumping into a series during the second season without having watched the first. Unfortunately this doesn’t exactly make for great TV.

The situation isn’t helped by the non-linear structure the show adopts or the lack of distinctive characters. Everyone sort of has the ... same face which was a problem for me, as I couldn’t tell if I had seen certain characters in another episode or not. What I assume were big plot reveals were ruined because I didn’t know which character from 3 episodes prior was having their story concluded. Usually I’m fairly astute with this type of thing, but I’ll admit this might have occurred because I wasn’t invested enough in the series. But first time viewers can expect some (deliberate?) confusion.

In a way I respect how intentionally opaque Boogiepop is, the way it requires you to dig deeper into supplementary material to understand it. I just think it could have been executed better. It didn’t leave me wanting to hunt down the novels or read fan theories online the way other shows of this nature did. A lot of the time it just bored me.

It does have some good qualities though. Some of the visuals are quite nice; in one scene Boogiepop opens his/her cape and it appears as if a gate to the cosmos is contained within it which I thought was really neat. I liked the memory butterflies and some of the monster designs as well. The animation…fluctuates. The OST and sound design are phenomenal.

Overall I didn’t really enjoy Boogiepop Phantom which is a shame as I had pretty high expectations and liked the first few episodes a lot. It became pretty apparent about halfway through that the series was more interested in being pseudo-deep than being actual scary which disappointed me. It just doesn't stand on it's own as a satisfying story. I would only recommend it to fans of the novels or soundtrack aficionados.