Following a bombing incident at a music school, Conan must protect the lead singer from the perpetrator before the big performance at a grand opera. While this movie's premise is basic, it still makes it work with smooth pacing and little moments of character in the cast. The lead singer, Reiko, is interesting enough to work as a supporting character and the subplot with Ran and Shinichi is also kind of nice. While it would've been nice for the rest of the supporting cast to get this kind of treatment, it's obvious that the filmmakers chose to do this deliberately. What's also kind of fun is that the animators were able to sync the animation with the music and singing. On the subject of the music itself, it's great... perhaps too great. While the songs in this movie are very good, I felt a bit of sensory overload from it all. Since this might be a personal problem, I won't hold it against the film too much.
Now, one thing that I am still on the fence about is how Conan's tone-deafness is handled in this movie. To be tone-deaf means having no concept of relative pitch and the inability of to distinguish between two notes. So how does Conan, a character who is tone deaf, be able to not only clearly distinguish how flat a certain note is, but also sing in harmony with a character with perfect pitch, a quality unattainable by tone deaf people? My only solution is that Conan isn't really tone deaf; he just lacks proper training. After all, Conan was able to perfectly replicate the dial tones for the boss' phone number after listening to it once. To be truly tone deaf would mean to not be a great detective, as being a great detective would mean the ability to distinguish between different sounds (which is an ability Conan has). Well, it's definitely something to think about.
For a Detective Conan movie, its a pretty straight forward film. While lacking the appeal of more popular movies, one could consider this a hidden gem. If you are a big fan of classical music and would love to see it implemented in a mystery film, then consider Full Score of Fear a "full speed ahead".
