Boogiepop Phantom

2000. TV series. (12 X 30 min.) Horror/drama. org Kouhei Kadono (novel). dir Takashi Watanabe. SCR Seishi Minakami, Sadayuki Murai. des Shigeyuki Suga. -bc

A challenging and demanding series that explores the psychological state of contemporary Japanese youth with a complex, time-tripping tale of high school kids who experience a life-altering series of paranormal events.

Teenagers in a Japanese city are visited by mysterious characters, or “see” things or people that their classmates can’t. A shy girl is summoned by the “ghost” of a boy she once liked, but who disappeared. A senior boy is able to see fist-sized spiders over the hearts of people feeling guilty and is the only one able to remove them and relieve their guilt. A girl spreads the dubious philosophy of a now-dead enigmatic younger girl named “Panuru,” who urged her to accept and love the world for what it is. A boy finds himself with the sudden strength to fend off bullies and rid the world of “useless” things. Few of the adult characters can be trusted, especially after Morita, a veteran police officer, describes a secret organization seeking to hunt down and kill “special kids” who have evolved beyond ordinary humanity.

The series jumps back and forth between past and present incidents in the teens’ lives. Five years earlier, strange phenomena began to occur after the appearance of an unexplained beam of light one night at the center of the city. A series of unsolved killings took place afterwards. All of the characters introduced were irrevocably affected by that time and experience frequent flashbacks to those events. The elusive Boogiepop Phantom, an imposing young woman in an unusual hat and cloak and a self-proclaimed “Angel of Death,” appears on occasion to try to intervene on behalf of the tormented youths.

High school senior Nagi Kirima seems to be alone among the townspeople in earnestly investigating the strange goings-on, motivated chiefly by the murder of her father five years earlier. She rides a motorcycle, wears a paramilitary uniform, and seems aware of the scope of the mystery and the different entities involved, although she doesn’t seem to have a clue as to how to handle it all. She crosses paths with Boogiepop more than once. A classmate of Nagi’s named Toka Miyashita also enters the story from time to time and turns out to hold a crucial secret.

The teen characters are often left in a state of suicidal or near-suicidal alienation, leading to misguided, sometimes self-destructive attempts to relieve the pressure. Several scenes are set at the local prefectural hospital where some of the characters go for treatment. The later episodes focus on the teens’ painful, often suppressed childhood memories. A key character, Poom Poom, emerges to symbolize the youthful dreams shattered by unfeeling adults and acts as Pied Piper to the wounded souls of the varied students. He befriends another lost soul, Manaka, a girl attended by streams of butterflies made of white light and who can only repeat back what others tell her. Poom Poom’s actions eventually lead to confrontations with both Nagi and Boogiepop herself in an unfinished amusement park that comes to life at his command after construction had been shut down during the nation’s financial downturn. Even after he is dealt with, however, one more lingering menace must be tracked down . . . in Tokyo.

Sadayuki Murai, credited with series composition and screenwriter of five Boogiepop episodes, is an important anime screenwriter, having written or co-written Perfect Blue, Reign the Conqueror, Millennium Actress, Kino’s Journey, and Steamboy, as well as episodes of Cowboy Bebop, Devil Lady, Alien Nine, Magic User’s Club, and Astro Boy (2003). Murai also wrote the screenplay for Boogiepop and Others (2000), the live-action film version of the Boogiepop novels by Kouhei Kadono on which the anime is based.

Boogiepop has obvious stylistic similarities to Serial Experiments Lain (understandable, given the participation of Lain’s key animator, Shigeyuki Suga, as character designer here), most clearly in the design of the equally malaise-ridden school-age characters, but also in the sense of a modern Japanese urban setting in the grip of unseen, inexplicable forces. In Lain, the disruptive elements tended to be technological in nature (bursts of electricity, sounds of static, computer circuits appearing in the sky), while in BP, they tend to draw on horror imagery and fears of ghosts, vampires, psychotic killers, secret societies, and “angels of death.” There are gruesome, bloody murders (although relatively understated) and a tone that seems to draw on some of the live-action J-horror movie hits of the time (e.g., Ringu, Uzumaki). The hints of undercover investigations, high-level conspiracies, and secret organizations with sinister agendas invest the series, in its first half at least, with distinct X-Files trappings.

Brown is the dominant color in just about every scene. Shots of dusk (a time of day when much of Boogiepop takes place) offer a brown evening sky resembling sepia-toned photographs. There are green trees and red articles of clothing, but these colors are muted every time they appear. Much of the film is set at night in the streets, parks, alleys, courtyards, and roadways of the unnamed city, with some of the more dramatic scenes set in an empty parking garage and an underground drainage tunnel. Even scenes in daylight are drained of color and rendered with soft linework. Everything is just a little hazy, as if to give viewers an unsettling sense of not being able to see things clearly. One of the effects of the dark visual scheme is to make the sudden bursts of light that do occur, such as the beam that shoots up into the sky and Manaka’s butterflies of light, all the more vivid and powerful. Only in the final episode of the series, in which the action shifts to Tokyo, do real color and light flood the screen.

We see more detail in the faces of the adult characters, such as the veteran police officer (who may not be quite what he seems); the female psychiatrist at the hospital where some of the girls go; the mother who reads the diary of her murdered daughter; and Manaka’s mother, an unmarried woman of thirty-five who suffers from amnesia after giving birth. The younger characters who make up the bulk of the cast are, like those in Lain, meant to be simpler in design, more unformed, and somewhat interchangeable. The one schoolgirl with a strong face is Nagi Kirima, the ranking heroine of the piece, who, in fact, looks considerably older than the others, as if her proactive stance and greater experience give her more character and substance and, hence, more facial lines.

The highly effective soundtrack consists of an electronic score that provides an eerie undertone to the proceedings without resorting to cliché, and all sorts of original electronic sound effects bolster the impression that something is seriously amiss.

Boogiepop Phantom is arguably the most abstract series presented in this book, with a barely penetrable narrative that makes Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain look downright conventional in comparison. It introduces horror and thriller elements and a determined heroine in an action suit on a motorcycle that hint at a more traditionally exciting and accessible story line, but every time it starts to look reassuring, our expectations are overturned. Eventually, it becomes clear that the series is not looking to pander to genre fans but has more far-reaching goals, including the wholesale critique of the Japanese school system and the way children are forced from an early age to conform to very specific educational and career tracks. The notion of a secret organization designed to seek out and destroy special, more “evolved” children is introduced early but never quite developed as a real threat, existing in the story primarily as a metaphor for the way Japanese society stamps out children’s individuality, particularly those who are clearly above average. Most of the points are made through symbolic means, whether through the inability of Manaka to utter an original word of her own despite a highly articulate narration from inside her head in episode 11, or the use of the Pied Piper, seen in a flashback to a children’s play, who tells the parents, “Your children won’t be coming back. You broke your promise.”

A recurring theme of the series is the persistent failure of parents and other adults to protect the children, whether by neglecting them outright, discouraging their passions, or simply putting them at the mercy of a system with a set of rigid goals already laid out for them. Questionable authority figures abound, including the veteran cop who makes his young partner uneasy (“Morita, haven’t we had this conversation before?”) and the female psychiatrist who tells one girl, “Some women are just better off being weak. Stronger women become targets for bad men, the way a murderer might kill a woman to punish her for her pride.” Even the venerated figure of a senior citizen turns out to be a monster, as in the case of Manaka’s grandmother, who keeps the girl locked up indoors for the first five years of her life and, when she herself is about to die, tries to kill Manaka first.

Ultimately it all boils down to honest dramatic tension between two opposing forces, each of which has a reasonable claim on our sympathies. Poom Poom, a childhood creation of one girl merged with the form of the Pied Piper from another boy’s memory, wants everyone to stay in a happy, childlike state and join him in the abandoned amusement park, the repository of forgotten childhood dreams. “We can just play here forever,” he tells his converts. He has legitimate grievances with adults who have left their own dreams behind and try to suppress those of their children. Yet Nagi and Boogiepop speak from a standpoint of maturity and recognize the need to grow up and move forward. They try to keep the teens from being seduced by Poom Poom and the other temptations at hand and from remaining stuck in the past. It all results in a riveting climactic confrontation between the two mind-sets in episode 10.

Poom Poom’s origin is one of the more fascinating elements of the second half of the series. In episode 7, high school boy Mamoru flashes back to a school play in which he portrayed the Pied Piper and the disappointment he felt when his father failed to attend because he was hard at work on the design of Paisley Park, a new children’s amusement park. The park is later abandoned in mid-construction when the company backing it goes bankrupt. In episode 9, we meet Akane Kojima, who created the character of Poom Poom in a series of stories she wrote in school. When a teacher tells her to major in science, not literature, she burns the notebooks containing the stories. When the Pied Piper from Mamoru’s past appears and induces Akane to join him at Paisley Park, she gives him the name Poom Poom and a movement is born.

During the standoff in the park, Poom Poom tells Nagi, “You don’t have to pretend to be so tough,” just before ordering his zombielike child minions to surround her. Later in the same sequence, the indignant Boogiepop confronts the defiant Poom Poom, who laments the fate of grown-ups: “They’re happy being adults, not knowing they’ve shed the things most important to them. . . . ” Boogiepop berates the boy, “Losing something and regretting it are as different as children and adults. . . . You are only insulting the truly beautiful things.” Poom Poom responds: “Human nature denies the past in order to justify the present. But do you believe there is anything in the present worth justifying?”

Boogiepop and Others (2003) was a live-action movie adaptation of Kouhei Kadono’s original novel directed by Ryu Kaneda, from a screenplay by Sadayuki Murai, chief writer for the anime series.

The series has thematic parallels with a live-action Japanese hit movie from the same year, Battle Royale, which offered a similar indictment of Japanese society and its treatment of children, but used the more violent and aggressive metaphor of a class of ninth graders sent to an island and ordered to kill each other until only one remains. The longer form Boogiepop took a less visceral, more multifaceted approach, relating the kids’ stories in individual segments, detailing exactly what went wrong in their lives and at what point.

violence Some bloody killings and homicide/suicide victims in pools of blood. profanity Some profanity in subtitles.