Boogiepop Phantom is a hard one. It starts out with elements of an anthology show, episodes dedicated to strange and seemingly supernatural occurrences that happen to encounter each other at tangent points, but ultimately the show does tie together into a single and larger plot. The show basically never explains anything, but at the same time it gives you the palpable sense that the truth is out there and an explanation exists within reach. It’s named after a particular oft-referenced supernatural entity… which barely appears in the show.
All in all it’s a bizarre sepia-toned dive into a threatening world of deep shadows, down-to-earth character designs, and supernatural occurrences that defy quick and easy labels like “vampires” or “ghosts” yet clearly inhabit a conceptual space that belongs to icons of horror… and we’re going to take a closer look in order to understand its appeal as well as its technical plot.
Part of the issue is that Boogiepop Phantom is neither exactly the beginning nor the end of its story. It tells parts that are chronologically at or near the start and ones that seem to be more capstone-like, but… it’s adapted from a series of Light Novels but what’s mostly on the screen is a kind of anime-original sequel to the first book with bits and pieces of the sixth (itself a prequel) woven in. So if you haven’t read the original Boogiepop novel (or seen the 2019 Boogiepop anime that adapts it, among other entries), you might be a little lost as to some of the incidents that have already happened in the story, and that the major events of Phantom at least partially flow from.
I don’t usually announce my reviews ahead of time, but I’ll be looking at the 2019 series next week. However, since Boogiepop Phantom is from 2000 and is clearly intended to stand alone as an anime outing, I will be keeping my references to the parent plot to an absolute minimum.
Boogiepop Phantom, then, starts with the story of a shy girl with a crush. The boy she liked vanishes, but some time later she sees him (or something that makes a fairly good projection) and is almost lured into being devoured by the entity before the arrival of Boogiepop – a figure in a black cloak and tall hat sometimes identified as a Shinigami. Boogiepop dispatches the entity that took the form of the girl’s crush, claims to have killed the real crush in the past, and leaves the girl to her dose of grief, confusion, and/or closure.
During this introductory episode, we encounter a few ideas: a mysterious pillar of light that appeared in the city where this all took place (The climax of the first Boogiepop story), a strange and twisted rainbow that now can be seen above the city, and cameos by a few other characters who will be relevant in their own, later episodes.
One of those characters is a boy from the same school who says he sees an insect on the girl’s heart. In episode 2, we focus on him and see that he gained the ability to see spirit-bugs attached to people when the pillar of light happened, and that he also learned that if he removes and devours one of the bugs, it seems to take away the host’s painful memories and regrets, freeing them from suffering. The boy, however, becomes deliriously addicted to the bugs over time, to the point of catching the interest of a certain cop. Ultimately, he runs into Boogiepop… who is a little bit different in this appearance, both in look and in manner. Most of the iconography is down, but the details are a little off.
Since informed viewers could probably catch on there, this is the titular Boogiepop Phantom, who is not the original Boogiepop but rather some manner of copy or impostor, the details of which will come out in good time. For the time being, I’ll just try to keep the two distinct.
The third episode starts to weave closer to the plot. We meet (more closely) a girl who goes by Panuru, having taken up the identity and world-view to cope with the death of the original Panuru, who was her friend until she was murdered five years prior to the show. She ends up working with the people-eating monster that was seemingly killed at the end of the first episode (which ends well after this one, as one might guess by this) and even feeds one of her classmates to the beast. She’s confronted by three separate figures for her treachery: a tough girl student called Nagi Kirima (who I am calling by name because she’s one of, if not the most important recurring character), Boogiepop, and finally, while fleeing from Boogiepop, the cop who was hunting bug boy. Said cop kills her and disappears her body, suggesting that normal policing is not what’s going on.
By this point, you can get an idea of how the show is constructed: each episode largely tells its own story, but those stories are also inexorably linked, and can’t really be said to be complete without others. It’s a little like a quilt – it’s all together as a single structure, but there are also these discrete and individual parts that can be said to have a good deal of identity of their own.
Frankly, like a lot of the stylistic choices of the show, its a bold move, and one that easily could have backfired. Most stories, much less most shows tend to be told in a linear pattern, following a particular thread from its beginning to its end. Sometimes they can have extra stories branch off and take focus for a while, but there’s generally a main plot “trunk” from which the branches radiate and that supports all of them.
That’s not exactly true in Boogiepop Phantom, but because it’s done smartly and done in a supernatural mystery, it works out. Instead of being shaped something like a tree, Boogiepop Phantom spreads out more like a spider web, all the threads connected in intricate ways and with some definite purpose to its shape, but not so much the directionality you see in other media. Rather than going forward with Boogiepop Phantom, you’re more going deeper.
Our next layer down, then, has us following a loser obsessed with a dating game and, shortly, a new girl hired where he works. This creeper ends up under the influence of a drug that messes with his sense of reality, and tries to put the girl under it too in order to possess her, until the point where he loses it completely and gets arrested. This ties back to the other material mostly in the source of the drug being the disappeared boy from Episode 1 and his odd partner, who isn’t explained right now but does ultimately get named in the show: Manticore.
It cannot be overstated how messed up and creepy this guy is.
The next episode has two lines, which start to pull more of the story together. In one, a girl who was once saved by Nagi Kirima investigates what really happened those years ago when it happened. This gets our first good look at the “Five years ago” thread, the hospital location (where much of that went down), and incidentally Touka Miyashita – A somewhat enigmatic schoolgirl bit character in this one, but one who is ultimately critical, at least in a sense.
The other thread focuses on two police officers, the sketchy one we saw rub out Panuru and his partner. The sketchy cop spins a story that’s very critical to the background of Boogiepop: How there are some humans who are becoming “evolved”, gaining mysterious capabilities, and how a secret order known as the Towa Organization has a deep interest in these evolved humans, and will stop at nothing to acquire or destroy them. Or so say the rumors. The Towa Organization even has their own super-powered entities, artificial human-like beings created with various capabilities, including a shapeshifting assassin. Or at least that’s the rumor. Said officer also confirms the rumors, revealing himself to be Towa’s shapeshifter before wiping his partner’s memories and starting the conversation all over again.
The next episode steps back to the anthology feel a little. It tells the story of a young woman who became estranged from her family, made friends at therapy, and was ultimately (five years before the present) killed by the serial killer that Nagi Kirima is ultimately (as of this point, to the audience) credited with defeating in the end. She never made up with her mother, but the diaries she left behind reveal to the woman she wanted to, and in the present her ghost appears to show to said mother.
At this point you might start thinking that the Serial Killer of Five Years Ago and what happened there might be important. We don’t exactly learn much more about it (at least not in this show), but there’s clearly a great degree to which the serial killer events inform what’s happening in the present.
From there, we stop in with the kid son of a failed architect who, after growing into misanthropy, believes he gained the power to destroy from the pillar of light incident. After a visit from a strange girl and a Peter Pan-esque entity called Poom Poom (seemingly the animate creation of a failed children’s author, and thus representing lost dreams), he tries to destroy his father’s greatest failure, an abandoned unfinished amusement park, but is intercepted by the shapeshifter cop. The Shapeshifter cop seems to get the drop on him, but his sister (the entity with the actual destruction power) takes out the cop.
Following this, we catch up with Nagi Kirima and a reporter she kind of befriends. This gets us the best information we’re going to get on the Pillar of Light incident that left the warped rainbow in the sky, that it was caused by a conflict involving Boogiepop, Manticore, and another being (alien or angel, who can say?) known as Echoes. Manticore was destroyed and Echoes vanished, but now a phantom of Manticore has appeared, along with the Boogiepop Phantom. Boogiepop Phantom is hunting Manticore Phantom (who is still killing people), and is also responsible for some of the disappearances, as we’ve seen, though supposedly it’s for their own good somehow.
And with that we enter Episode 9 and can actually say there’s some sort of endgame. Most of it is concerned with Poom Poom, the weird Peter Pan from earlier. Poom Poom calls people, especially the lost and the broken, out to play, with the abandoned amusement park as his lair and a strange and strangely uncommunicative woman with him. He offers them balloons, and those who accept contribute their inner child to Poom Poom’s band of phantasms. In the first case we see closely, it’s a girl on the verge of despair after being told she has no talent for piano and should pursue something else. After Poom Poom takes her, she ends up committing suicide back in the real world. Another unhappy teen instead becomes a zealot of Poom Poom, spreading the good word to others until Boogiepop Phantom seals him away
All the same the creepy kids and red balloons spread like we’re in Steven King’s It, which draws Nagi in to the park. She clashes with Poom Poom and the inner child army, but Boogiepop (OG version) shows up and causes Poom Poom’s weird lady to take a nasty fall. This turns her from young if haggard to, shortly, an old woman, suggesting that she’s not entirely natural either. Poom Poom and his army of kids, seemingly dependent on her, also vanish.
Indeed, it seems (as we get an extended flashback in the wake of her defeat, taking up most of an episode) that she’s the ghostly return of a little girl who was raised and ultimately murdered by her grandmother some time in the past, the crime scene for which we saw in an earlier episode. She was resurrected in her current form by the pillar of light, and then sort of stumbled her way into her villainous post. After Boogiepop Prime and Phantom debate whether or not to dispatch her (they don’t; her threat is neutralized) she finally expires, dissolving into butterflies (very similar to ones she seemed to manipulate earlier).
We also find, in the tunnels beneath the city, that the individuals disappeared by Boogiepop Phantom have been kept in stasis, probably to shield them from either Towa’s attention or just the world that’s not ready for them. With the defeat of Poom Poom’s rein-holding ghost girl, though, most things seem to be set somewhat right: lots of people are visited by a moment of catharsis, and the warped rainbow and the abnormal magnetic field it represented, that were said to allow many of the phenomenons, fade away.
We finally get the solve after a year time skip, when Touka and her boyfriend visit Tokyo to take college entrance exams. Touka seems out of sorts and even misses a section of exam (or nearly so) though, and the reason why is shown: Boogiepop, who Touka is the host of, is still on the hunt for Manticore’s last remnant, which survived by melding with the detective Nagi hung out with (himself a Towa agent) and acting as a serial killer. Boogiepop dispatches the evil once and for all, Touka presumably finishes her exams just fine, and Touka and her circle of friends graduate into a brighter world.
Full disclosure, I saw the 2019 Boogiepop show before watching Boogiepop Phantom, and I think I would have been totally lost without it. This is, to an extent, both Phantom’s biggest fault and its most unique asset. You will get lost. It’s a sprawling anthology show that does tie everything together, but that explains very little and isn’t interested in connecting the dots for you at the outset. But at the same time its anthology-like nature and brilliant atmosphere, supported with both the dark and sepia visuals and the content of each episode being disturbing dives into humans dealing with the unexplained, can leverage the viewer being lost to an extent.
Let me stress that some more: To an extent. These things can only go so far, and I really think that Boogiepop Phantom crosses a line. Far be it from me to bash a show for being hard. Ergo Proxy and Serial Experiments Lain are obtuse in their own ways, but they do give you enough clues to work with. Boogiepop Phantom blatantly expects you to have read the first novel and have a basic understanding of who Boogiepop is and what happened with Manticore and Echoes. I can’t say how well a totally blind viewer would follow it since I wasn’t one, but I can’t imagine it would be even remotely well.
The anthology element also works slightly against as it’s hard to get attached to any of the characters when you realize you’re not seeing anybody again as more than an extra. Even the characters who do recur, like Nagi Kirima, don’t get a lot of explicit development or build terribly strong connections. Again, I can’t say exactly how hard it is to go in unspoiled (and by this point, neither can you unless you saw the show before reading to here), since some basic facts are in there, but if the answer is following along fine than I’d be totally shocked.
That said, with some handle on the material on the side? The writing is kind of dynamite. It’s understated a good deal of the time, but it’s not bland in its minimalism. Few enough words are spoken, but the show remains a powerful experience, transporting you into its distorted world and letting you really sink into its many stories. I think if you go into this expecting something more like Mushi-shi, that tells lots of little stories that just happen to have a common thread, you’ll probably be more pleased than if you go in looking for the big picture first and foremost. The big picture is certainly there, and we’ll dig into it more next week, but for Phantom it’s not the main attraction.
This makes Boogiepop Phantom a little difficult to grade. How much do I take off for being so thoroughly obtuse? Ultimately, I think the best metric I have for this one is to treat my letter grade as being representative of the strength of my recommendation. In a metric where C- is a case of “twist my arm and I’ll say it comes more recommended for than against” and A+ is “a masterpiece that you should see asap if you haven’t”, Boogiepop Phantom rates an ordinary B. If you’re into its pitch, a somewhat spooky mystery that does unexplained phenomena and actually declines to explain them, I think you’ll have a good time watching. If you want something that resembles the pacing and construction of a normal show, stay away.