Pardon the long title, but this franchise is… difficult at the best of times. Granted, we’re going to be largely looking at those best of times here and making sense of them, but it still has an edge of the inscrutable.
While Boogiepop Phantom created a new story to act as a sequel to the original novel, Boogiepop and Others (also called “Boogiepop Never Laughs” as a direct translation of the Japanese title, but “and Others” is the official western title) is a direct adaptation of the books. Specifically, books 1 (Boogiepop and Others/Boogiepop Never Laughs), books 2&3 (Boogiepop Returns: VS Imaginator parts 1 & 2), book 6 (Boogiepop at Dawn) and book 5 (Boogiepop Overdrive: The King of Distortion). Yeah, in the straightforward version they skip 4 and swap the positions of 5 and 6. I’d say to brace yourselves, but after Phantom last week, a simple arc structure that doesn’t seem out of order to anime viewers is a joy.
That said, each arc does still have a… unique way of telling its story. This is somewhat apparent in the first episode, which acts an overture to the entire Boogiepop and Others arc. In this episode, we follow Seiji Takeda, who is having some trouble with his girlfriend, Touka Miyashita, who stands him up for a date only to be spotted doing something of a good deed in what looks like an odd cosplay. It turns out that Touka is actually, unbeknownst to herself, the host for the entity known as Boogiepop. Rumored to be a Shinigami, Boogiepop is actually a being that comes into existence as a sort of cosmic immune system, a sapient automaton that exists in this time and place in order to stop some sort of threat to the future of humanity itself. It’s a concept somewhat similar to the Counter Force in Fate/Stay Night, for those familiar. Boogiepop has manifested through Touka because of a particular man-eating monster and what its rampage may evidently portent. Time passes as Boogiepop investigates, and has chats now and again with Seiji. Seiji forms something of a bond with the nonhuman spirit entity wearing his girlfriend’s body, and thus it’s something of a sad parting when Boogiepop announces that the disaster has been averted and it expects to vanish soon.
The next two episodes tell what actually happened. To put it in something of a chronological sense, an alien in human form, called Echoes as it could at first only repeat sounds it heard, was taken by a secret evil organization. They tried to clone Echoes, but the result was imperfect, a shapeshifting creature with a taste for human flesh. Both Echoes and his clone, Manticore, escaped, with Manticore seeking to survive and Echoes hoping to clean up the mess.
Manticore falls in with a particularly twisted male student, Masami Saotome, who instructs it to hide using the stolen form of a devoured female student, and eggs it on into seeking domination rather than mere survival. The partners in crime fall in love, but forces are closing in on them: Echoes, seeking Manticore; A particularly intrepid student, Nagi Kirima, looking for the serial killer plaguing her school; Boogiepop, unseen.
Nagi’s investigations ultimately see her teaming up with Echoes, Naoko Kamikishiro, a girl who can communicate with Echoes and who bonded with him through her kindness, Kei Niitoki, a lower-grade girl with a crush on Seiji (awkward), and Shiro Tanaka, a boy from the archery club and Naoko’s boyfriend. There are even more relations and encounters in these episodes, but I will spare you the whole web.
After Naoko is killed by Manticore, this comes to a head in a major clash with Masami wounding Echoes and mortally wounding Nagi, Echoes dissolving into light (which obliterates Masami when he tries to protect Manticore) and Manticore, out her lover, going crazy only to be put down by Boogiepop and the Shiro. Echoes’ disappearance (the pillar of light incident from Phantom) also heals Nagi’s otherwise-deadly wound, giving her a second chance to keep being a badass investigator and the closest thing the series has to a genuine main character. Thus ends Boogiepop and Others proper. On to VS Imaginator.
“And Others” was a three-episode arc in this show. It was an impressively dense yet actually easy to follow three episodes (the density being especially notable given how one of those three episodes was the conversations with Boogiepop). “VS Imaginator” runs six, and is pretty much as packed. I guess that makes sense seeing how it covers two entire books worth of material, but I will still do my best to be efficient in the retelling.
The main thrust of this story (told though it is from a few perspectives) is that the school guidance counselor gains a supernatural ability, the power to see what can be best described as either the souls or psyches of others, represented as flowers. He also gains the ability to manipulate those flowers, changing how they grow and consequently changing the person. At first he uses his ability to guide students well, but he becomes obsessed with the idea of perfection in the face of the fact that every flower he finds seems to be flawed somehow: a weak stem, shallow roots, a lacking bloom, an excess or deficiency of thorns – all meaning different things about the person with that flower and their own character flaws.
He does spy one “perfect” flower, however, and in his mind hopes to act as the savior of humanity by copying that and pasting it over the rest of mankind.
The perfect bloom belongs to a girl, Aya, who seems oddly less than perfect. She comes across as stoic and meek to a fault. All the same, a boy we follow, Masaki, falls for her, and in that gets wrapped up in her troubles. It seems she’s actually an artificial human created by the Towa Organization, albeit one without obvious powers or inhuman elements. She’s beholden to a higher-ranked Towa Operative, Spooky Electric (or Spooky-E), who has some fairly impressive electrical powers (including the finesse to, albeit reversibly, program a human brain) and all the charm and manner towards Aya of an abusive stepfather.
Much of the arc involves this couple trying to get Aya out of her bad situation while she grapples with things like love and humanity, the guidance counselor slips into mania, and Boogiepop pursues Imaginator. The stories intersect now and again, like the guidance counselor curing a boy of Spooky Electric’s brainwashing, or the boy and girl having the boy impersonate Boogiepop and play superhero or Boogiepop (the real one) clashing briefly with Spooky Electric in the hunt for Imaginator. Even Nagi appears briefly, trying to protect one of her friends from the mess.
This comes to a climax in an abandoned unfinished amusement park (the one that also played a major role in Boogiepop Phantom). Spooky Electric has a hideout there, and kidnaps Aya to it. The guidance counselor appears, hoping to manipulate Spooky Electric to take control of the Towa Organization and use their resources to help rewrite the world. Spooky Electric tries to fight back, but the guidance counselor strips him of his thorns, removing his ability to be aggressive – but not his loyalty to Towa that sees him electrocute himself rather than become a pawn against them.
The guidance counselor, however, holds Aya himself, intending to use her as a sacrifice to revise as many people as he can. Masaki does his heroic best to rescue her and is ultimately escorted to victory by Boogiepop, who does stop the guidance counselor… but declines to eliminate him, since he’s not actually a threat to humanity, instead revealing that all the changes he does are temporary at best, and he doesn’t really have the power to alter the world. With her pawn gone, Imaginator and the threat she poses fade from the world and, with the couple reunited and Aya freed from Towa control by way of Spooky Electric’s death, it seems to be a happy ending all around.
The next arc, Boogiepop at Dawn, then begins.
While I pointed out how odd the 1-2/3-6-5 order is at the start of the review, I will say now I do understand both why they wanted to include Boogiepop at Dawn and why it was not going to be a good one to end on: It’s a flashback, some material from which was also included in Boogiepop Phantom, that essentially shows Boogiepop/Touka’s first mission and how Nagi Kirima became… who she is.
Thus, the story begins five years before the Echoes/Manticore plot, taking place at the prefectural hospital. Here we follow a number of characters: A private eye and Towa-created artificial human operative called Scarecrow is the first, as he investigates the prefectural hospital. There he meets the young Nagi Kirima. She’s incredibly bright and impresses Scarecrow and even forms something of a bond with him, which is something of a problem for Scarecrow as the “growing pains” she’s at the hospital for appear to be a case of evolved human powers (specifically fire powers burning her from the inside, as Boogiepop refers to Nagi as “Fire witch” at least once in the show), and thus a target of Towa’s aggression. Scarecrow goes rogue for a number of reasons, and though he’s hunted down by another Towa enforcer, he manages to both give Nagi an experimental drug that will suppress her power development and thus keep her off the Towa hit list, and to encounter Boogiepop, providing something of an origin for the entity’s name.
Even as Scarecrow’s story comes to a close, all is not well at the hospital. Dr. Kisugi, a psychologist, has encounters with both Nagi and a young Touka Miyashita, in the latter case managing to communicate with her “alternate personality”, Boogiepop, during a therapy session. Kisugi has also been very naughty, as she’s experimenting with an “evolution drug” (basically the opposite of what was used to cure Nagi) at the same time as a series of grisly murders of young girls begins. One might think these elements are related, especially when the doctor has the bad habit of stalking the hospital at night, driving her patients mad with fear.
And, in fact, they are related, as Nagi and a Towa agent both investigate the murders and even work together a little (the latter ignorant of the former’s suppressed nature, and the former ignorant of the latter’s loyalties), ending with Nagi having the right suspicions. Both she and Team Towa invade the hospital, but Dr. Kisugi seems to have been using the drugs herself, as she displays superhuman capabilities. She takes out the Towa agents, but is goaded into chasing Nagi, who has realized the doctor’s obsession with fear and fearlessness in girls, and thus shows her own courage to bait the doctor.
Despite the doctor’s ability, Nagi puts up a hell of a fight, luring her into a trap and stunning her with electricity. However, Nagi alone is not quite enough to finish Kisugi off – Boogiepop appears at the end to ensure that the psychologist’s serial killing and self-evolving ways end abruptly, resulting in the first meeting between Boogiepop and Nagi.
With that story told, we cap up the show with Boogiepop Overdrive: The King of Distortion.
This one uses a lot of the characters from the first “Boogiepop and Others” arc, making it feel like more of a bookend. Seiji Takeda is back (though only briefly), along with several other characters. He wanted to go on a date with Touka, but Boogiepop shows instead, mentions something about a King of Distortion, and draws all attention to a weird building designed by a famous architect before he died. Shiro and Kei end up in the building, which is crowded as all get out for its grand opening, along with some new focal characters. Shortly after, the emergency shutters come up, putting the whole place on lockdown, and everyone trapped inside seems to pass out.
Most of what follows is a trip through various dream worlds, where the King of Distortion appears to individuals as someone from their past. Kei, for instance, is haunted by Masami. A single mother sees the man who convinced her to keep her child. A high-school girl sees a dead friend, whose death she feels like she had a hand in causing. A hacker sees Nagi Kirima, warning him about his behavior. And a little boy sees the Godzilla-like monster Zooragi, who threatens to damage the building in realspace as dreams and reality merge, which brings Boogiepop along to intercede.
The characters trapped work through their issues, though Shiro and his friend soon awaken and begin to investigate the real space of the building, looking for a way to save everyone, and other focal characters gradually begin to awaken. Boogiepop, for instance, runs into the girl who blames herself for a friend’s death, and declines the girl’s request to be killed, saying that it’s her compassion that allowed her to meet her friend as the King of Distortion and thus that she’s not a bad person.
Gradually, the various important folk wind their way up to the top of the building. There, Shiro and his friend find a recording left by the building’s architect, which gives them the release code and warns them about the Towa Organization. Boogiepop links up with an awake Kei, and then they run into Shiro, who also is identified as the King of Distortion (in this manifestation called into being by Shiro’s grief over his girlfriend’s complicated life and brutal death).
Boogiepop tells the King of Distortion that she’s not his enemy because he is apparently not a threat to humanity… just a bit early, suggesting that the earnest catharsis and psychic bonding the King offers could be somewhere in humanity’s future, but that mankind isn’t ready. With Shiro’s issues addressed and the King acknowledged, he seems to agree to leave and wait for the right time to “Turn everything to gold” (as the King has often put it), and King/Shiro gives Kei the passcode to open up the lockdown and let everyone out to wake up and go on with their lives, day likely ruined but perhaps a little wiser.
Thus ends Boogiepop and Others.
This is a show that at every time, has a lot of moving parts. It’s almost overwhelming how many characters are introduced and how their stories weave together. But, unlike Boogiepop Phantom, while there are obtuse or obscure elements, they’re not so obscure that you can’t understand what’s going on. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In Boogiepop Phantom, the characters often understood more than the viewer was told, at least about some situations. The show was viewed from the point of an outsider. In Boogiepop and Others, the viewer almost always knows more than the characters, since we see scenes from multiple points of view and can reasonably put them together, so it feels much more like a “normal” show.
There’s also the fact that where Boogiepop Phantom told, ultimately, one story in such a scattered way that it felt like twelve, Boogiepop and Others tells four stories basically straight through. They aren’t typical stories, the ones you’ve seen done a million times (at least not other than the fact that every story is, if you boil it down enough), but they have the basic structure and flow of stories that we can recognize. We may get an overture, like the first episode, or a swerve like shifting “At Dawn” from Scarecrow to Nagi, but we can still follow a plot the whole way through. Versus Imaginator is particularly effective as the kind of story you’d see out of an arc of another show, but they all basically work straight through.
Now, one thing that I have often groused about is how hard “the occult” is to work with as a theme. I brought it up for Occult Academy and I brought it up for Occultic;Nine and I mention it here because, in some ways, I think the Boogiepop franchise, particularly Boogiepop and Others, kind of gets the outside-the-box solution.
By that, I mean to ask: what makes the occult an appealing topic? If you’re not answering for any particular phenomenon (which would be an easier theme to take on anyway), I think the answer is that it’s the mystique. The idea of the Occult is of something secret, unexplained and perhaps unexplainable, at least partially. It’s a half-solved mystery, the world seen through a camera obscura, fascinating in its partial nature, inviting investigation all the way down the rabbit hole. Boogiepop is full of that feeling. True, there aren’t really recognizable occult phenomena in Boogiepop, but there don’t have to be. It has the mystique, and by constructing its own unfamiliar world it can create that mystique without losing focus.
Because, when you get down to it, what’s going on in Boogiepop? Best as I can figure, it’s Fate’s Counter-Force taking on the premise of X-Men, with a shadowy evil organization making trouble in that framework. But it doesn’t feel like that at all, it feels like something big and wonderful and mysterious where anything is possible yet there exists a truth to see if you can only peel back the layers to see it. It feels like an Occult setup.
One interesting side-note, I feel, is the titular character. When you get down to it… Boogiepop doesn’t actually do all that much in Boogiepop. Usually she shows up to give a final push once the humans involved have done 90% of the work or more themselves. Of all the potential threats, the only one that Boogiepop actually dispatches as the fearsome “shinigami” is the mad psychologist; Manticore is taken out by Shiro (with Boogiepop’s assistance), Echoes is a friend because of Naoko, Spooky Electric is dealt with by the guidance counselor, he’s not actually a threat, Imaginator sort of peters out which you could credit to Boogiepop despite it not feeling like it, and the King of Distortion is ultimately handled peacefully.
Despite this, you do feel like Boogiepop is a powerful, otherworldly entity, because the property, and particularly this show, is good at controlling the tone and feel to be immersive and engaging. You relate the Boogiepop and Others very naturally the way that the creators want you to relate to it, and that’s a critical skill.
All in all, I’d rate Boogiepop and Others as an A. It really is well-executed, as well as fairly unique. It’s intricate and engaging, capturing some of the spider web feel of Boogiepop Phantom without the morass of being lost that Phantom had as the albatross around its neck, and it’s a better representation of the allure of the occult than most shows that go explicitly for the occult. Unlike its older sibling show, this is one I can wholeheartedly recommend even to more casual viewers. And, when you’ve watched Boogiepop and Others, you have a context into which to place Boogiepop Phantom, which means as a side benefit it should be easier to enjoy that show as well.