There is an urban legend that children tell one another about a shinigami that can release people from the pain they may be suffering. This “Angel of Death” has a name: Boogiepop. And the legends are true. Boogiepop is real. When a rash of disappearances involving female students breaks out at Shinyo Academy, the police and faculty assume they just have a bunch of runaways on their hands. But Nagi Kirima knows better. Something mysterious and foul is afoot. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: TBA
Source: Light Novel
Episode Summary: Keiji Takeda is in the city, waiting for his date, Touka Miyashita to arrive. She does, in fact, drop in, though dressed in black robes, ignoring Takeda completely, and aiding a disheveled, crying man while scolding the rest of the crowd for their insensitivity toward him. The next day, Takeda can’t get a hold of Miyashita at all, and with word of several runaways from their school, Takeda’s mind starts traveling to dark places. As the sun begins to set, he notices a figure up on the roof.
This rooftop presence has Miyashita’s face, but speaks with an awareness that feels otherworldly. They call themselves “Boogiepop,” an entity that only appears when needed and when the world is in danger. They warn Takeda of a monster, a “man-eater,” that poses a threat to humanity; it’s coincidental that Miyashita is the conduit through which Boogiepop was able to manifest. As Takeda wrestles with his ability to accept Boogiepop’s presence and Miyashita’s absence, he also becomes concerned that another student at the school may be the embodiment of the horror that Boogiepop has arrived to oppose.
Impressions:Content Warning: brief images of death and dismemberment. Discussion of dissociative identity disorder.
This first impression covers material from the first of two episode of the series that was released today.
Boogiepop and Others is very tough to write about in any kind of a straightforward way. Its first episode is the sort that doesn’t lay out any convenient road maps and plays on viewers’ lack of knowledge and narrow scope of perception. Its horrors come in brief flashes, startling moments of silence that cut through the soundtrack like gunshots, and distorted horror images that are gone before one can really register them. Its scenes rarely take place in daylight, instead confined to twilight or shadows. In short, I think most (including myself) are likely to find it a bit confusing, and maybe a little bit off-putting at times. For me, though, the unsettling atmosphere and mysterious story are terribly intriguing.
This episode, by the time it concludes, gives the impression that the timeline it portrays isn’t exactly what it appears to be. Through Takeda’s eyes, we meet the enigmatic Boogiepop, learn their motive, and then they’re suddenly gone, the threat they warned of having been eliminated. But what of the missing students, or the the talk of the murderer among them? How can Boogiepop speak of a friendship built with Takeda though they’ve seemingly only known each-other very briefly? There are certainly a few pieces missing from the puzzle (and some disorientation sorely in need of settling), but there’s a certain magic to the brief glimpses we receive of the titular character and their purpose.
While it’s yet to be apparent in an obvious way, there’s a nagging feeling that Takeda seems disconnected from other characters, and that in itself is intriguing to me. He’s one of the only that we see directly interact with Boogiepop beyond the confrontation in the city. He often seems separated from others by barriers – door frames, foreground objects (the tower on the school roof), and the focus of the camera. While I don’t care to speculate too much at this point in the story since there are a lot of details missing, I wonder if Takeda and Boogiepop interact because Takeda is sort of experienced at seeing the separation in things in this way. If not, the framing of many scenes is still good at conveying that he’s a character we ought to pay attention to.
Along those same lines, while we don’t really see Miyashita as herself much throughout the episode, there are a lot of interesting ways that the framing of various scenes conveys the differing states of her own personality and the Boogiepop entity. Miyashita’s radio silence, and then her sudden texts to Takeda, let one know that the swap has taken place. We hear her voice over the phone but don’t see her in person except in brief shots of her face reflected in the side of a train car and in a mirror – Boogiepop appearing in the background as she expresses a dark grin. Some of these tricks and visuals are fairly obvious, and some of them are subtle, but all these signals seem very deliberate and conscious. I enjoy the effect they give.
The soundtrack and sound design in this episode is moody and fascinating; a good fit for such an unusual first outing. I really love the sharp contrasts between sound and silence, once again suggesting a strong division between two different states of being. In a lot of series the soundtrack can be overbearing and seems to have its own agenda, wringing feelings out of the audience. Here, much of the time there’s subtlety to the sounds with their low tones and lack of melody.
For all of its positive, intriguing aspects, the episode does seem to stumble in a few ways (though I suspect many will disagree with me on this point). While some of the story elements are confounding and seem put in place to throw the viewer off track (not something that bothers me but which might frustrate others), some others feel off-putting in the way that they seem to play into certain stereotypes and tropes. While the matter of the missing, presumed runaway, girls hearkens back to older series like Serial Experiments: Lain, it also feels a little bit, for lack of a better word, “typical.” There’s often a certain gut reaction people have toward missing or murdered girls and women. Runaway girls, presumed to have escaped society’s exacting standards and entered into delinquency, often feel to me to represent some element of society losing control of them (and symbolically falling out of step or transgressing in some way). And dead women’s bodies are often a cheap way to sprinkle violence and edginess around in a way that’s a shortcut to producing horrified reactions in an audience. While these things aren’t deal-breakers for me, I’ll certainly be interested to see how they pan-out in context.
It’s hard for me to describe, but this episode gives the impression of an older series, one with more millennium-based anxieties. There are really no concrete clues that directly suggest that, but I do see a bit of an equivalent. In 20-odd years we’ve gone from internet-based technological stressors, to smartphones and social media. The students in Takeda’s class still cling to urban legends about murderers and lost souls, it’s just the mode of transmission that’s changed. “Social media is the monster within our ranks” seems too pat an interpretation to start tossing around so early on, so I’ll try to keep that to myself. But urban legends have their origins in some of our very concrete anxieties, so it wouldn’t surprise me if a story of modern-day urban fears elected to go that direction.
Pros: Atmospheric presentation with great sound design and soundtrack. Cool visual symbolism.
Cons: Some story elements rely on uncreative tropes. The first episode is definitely confusing, which may frustrate viewers.
Grade: B