eflecting philosophically on a long-ago experience, shy high-school sophomore Moto Tonomura comments to herself, "Looking at the world as a whole, this incident was just a small piece of the big puzzle. But it's the pieces of the puzzle that form the whole picture." She's talking about her own life, but she might just as well be describing the overall theme of her tangled series Boogiepop Phantom.
Episode 1 deals with Moto, who's pining after her best friend's ex-boyfriend, Saotome. He disappeared a month ago during a strange cataclysm that smashed a hole through his school's roof, sent a beam of white light shooting into the sky and knocked out lights all over the city. Distraught and distracted, Moto wanders around town facing weird supernatural phenomena and listening to her classmates discuss a new urban legend, regarding the arrival of the Angel of Death, otherwise known as Boogiepop. Privately, Moto believes Boogiepop killed Saotome. Her friends are impatient with her obvious depression, but an older boy she accidentally meets in the nurse's office introduces himself as Jonouchi, and points out that a bug is attached to her heart and if she doesn't get rid of it, it'll eat her from the inside. So she continues her melancholy search—which leads to a horrific encounter with Boogiepop herself.
Episode 2 jumps backward in time to introduce Jonouchi, a would-be athlete felled by a malignant bone tumor. Convinced that his ability to "be a hero" has been removed, he's bitter and self-pitying—until the mysterious cataclysm gives him the power to see other people's suppressed grief. His grotesque and ultimately sanity-impairing attempts to deal with such manifestations lead him to Boogiepop as well.
In episode 3, the aftermath of Jonouchi's story leaves one of his classmates dealing with a sudden depression of her own. It leaves her vulnerable to her friend, Misuzu, who believes in accepting everything at face value—even the monstrous thing that's using her to prey on those around her. And so the series goes, leaping back and forth through time to explore a welter of plot-puzzle pieces that all link up via a few key events: the cataclysm, the subsequent disappearances and the serial killer that stalked the area five years ago.
A spooky sepia puzzle
The most frustrating, and the most involving, thing about Boogiepop Phantom is the way each interconnected episode is about half story and half fragmentary history or future-story. It takes some detective work and repeated viewing to track all the time jumps, and presumably viewers will have to see all 12 episodes to fully make sense of these six. For instance, Moto's encounter with Jonouchi in episode 1 is baffling on its own, save as a slice of creepy surreality, but episode 2 clears things up. A lunatic raving in the streets is just a moment of background for episode 3, but episode 4 follows his personal storyline back to show how he ended up in such a sorry state. And so forth. Some of the most important stories have yet to be told—particularly that of detective wannabe Nagi Kirima, who's clearly a key figure, but who only shows up in these six episodes in brief flashes. Even Boogiepop disappears almost entirely in episodes 4 through 6.
Structure aside, Boogiepop strongly resembles Serial Experiments Lain in tone, style and execution. It adheres closely to a washed-out sepia color palette that heightens the sense of mental disease and emotional malaise that affects most of its characters on some level. Its stark, striking character design looks like a compromise between Lain's potato-faced protagonists and the sharp-nosed women of Silent Möbius. It scatters spine-tingling images of seemingly supernatural mystery and ghastly horror amid everyday scenes of school and social interaction, throwing an eerie pallor over even the most mundane details. And of course, it jumps all over the place, telling an engrossing piecemeal story that raises constant questions.
But so far, unlike Lain, Boogiepop actually seems inclined to offer answers. Episode 4 is a particularly Lain-like installment about an unsettlingly obsessive boy who relates to his cutesy, computerized pet/girlfriend better than he relates to real girls, until he starts to get the two confused. But episodes 5 and 6 follow themes rather than individual characters, and actually clear up some of the confusion. If the second half of the series is as moody, chilling, challenging and well-assembled as this half, Boogiepop Phantom will add up to one sophisticated wild ride.
Perhaps because the horror theme is sufficiently different from the wired-world cyberpunk theme, Boogiepop feels more like a respectful elaboration on Lain's style than a cheap rip-off. Or perhaps it's just because Boogiepop is so fascinating in its own right.
— Tasha
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