Boogiepop Phantom

By Andrew Osmond.

Boogiepop Phantom is a teenage Twilight Zone. Contrary to popular anime depictions, being an adolescent in Japan isn’t all comedic love triangles, eccentric school clubs and wild beach vacations. It can be numbing, depressing, achingly lonely and aridly meaningless. In the deepest funk of teenage night, where everything seems weird and alien, why shouldn’t there be monsters in the shadows, or crazy phenomena no-one else sees?

The series feels like an anthology, in that each episode centres on different characters, mostly school-aged and often girls. The first episode, for example, focuses on a withdrawn girl with sadly unrequited feelings for a boy who’s vanished without trace, one of numerous disappearances in her town. Midway through the story, the girl has a weird encounter with another boy, who claims her bottled-up feelings have turned into an insect attached to her heart. The only way to get rid of it, the boy says confidently, is for him to grope her chest.

The girl turns him down, understandably, and the boy doesn’t appear again in her story. But the next episode turns out to be the boy’s story – it turns out he was telling the complete truth, though he’s still a creep. And as the series continues, so we continue meeting more characters whose paths criss-cross, with weird little details to be expanded in another story further on. Not all the characters are hapless and lost. There’s a fearless girl investigator, a very sinister policeman, and more than one figure stalking the dark in ornate cloaks and tall hats. They’re sometimes called shinigami, the Japanese word for death god, but they have a stranger name as well: Boogiepop.

Boogiepop Phantom makes you share its characters’ limbos. Much of the anime is in gloom and shadows; even classrooms and karaoke bars feel like distanced netherworlds. Speech and noises are echoey, off-key, abrasive. The menace is constant; there’s not much violence, but what there is can be horrible. Of course, more of the story is explained over time; amusingly, one of the main info-dumps is provided by a disguised monster who divulges things to kill time. But it’s far more about mood than plot.

For fans of older anime, one obvious comparison is Serial Experiments Lain, broadcast in 1998, two years before Boogiepop Phantom. Lain, too, was a series about loneliness, and an alienated mood that fractured common-sense “reality” into dark dreams. Phantom also anticipates the 2004 series Paranoia Agent by Satoshi Kon, with its “relay” structure where different episodes highlight different characters, with holes in their lives and selves tipping them towards madness.

There are, in fact, some specific links between Kon and Boogiepop Phantom. Phantom’s lead writer was Sadayuki Murai, who had already worked with Kon on Perfect Blue and would do so again on his 2001 film Millennium Actress. Moreover, Phantom’s other writers included Seishi Minakami, who would go on to work with Kon on Paranoia Agent and Paprika. There’s one Phantom episode – the fourth part – that feels especially Kon-ish. Specifically, it evokes Perfect Blue, with a videogame otaku who starts to confuse the 2D cutie in his favourite game with a real girl at his workplace. It’s as disturbing as it sounds.

Boogiepop Phantom isn’t an original series; it’s an adaptation and also part of a multimedia franchise. The Boogiepop world originated as a series of a prose novels by Kouhei Kadono. Winning the 4th Dengeki novel prize in 1997, the original novel was described by Kim Morrissy at Anime News Network as the work that would “change light novels as a medium forever.” This was not merely because it sold well enough to transform the Dengeki prize from a minor gong to a harbinger of future success, but because it became emblematic of a whole slew of stories, conceived in the wake of Evangelion, in which characters’ inner torments were given as much attention as their outer conflicts. For the youth of Japan’s Lost Decades, raised in a country suffering permanent stagflation and diminishing prospects, it was a sign of the times – individuals caught up in vast disasters that were neither of their making, nor really in their power to prevent.

Author Kadono, in fact, was one of the early examples of the lifestyles that dovetail among Japan’s NEETs and hikikomori – he dropped out of the rat race as a young man, and spent his twenties as a shut-in, writing and rewriting until he finally produced the story that would make his fortune, and which would spawn spin-offs in multiple media, including more novels, manga, games, audio dramas and a live action film. And that’s one problem with the Boogiepop Phantom anime; it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The anime is a sequel, dealing with the fall-out of events from Kadono’s first book, Boogiepop and Others. While some of the scenario is explained in the anime – much of it by that helpful disguised monster – some of the backstory is untold, especially involving the girl investigator, Nagi Kirima, and a more unassuming girl called Touka, who has a secret even she doesn’t know. As well as Kadono’s source books, more of the context is laid out in a 2000 live-action film, which was supposed to come out at the same time as the anime, but was fatefully delayed by a few months. More is explained in another anime series, made in 2019 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Dengeki company – yes, the success of the original was that important to them.

While this lack of completeness is an issue with Boogiepop Phantom, anyone who is, or has been, a lonely teen will relate to how it shows the torments of growing up. Western viewers may see other resonances. For example, there’s a child Pied Piper figure who hands out scary red balloons, while any fan of Stephen King’s It mutters, “We all float down here”. This piper is also linked to a magic theme park offering an eternity of childhood, with overtones of Ray Bradbury’s story Something Wicked This Way Comes. And if you’re a fan of Paranoia Agent and Serial Experiments Lain, then watching Boogiepop Phantom will feel like coming home.

Except… You remember how Paranoia Agent had that wild, yodelling title song, designed to wake up late-night TV viewers? Boogiepop Phantom takes an entirely different strategy, going for a mellow and funky title track, as if to suggest this is a show that might be best watched half asleep.

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. Boogiepop Phantom is released in the UK by Anime Limited.