Boogiepop Phantom is a very interesting adaptation, mostly because of how different the experiences of watching it before and after reading the source material were for me. Personally, I try to view anime adaptations as standalone projects (unless explicitly stated by the creators otherwise), and that's how I'm going to look at this anime in this review as well, however, I will talk about how the adaptation relates to the light novels.
There's a way to write the plot of a story by splitting it into 2 "layers". The majority of the time the audience is shown the main layer, and only sometimes, through implications,
...
allusions, maybe disjointed events, the writer shows what is happening in the background (the 2nd layer). This helps in a limited amount of runtime to expand on general plot, world-building and themes. However, this method of storytelling expects the viewers to be very attentive if they want to piece the plot together and sometimes expects them to come up with arbitrary explanations for the ambiguous parts of the story. Boogiepop Phantom does exactly this, the "2nd layer" of the story either refers to events that happened in the light novels, sometimes with anime staff's own interpretations of said events, or presents the original Phantom side story. Knowing the content of the source material, the plot of the anime becomes more or less straightforward. But as I said, I'm going to evaluate this anime as a completely separate project.
Boogiepop Phantom is an episodic anime about mental struggles people face in the modern city but with a twist that all of them encounter some sort of paranormal phenomena, all while an ambiguous sci-fi thriller plot unravels in the background. The plot is presented in a non-linear style, there are no clear protagonists, instead, each episode focuses on particular characters that sometimes reoccur in the background roles later in the show, connecting the whole story together in some way. The anime overall gave me a feeling that it wanted to present a city life/society rather than any specific person/character. There are a lot of psychological and existential themes, some of the major ones are dealing with negative events and memories, escapism, and the difficulty and necessity of growing up/moving forward in life.
There are going to be spoilers for episode 4 below.
One of the difficulties in making episodic anime, assuming the writing plays an important role in the work, is that you have to tell a separate, fleshed-out story in a relatively short amount of time. In my opinion, not all of the Boogiepop Phantom's episodes were able to achieve that; however, the ones that did were done excellently. To not clog my review with every single episode analysis, I'm just going to talk about only one of my favorite episodes as an example of what I liked about the show. Episode 4 is about a troubled young guy without any major aspirations in life. He lives with his parents, doesn't have any friends, and, besides school, spends most of his time working, browsing the internet and playing a dating simulator. Eventually his unhealthy social lifestyle leads him to severe substance abuse and serious delusions, which in turn make him lose his sanity. While this brief synopsis does not seem exceptionally fascinating, the way the episode establishes the main character and his environment in a very short time period is remarkable. The relationship between main character Yoji and his dad is shown as very tense and stressful. The dad wants Yoji to get into a university, but Yoji either doesn't want to continue studying or can't decide his future path yet. As time goes on, both parties get significantly frustrated. Because of all the pressure, Yoji shuts down in conversations with his parents, and his dad doesn't understand Yoji's emotional state and why he doesn't follow the proper (in his eyes) path of studying for university. Parents were even willing to lower their expectations for Yoji's next university, and after not seeing any notable academic results and not getting any answers from him, his dad's frustration grows into almost anger. Yoji's frustration turns into resentment and disregard towards his parents. A brief flashback shows the dad reprimanding very young Yoji overly harsh for not doing well in his schoolwork, perhaps it was the dad who made Yoji feel indifferent towards school/university. All of this takes minutes to establish with just a few interactions of Yoji and his dad. Dad's intonation and choice of words and Yoji's dismissiveness and behavior when his father can't see him in his room. Later in the show, the tension between them heightens after the dad finds Computer Graphics School's pamphlet suggesting that Yoji might not be aiming to get into a university. The dad squeezes the paper with anger.
Another aspect of Yoji's life that seems to trouble him a lot is the lack of a romantic relationship that can be explained in part by Yoji's environment and in part by his extremely high, unreasonable standards for his potential partner. A lot of this is established just by Yoji's facial expressions and body language when seeing some other people or by him talking to himself. He winces seeing another couple on the street, he takes his eyes off the customer as soon as he sees her talking to a guy.
Yoji copes with the stress by ignoring some of his problems and turning to the dating simulator, the experience of playing which he treasures to an unhealthy extent but thinking about it, prioritizing it like an actual important event of the day helps him to suppress negative emotions he feels throughout the day.
However, there is another side to Yoji, all the emotional pressure didn't help him to form a good character. While Yoji is a relative loner, that did not make him bad at communicating. Quite the opposite, he's very good at understanding how to act to leave certain impressions of himself on other people. Yoji uses this ability to deceive and manipulate people to make them act out his weird fantasies.
The positive development of "Yoji character" is not shown. After the first half, the episode becomes way less about loner Yoji and more about a substance addict that is rapidly losing his mind. Eventually Yoji becomes unable to distinguish reality from fiction, starts to outwardly (as opposed to secretly like before) act creepy and weird towards his coworker, and loses his job. Later, because of a power outage, Yoji loses all the progress in his dating simulator, the only real passion that he is truly committed to. When the game gets deleted from/corrupted on his computer, he feels like everything meaningful in his life is gone. Yoji snaps, starts yelling and kicking the door. The outburst perhaps completely ruins his relationship with his dad. Later Yoji is shown mentally deranged. Instead of resolution to Yoji's life problems, the episode shows what eventually happens to the mind of the Manticore victim.
To portray relatively complex psychological states of some of its characters, Boogiepop Phantom deliberately chooses particular facial expressions, body movements, words the characters say and intonations they say them with. What makes this episodic anime's writing better than a lot of others is how much more information it manages to establish about its characters in the limited amount of episode runtime. However, I can't say this about all of the episodes, the better ones explore the characters and the problems they face more in-depth than the others. The entirety of the plot (assuming the light novel references are a part of it) is very difficult, if not outright impossible to fully piece together without conjectures, especially because the audiovisual presentation makes it seem like some of the events might not have happened as is.
Overall, the writing was done well. The "Phantom" side story is pretty simple once put together, the individual characters' segments are the strong point of the plot.
So how does the technical part of the show support the writing? With equal competence, in my opinion. There are 3 elements that stand out the most: the soundwork, color palette and visual effects. The show makes great use of distorted, overlapping, reverberated, unordinary loud, repeating sound effects and bursting-in soundtracks to keep the tense and dazed atmosphere. On the visual side, the anime staff decided to go with a limited/smaller and toned-down color palette and an uncommon vignette effect for the majority of the show, making it feel hazy/dreamy. All of it is aimed in part to try to communicate to the audience the mental states of the characters and in part to try to make it more difficult to understand if the events that are happening on screen are real. Although the animation itself is nothing special, it was very nice to see that the staff was willing to experiment with other visual aspects.
How anime relates to the light novels:
Watching the Boogiepop Phantom before reading the novels and then once again after were two very different experiences, at least for me. I already described more or less what it feels like to watch it without knowing information from the source material. So, watching the anime after reading the light novels renders the plot pretty straightforward and almost completely takes away all the dazed mystique the show tries to set up. It becomes obvious that everything that happens on the screen happens as is in the show's universe. There were no points where the story is shown through the perception of an unreliable narrator, nothing out of what was shown was a dream, it's just a collection of stories, with some of them connected to each other and presented in a non-linear style.
What is the better way to approach the show, before or after reading the light novels? Should the anime be treated as a standalone work that happened to borrow the Boogiepop universe to tell an isolated story, or is Boogiepop Phantom intended to be experienced within the context of the light novels? Two interesting questions to which I don't know definitive answers, however, I was only able to have 2 different experiences with the show because I watched it before reading the source material first. Not knowing anything about the Boogiepop universe and watching the show left me with an entertaining confusion of trying to decipher what was going on, what was real and what wasn't. While knowing what happened in the light novels and rewatching the anime, I got to experience the enjoyment of understanding the references and seeing the bigger picture clearer. Perhaps similar to being entertained by bewilderment from watching an unfamiliar magic trick and then experiencing enjoyment from following the execution of the same magic trick that you now know the secret of.
Maybe a stretch, but another factor that makes this adaptation very interesting is that watching it in a vacuum gives more ground to the brief references to the events that happened in the source material, in a sense that the audience is given disjointed facts of something that has happened or is happening, and the viewers have the ability to connect them and build/deduce the full story themselves. On the other hand, knowing what happened in the source material makes all of those light novel references very redundant to the anime's plot. It feels to me like the anime just decided to borrow the setting from the Boogiepop universe to tell its more or less independent story and doesn't really need any core attributes of the original stories. Feels to me like the show is wearing the Boogiepop mask, perhaps just to attract a bigger audience.
There are 2 points that make me give this work such a score. Firstly, while a lot of elements are very well done, at the end of the day, Boogiepop Phantom borrows from its predecessors a little bit too much for my taste. Similar soundwork style and plot structure, and even some similar themes, have been present in anime before. Secondly, not all of the episodes seem to be as well written as the others.
7.5/10
Jan 30, 2025
Boogiepop wa Warawanai
(Anime)
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Boogiepop Phantom is a very interesting adaptation, mostly because of how different the experiences of watching it before and after reading the source material were for me. Personally, I try to view anime adaptations as standalone projects (unless explicitly stated by the creators otherwise), and that's how I'm going to look at this anime in this review as well, however, I will talk about how the adaptation relates to the light novels.
There's a way to write the plot of a story by splitting it into 2 "layers". The majority of the time the audience is shown the main layer, and only sometimes, through implications, ... 
Sep 23, 2024
Murasakiiro no Qualia
(Manga)
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I gave Qualia the Purple 2/10 score. I try not to underrate or overrate anime and manga that I give a rating to, so after assigning a score this low I feel like I should write out my problems with this work if not for anyone else but for myself.
The author engages in a very poor writing technique that I don't even have a name for, by injecting in manga already existing scientific/philosophical theories/concepts, usually through one character explaining it to the other. It happens multiple times and what to me feels very cheap is that it reads very formal, almost like it would be ... |
