Anime On the Big Screen: “Detective Conan: The Crimson Love Letter”

Venue: Dendy Cinemas, Level 2, North Quarter, Canberra Centre, 148 Bunda Street, Canberra City, ACT
Date: Sunday 21 October 2018
Distributor: Toho Pictures (presented by the Japan Foundation as part of the Japanese Film Festival)
Format: Digital Projection, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles
Length: 112 minutes
Production Date: 2017
Currently on Home Video in English (as of writing): No

Unlike the horrible weather of the previous day, Sunday was a fantastic, sunny and warmish spring day with scant cloud cover in the blue skies above. Surprisingly Canberra Centre wasn’t crowded as usual. The second anime movie I went to see this weekend was playing as part of the 2018 Japanese Film Festival which had run over the previous three days. Two anime films played last year, however we’re back to one feature this year and it’s a doozy; a film based on a continuing franchise over two decades old that has made no real impression on western anime fans, let alone in Australia. I was given a survey as I walked in and told to complete it so more anime was programmed for future festivals in Canberra. I wasn’t going to argue the point of why in hell this film was programmed. There was plenty of other recent features they could have programmed such as the two Science Saru films; “The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl”, which oddly Melbourne did get, and “Lu Over the Wall”. However I made the comment that one of the better independent Japanese films of recent years, “One Cut of the Dead”, wasn’t even playing in Canberra for the festival, yet was listed in the line up for other capitals.

I really don’t get what goes on in the minds of the festival’s programmers. I honestly don’t. Despite the strange selection of the 2017 “Conan” movie, almost 50 people showed up for the screening. As per usual it was a mix of people; quite a lot of Japanese parents bringing their children to the screening, the usual film festival types, a couple of otaku types (with one rather large guy continually shoving popcorn into his face) and strangely a couple of groups of young women. Dendy had the Vapors song “Turning Japanese” playing over the PA before the screening commenced, which was quite frankly strange. Before I attempt to dissect the film, I think a quick rundown of the franchise is in order; based on the long running manga by Gosho Aoyama and published in Shonen Sunday, the manga became so popular it spawned an anime series in 1996 which still to this day gains high ratings and is now up to episode 917 as of last week. 22 films have also been produced since 1997, with this one being the 21st and also the highest grossing one at the time of release (with nearly a million tickets sold and ¥6.87 billion in box office receipts).

The series follows Shinichi Kudo, a high school detective who gains fame by helping the police solve murder mysteries. While on a date with his childhood sweetheart Ran Mori at a theme park, he comes across a shady deal being hatched by a criminal organisation, but is caught by its members and knocked out. They force a strange new poison down his throat in an attempt to kill him. However instead of killing him, it oddly shrinks his body down to that of a first grade child. To hide his true identity, Shinichi takes up the alias Conan Edogawa and tags along with Ran’s bumbling detective father, Kogoro Mori, in the hope Kogoro will take a case involving the organisation that poisoned him so he can obtain the antidote that can turn him back into his old self. When he is able to solve a case, he uses a tranquilizer to put Kogoro to sleep and impersonates him using a voice changer to reveal the solution. Conan enrols in a local elementary school where he makes friends with several classmates who form their own detective club called the Detective Boys. He also befriends a professor, Dr Agasa, who makes various gadgets for him to use in his investigations and often teams up with teenage detective Heiji Hattori and his not quite girlfriend, Kazuha Toyama.

This movie has the Detective Boys club along with Detective Kogoro, Ran, Heiji and Kazuha traveling to Osaka to cheer on Mikiko Hiramoto who is playing in Japan’s biggest karuta tournament as part of the high school karuta club she and Kazuha are in. A mock tournament is being played in front of the cameras in a local TV station with Mikiko and champion Momiji Ooka playing as a rehearsal. In between setting the stage up for the broadcast, Momiji bumps into Heiji and states that she has just met her future husband. Naturally Kazuha is rather miffed at this accidental meeting and interrogates Heiji to find out if her really knows her. The local police inform the station that a bomb threat has been received. The station is evacuated, but Mikiko goes back to retrieve a special set of karuta cards that will be used in the final. Conan, Heiji and Kazuha run back in to save Mikiko, but the bomb goes off during their evacuation. Mikiko manages to escape, but the others are trapped and decide to head to the roof. Conan uses his Elasticity Suspenders to lower Heiji and Kazuha to the ground, but a second explosion weakens the roof and he forced to use his Turbo Engine Skateboard and the station’s satellite dish to catapult himself towards the river. He doesn’t quite make it, however Heiji saves him by catching him in his arms.

In the aftermath we learn that Mikiko has broken her arm and can no longer play. She convinces Kazuha to play for her, though she feels that she is not up to Mikiko’s standard. Help arrives in the form of Heiji’s mother, Shizuka Hattori, a famous karuta champion, who teaches her everything she knows. It is later revealed that karuta champion Toshiya Yajima has been murdered. Several karuta cards are spread around the crime scene. It becomes obvious that the murder is related to the forthcoming karuta tournament, and soon people connected with the tournament start receiving threatening emails containing images of karuta cards which all have the word “Momiji” in their poems. It is believed that a man named Shikao Nagoro is behind the threats. Missing for several years, Nagoro was the leader of an elite karuta group in which Momiji was his greatest student. Conan believes the final target of the bomber is Momiji herself and that the bomber will strike in the finals of the championship.

This film, like the last six “Conan” films which preceded it, was directed by Kobun Shizuno, who is better known to anime fans as the director of CG anime such as the recent “Godzilla” trilogy and “Knights of Sidonia”. Besides Shinzuno, there isn’t any other really notable staff who worked on this film. But on the voice acting side of things though, there are some really big hitters; Megumi Hayashibara plays Ai Haibara (who plays only a small role in the film, but a large one in the “Conan” universe), Yuko Miyamura (Asuka in “Evangelion”) playing Kazuha Toyama, Akira Kamiya (Ryo Saeba in “City Hunter”) plays Kogoro and Minami Takayama (Nabiki Tendo in “Ranma ½”) as Conan.

On the positive side of things, much of the action is really well done. There are approximately three major action sequences and Shizuno shows off his fantastic skills in all three (Shizuno storyboarded the film as well). He certainly knows where to place the camera to obtain some great shots. According to interviews for the film, manga author Gosho Aoyama cited the recent live action adaptations of the manga series “Chihayafuru” (also made into an anime with the live action films being screened at this Japanese Film Festival) as inspiration. Much like “Chihayafuru”, this film makes use of the beautiful surrounds of the Omi Jingu Shrine which in real life hosts the national karuta championship. In the game play of karuta itself, Shizuno cleverly uses the cards flying in the air as moving screens to depict the action in and around the game being held. The closing credits also uses really beautiful live action footage of the area in and around Omi Jingu, which I thought was a great way to end the film.

Now having said that, I really struggled with this film. As it was part of a much larger franchise that I practically knew nothing about (apart from the few episodes I managed to catch on TV in my travels to Japan), I attempted to read up on as much as I could before I went. However it’s pretty hard to jam over 20 years of the franchise into a quarter of an hour or so of reading. As the cast is rather large (and even with the fact many characters did not appear or had mere cameos in this film), I found it really hard to work out the relationships in the film and generally couldn’t get their personal idiosyncrasies that had been built up over the last two decades. Coupled with that was a rather convoluted mystery involving karuta cards and organisations linked to the game with characters being introduced left right and centre at a rapid rate.

Adding to this hellish mix was the rather bizarre world of “Conan” in which not only do you have to suspend disbelief that a teenager has been shrunk to the size of a young child, but also that he solves crimes and uses his unconscious girlfriend’s father and a voice changing bowtie in order to announce the culprit of the crime, because no one is going to believe a child. And this is despite the very realistic world settings. The gadgets Conan uses are really silly and implausible (turbo propelled skateboard?!) and the action sequences have some plainly absurd moments. The worst offender is the action sequence at the TV station. One part involves Conan escaping the burning and crumbling roof top by riding his turbo skateboard around and around the TV station’s satellite dish in an effort to gain speed so he can jump over the road into the river several hundred metres away. It’s utterly daft. Meanwhile the bomber standing outside the burning building is depicted as if he is wearing a black zentai suit, which I assume is to hide his identity from the audience, however it just looks strange, as nobody in the crowd seems to notice this weird man in a black zentai suit grinning manically. Other methods surely should have been considered to hide his identity from the audience. Why they chose this method baffles me.

I also didn’t think much of most of the animation. It doesn’t really get above TV animation level for the vast majority of the film. The music isn’t much chop either. For the most part it’s quite dull synthesizer music that at times sounds like it escaped from a B-movie. Adding to the film’s woes are the subtitles. First up they were white and quite thin and didn’t have a great deal of black border to them. Any time there was a light or white background, they could be extremely difficult to read. The translation wasn’t up to snuff either. There were a lot of grammatical errors and obviously the script editor or translator couldn’t work out how to handle the puns and wordplay all that well. For instance if there was a bit of wordplay, the line would be translated literally, plus the line would also romanised in Japanese. Apparently the audience was meant to read all the subs in a very short time frame, then work out the pun or wordplay for themselves. This film was screened in Singaporean cinemas last year, so I’m assuming the version screened here is identical to Singaporean one. Odex was the distributor, who are pretty notorious for their shitty subs and translations. It certainly looks like their work.

Summing up, I couldn't get into this film much at all. It was too hard me coming into this film fresh without really knowing the history of the franchise. It was extremely difficult to work out the convoluted mystery, keep track of the suspects and try to figure out who all these characters are and how they relate to each other in the “Conan” universe. I also couldn’t suspend my disbelief in spots. Parts of it were a bit too silly. The choice of this feature for the film festival beggar’s belief; a movie from a 20 year franchise that is pretty much unknown to a lot of western anime fans, let alone general festival goers, involving a mystery set around a card game unfamiliar to the vast majority of westerners. I mean the manga series is a relatively good seller for Viz and American late night show host Conan O'Brien has recently raised the profile of the series, but come on! At times the film did interest me, I did like part of the mystery and lot of the action sequences where fun (when you could suspend disbelief), however it wasn’t exactly a fun experience for me. 5 out of 10 and I’m being quite generous.