A different kind of "mystery" meat this time. The Detective Conan franchise pretty much has to be considered the single most successful anime series of our time: 635 episodes and still going, which makes DBZ look tiny by comparison. (Bleach is currently 345 eps. Keroro Gunsou is 358. Naruto is a paltry 220.) It's based on a manga which has reached its 65th volume.

Detective Conan also has had 15 movies, and this is the 14th. So when it came along, I got curious.

The series conceit is well known: Our Hero was a brilliant high schooler who also worked as a detective. But he was caught by some bad guys, who gave him poison. However, rather than killing him it reduced his body to that of a grade schooler. Didn't change his mind or personality, though.

Before the change, his best friend was a pretty girl named Ran. Afterwards, he didn't want her to know what had happened, so he adopted the new name of Edogawa Conan, made up of parts of the names of two great mystery authors. And so we have it: after all this time he's still a little kid, and every episode presents a mystery which he solves.

It's hard to believe they could keep it fresh such a long time. So maybe it wasn't a good idea for me to begin sampling the series with something so late and recent. Fact is, I couldn't finish it. I got half hour in and gave up, for a simple reason: I was bored.

It's a 100 minute movie, and there just wasn't that much meat there. It dragged. I imagine that if the story had been told in a 22 minute episode it would have been pretty successful, but in 100 minutes it dragged.

It might have helped if I was more familiar with the characters, because most of the part I did watch was dominated by character cameos, particularly of little kids the age that Conan was reverted to, and a bunch of bumbling cops.

Just not for me, I'm afraid.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:46 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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