Boogiepop and Others – Episodes 1&2 [First Impression]

I’ve heard of the original Boogiepop Phantom anime, I’d always vaguely wanted to see it but never got a chance. I saw ‘Boogiepop and Others’ pop up in the seasonal preview and I couldn’t help but wonder to myself if I could watch it with no knowledge of the previous anime. Everything I was seeing and reading said ‘Yes’, so I dove right in.
My general reaction to the first episode was to sit there, click on episode two in the hope and prayer that I might understand better anything that happened in the first episode.

Episode 1 leaves open an array of questions, among which. “What/who is boogiepop?”, Why are they there? If the danger is truly gone then who was the man-eater? If Boogiepop didn’t defeat the danger, then who did?

I feel like I met a lot of characters but at the same time know nothing about any of them outside of Keiji Takeda, the boy who’s dating the body that hosts Boogiepop, Touka Miyashita and Boogiepop…himself? A lot of the episode is spent in dialogue between these two characters on the roof of the school with cut aways to other events. Such as the discussion of the murder of young women that have reached the peak of their beauty.
Or cut aways to the dead bodies of these women. Girls are vanishing, ‘running away’ seemingly and there doesn’t seem to be any cause. A lot of the first episodes concepts seem to me to be abstract.

Such as the idea that we don’t take care of the people suffering around us. How we will turn a blind eye to someone crying right in front of us. Is this what we called a civilized society? Is it obvious when someone is in pain? Boogiepop helps someone, someone who appears to be a hobo it seems and poses these questions.

In the second episode, we get a little more of the story of what exactly is going on.
Starting with the hobo that Boogiepop helped in the previous episode. It seems that it’s true identity is a alien known as ‘Echoes’ that came to earth to try to understand what kind of creature mankind was. Are we kind? Are we cruel? It was supposed to turn into one of us and observe from within society but it evolved too much and got captured and experimented on. A clone was made from it, the clone that came to be known as the ‘man-eater’ that Boogiepop was hunting.
How do you mess up an experiment on a seemingly harmless alien that is only here to observe and can’t even speak properly so bad that you create a man eating monster out of it? How inept were these scientist?

Masami Saotome, stumbles upon the man-eater and names it Manticore. He vows to help it and begins trying to assist it in creating slaves that will bring it humans to rule over and devour.

Lastly the other character we learn more about in this episode is Nagi Kirima. The one everyone in the first episode seems to think might be the killer, but on the flip side. She may in fact be the one that is going to step in and defeat the danger in place of Boogiepop. Nagi Kirima is probably the most interesting character to me so far for a variety of reasons. Why is she involved in all of this? Where did she get obvious combat training? Why do so many people seem to go to her to help them?
If she is the one that will bring down the Man-eater, how and why?

There were other characters introduced in these episodes but I have yet to grasp their importance to this story and how it will pan out.

overall impressions:

God, these two episodes were intense. I feel like we learned a lot and yet nothing and all. The timeline seems to be all over the place and it’s going to be fun to try to fill in the blanks as the series goes along. This series has something of a reputation for being confusing and it certainly lives up to that. I am probably going to go back and watch these episodes again just to try to piece together things I may not of caught the first time.
I really enjoyed these episodes, they were fun and intriguing and I can’t wait to know what happens next but I am not entire sure about blogging it. The structure of the episodes and the way the timeline seems to function makes it seem like it might be hard to write about.  This is absolutely worth a watch if you’re a fan of the horror/psychological genre and you should go to Crunchyroll right now. The only reason i’m hesitant to blog it is I feel like each review I write for this might leave me looking like the meme of the guy with the pin up board trying to explain something complicated.

The animation wasn’t anything to write home about and the opening song, while pretty, was pretty standard. This is an anime that is going to hold up on it’s story and characters alone and that’s fine.

Possibility of watching: Guaranteed
Possibility of Blogging: Moderate

-Midnight