Director – Chika Nagaoka – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 111m
****
Spin-off from a hugely populardetective mystery manga and anime franchise – and Japan’s biggest box office success of 2024 – impresses on the level of eye-candy provided you don’t attempt to follow the overly convoluted plot – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 27th
Japanese property Detective Conan is huge, running as a serialised manga in Weekly Shonen Sunday for 30 years, and turned into an anime series two years after that. By 2024, the manga has been collected into over a hundred volumes, while the franchise has spawn both animated and live action features among other things. The current film is the 27th animated feature, and at the time of writing is the biggest film at this year’s Japanese box office.
It may not be a good place to start with the franchise. Unlike Spy x Family Code: White (Kazuhiro Fusuhashu, Takashi Karagiri, 2023), which does a surprisingly effective job at getting the newcomer up to speed on a well-established anime franchise, Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram doesn’t bother to explain its characters and their complex network of relationships, so you may find yourself completely lost before it starts throwing its increasingly convoluted plot developments at the viewer (as it does almost immediately with disorienting speed). Nevertheless, while the incomprehensibility factor is high, it’s extremely lively, looks great and proves hugely entertaining.
In a pre-credits sequence, it’s reported that the third generation of the Onoe family business, Takuzo Onoe, is a poor businessman and is consequently selling off the family’s valuable collection of artefacts piece by piece. Some scrolls from that collection are due to be transported from their current place of safe keeping, while the eponymous detective who has (at the start of the manga’s run) been shrunk to the size of a small boy is on the premises; so too is another sleuth, who is in the loading bay checking out some questionable transactions when the white top-hat-and-tailed Kid The Phantom Thief (voice: Kappei Yamaguchi) appears, intent on robbery. As Kid tries to make his getaway, he is pursued by his nemesis’ on a motorbike who rides through a stained-glass window to battle him on the apex of a roof, the Kid – as he flies off on his personalised white hang-glider which resembles nothing so much as a giant paper dart – addressing him as Detective of the West.
You can probably already feel my confusion attempting to write the plot into some sort of comprehensible form even as I thrill to the character design and visuals, and the entertainingly choreographed action. The title sequence goes a long way to explaining the background, but in a cinema where you can’t pause the film and see who is who or what is what, and assuming you’re an English person taking in Japanese by reading English subtitles, there is simply too much non-pictorial, verbal information coming at you too fast here.
So, rewatched at home with the aid of a freeze-frame, because it comes at you too fast in the cinema to take it in if you don’t know what it’s telling you already (backstory that readers of the manga and watchers of the anime series will be familiar with), the explanatory title sequence voice-over intro, with images that don’t really explain anything at all, goes something like this…
High school detective Shinichi Kudo (voice: Kappei Yamaguchi again) went to an amusement park with childhood friend Ran Mori (Wakama Yamazaki), where he watched men in black making a suspicious deal and had a drug put into him which shrunk his body. He has decided, on Professor Agasa’s advice, to keep his identity a secret to protect the lives of those around him, so adopts the name Edogawa Conan and ends up living in Ran’s house with her father, a detective. Those who know his true identity are Heiji Hattori (voice: Ryo Horikawa), High School Detective of the West (so THAT’S who he was) and his arch-nemesis Kid the Phantom Thief.
Other characters introduced in the course of the narrative include Hijiri Fukushiro (voice: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka), a medical student and gifted swordsman the sound of whose blade slicing through the air impresses a girl Kazuha Toyama (voice: Yuko Miyamura), a friend of Ran’s, when he practices in her garden. A helicopter flying overhead contains rich girl My Lady who, accompanied by her personal assistant and fixer Iori (voice: Daisuke Ono), appears to be in romantic pursuit of Hattori but keeps missing him because personal helicopter and reports of peoples’ whereabout is perhaps not the most effective way of finding them.
Three detectives investigating the death of a man carrying train and airline tickets include the accident-prone Kawazoe (voice: Yo Oizumi), incapable of parking a car without slightly damaging it and placing his coffee far too near to a computer keyboard, as well as his colleagues Nishimura (voice: Hikaru Hanada) and Nakamori (voice: Koji Ishii). Kid the phantom Thief, meanwhile, is intent of stealing a series of swords related to the one seen in the opening sequence. And the film keeps on going like this, piling further detail upon detail.
I’ve often found when watching convoluted plots of movies that, as they proceed, certain events gain in significance and one’s sense of the overall plot starts to fall into place. Not so here, at least, not for someone unfamiliar with the franchise. This isn’t a standalone movie so much as the latest entry in a colossal, ongoing, media franchise. It is far too complex, and there’s scant sense of some events being more significant than others. Perhaps it’s a mistake to watch this without a familiarity with the manga or the series in the first place, since this is clearly aimed at those who already know its basic ground rules and characters, for whom the movie is probably a lot easier to digest.
However, if you come to it without knowing anything about Detective Conan, as a piece of eye-candy, it’s enjoyable enough; indeed, it’s strangely and curiously compelling, veering between crime, mystery, larger than life characters, social comedy and romance. I find myself at once delighted to see it appearing in UK cinemas in a subtitled version, and wondering if it’s simply too niche to make any impression as a standalone release. Take a chance on it, by all means – you may love it, or you may find it completely baffling. Or both.
Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 27th.
Trailer: