Portraits from Memory: Boogiepop Phantom

I’ve been wanting to write something smart about Boogiepop Phantom for years now, but I’ve come to realize that, no, I really don’t want to. Every six months or so it goes into the dvd player and I sit and take it all in. It has to have been at least ten times through already. Ten viewings seems like a crazy amount of time to spend with a story. It is, but sometimes a story or the personal luggage that one brings to the story can support that kind of thing.

Boogiepop Phantom is a dense show that consists of two arcs told by a number of different stories. It’s about a lot of things that deal with the fears of growing up and feeling the walls close in as the state of when everything was possible ends. Things change as we grow older, says a character. In order to note that change it means recognizing something else has ended or is no longer what it once was. Change isn’t bad and not changing at all is probably worse, but it doesn’t make it any less sad to understand something had to go away in the process of growing up. I suppose it is most painful during those high school years when you are actively being pressured into leaving the infinite possibility of youth behind and forced to choose one reality over any other dreams that you may have had, which for many of us means trading the dream for survival. That is regret.

I’ve read a few people claim Boogiepop Phantom was too convoluted for its own good. I disagree with that to a point. While it is a convoluted jumbled mess and one would have to be a genius or a liar to claim they got it in one viewing, Boogiepop requires multiple viewings and rewards it with the kind of understanding that probably cannot be gained with a more straightforward presentation. If it were too convoluted, there would be no benefit in having to sort it all out. But, something like that is just opinion that’s tough to argue really — why not make it more straightforward, right? However, there’s nothing like the feeling of fitting those puzzle pieces together and further understanding what Boogiepop is all about. To be fair, the Boogiepop anime kind of assumes some outside knowledge of the Boogiepop world from the books, but I don’t find it all that important to know in order to enjoy the anime.

For all the angst it gives with statements like “why do we bother to live; we all die anyway”, Boogiepop Phantom holds out optimism. Sometimes people do make out okay, even after going through all of that. The end scene captures that moment when a chapter in a life ends and a new one she built is ready to begin a few days later. Beautiful, in fact.