Bonus #15: Boogiepop and Others (2000)

 

Director: Ryu Kaneda

Screenplay: Sadayuki Murai

Based on the light novel series by Kouhei Kadono

Cast: Sayaka Yoshino as Tôka Miyashita / Boogiepop; Maya Kurosu as Nagi Kirima; Daijirô Kawaoka as Keiji Takeda; Ayana Sakai as Minako Yurihara / Manticore; Asumi Miwa as Naoko Kamikishiro; Mami Shimizu as Kazuko Suema; Kai Hirohashi as Kei Shinkoku; Tetsu Sawaki as Akio Kimura; Hassei Takano as Saotome Masami; Hideyuki Kasahara as Shirô Tanaka

Live Action Adaptation

 

This is not the 2019 animated series by studio Madhouse being covered, but a live action adaptation of the first Boogiepop light novel released the same year as the first ever animated adaptation, Boogiepop Phantom (2000). It offers an interesting layer in explaining Boogiepop as a franchise, in that it is a deeply unconventional story in terms of lore but also in its storytelling in just the adaptations themselves, all of them unconventional even if the 2019 anime series is the most cognizant and does heavy lifting in explaining the lore to its basics.

The live action tale is aptly a puzzle box as much as Boogiepop Phantom, immediately disarming in how it has jazz cocktail piano music set to images such as a high school girl seductively licking the eyeball of another girl who is clearly dead. It is one of a few abrupt fragments we see in the prologue, in this Toei Video co-production, introducing all the students we will follow, as this film is told out of order, told in fragments over a timeline in different chronology to how they actually played out. It is, thankfully, fleshed out fully in the end with only certain passages not seen until the end of the film itself, with interlude segments in-between which add additional context. Screenwriter Sadayuki Murai, whilst working in live action here, is predominantly a screenwriter for animation, including for Boogiepop Phantom. He also penned Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (1997) and Millennium Actress (2001), so he is someone I have immense respect for, his craft on hand here in making sure this all makes sense in the end whilst taking a huge risk in depicting this tale in this idiosyncratic method of non-chronological storytelling.

This is also where the logic of Boogiepop is curious, just attempting it like any anime/light novel into live action as the Boogiepop costume alone, the titular figure a mysterious form who shares a body with a highschool girl named Tôka Miyashita (Sayaka Yoshino), looks really strange in the middle of a school or ordinary urban Japan at the time, looking like a Dune planet traveller is striking purple. Boogiepop, an urban legend presumed to kill people, is actually there to protect people from unearthly forms actually responsible for this, co-existing as separate entities in one body, and in terms of the tale being told, it tells the chapter in the 2019 anime which made up episodes one to three, Boogiepop Does Not Laugh. In this tale, there is a "manticore" disguised as a school girl, devouring the brains of fellow female classmates and whose tears, with an assitant, are being peddled as a mind sapping drug to bring more victims to her. There is the boy who loves Tôka who has to contend with how she is unaware of Boogiepop, and there is a girl who has found "Echoes", an alien entity in a human body connected to the manticore but is a form of good against them. And then there is Nagi Krima (Maya Kurosu), whose depiction here I loved. She is the other character of importance just in the Boogiepop adaptations alone - the daughter of a murdered novelist who, learning of the unnatural entities around her and Boogiepop, brings technology and her own martial arts skill to compensate for being a mortal young woman. This version as played by Maya Kurosu, as a short haired tomboy breaking students' arms, is a really cool one that sadly never was followed with and only has a short part to this narrative, one of the issues inherently with adapting merely a piece of this franchise when the series can expand on the character.

Telling a short piece of the source material, it is curious to see this version, which does have the limitations of a lower budget and the limitations of live action, stripping away some of the context and lore to its most practical version to adapt. Boogiepop is odd as a premise anyway, a sci-fi laced work with its horror touches and its esoteric world of artificial people, alien forms and monstrous entities picking on mortals. Boogiepop and Others, the 2019 version is the most conventional version as it is a series of four different stories like an anthology, whilst this live action version, because it shares a same screenwriter, is as esoteric as Boogiepop Phantom in how it plays out, which is a really unconventional experience even in context of this era's Japanese genre and horror films from the time. I have had ambivalence on all the lore, even as someone who admires all three adaptations as their own franchise without the source material, coming entirely from finding the 2000 Boogiepop Phantom an opaque and difficult anime in my youth, fully appreciating it now knowing it was a sequel novel adaptation which barely explains its world, becoming something abstract as a result and compelling as a result. It was also one where the real meat came from how the stories, no matter how unnatural, came from human behaviour, such as a plot line of someone who causes people to escape as their inner children, abandoning their adult selves as living husks in the normal world. Boogiepop Phantom out of all three also has the most distinct and incredible aesthetic and mood, but this live action interpretation glances at many of the franchise's virtues, including in how all these stories still connect to human folly and behaviour, slightly glanced over here with the subplot about the drug being taken for escape by students.

This does thankfully create its own atmosphere even in its own way. The urban Japan of this era of horror movies, especially the lower budget ones, has always compelling for me, more so in the case of this premise which, baring CGI which was aged back then, is having to work around its very unconventional content in the confines of what could be done practically and with the budget. It feels more compelling as horror and genre cinema that, hidden among the Japanese classrooms and in darkened alleyways, these strange visitors and incidents are transpiring, which you do not really see from lower budgeted North American films from the era unless with the lowest of budgets, always feeling restricted in their own confined sets as a result. Also the music, by composer Yuki Kajiura, is just as idiosyncratic as the two animated productions - not only does this have Boogiepop Phantom's opening theme at the end, sultry male vocal lounge music, but the smooth jazz score is delightfully unconventional, proto vaporwave, like the purple hue some scenes have.

Arguably this is the weakest of the three versions, even if the simplest of reasons that the others have longer to expand and shift with their narratives, whilst this has the time to tell just one of these tales. It is however a fascinatingly curious twist to low budget Japanese horror cinema from this era, even without the context of being an adaptation of a light novel, for how esoteric and unconventional the tropes of science fiction and horror are used within it. Able to see this, it is also the one adaptation of a source that became famous with its animated adaptations that managed to not come off as a compromised version. It struggles and it has to minimalize the more out-there aspects of the source work, but it manages to succeed in its own way to adapt the material, which is an achievement in itself.