In reviewing Serial Experiments Lain I likened it to an experience more than an anime, but I forgot to mention that it belongs to a trifecta of “similar” shows which all came out in a five-year span surrounding the turn of the millennium: Lain, Texhnolyze, and Boogiepop Phantom. I say similar because all three evoke a similar complicated, almost otherworldly feeling using a washed-out palate dominated by greyscale, brilliantly erratic sound design, and most of all a feeling of continuity and narrative having been kicked to the curb, even if an overarching plot could be teased out given a few rewatches. But “similar” in doubtful quotes is more correct, because despite all these fundamental similarities they couldn't be less similar in setting and plot. Lain is a technological inversion of reality, Texhnolyze a decaying civilization, and Boogiepop Phantom...Boogiepop Phantom is the hardest to pin down by far, no small feat in this crowd.
Even on my third watch I still couldn't give an adequate summary of the plot. Who is the central figure? Is it the Boogiepop herself, or perhaps her shapeshifting prey the Manticore? Is it the bystander Miyashita Touka, her victimized friends such as Suema Kazuko, or even the hunter Kirima Nagi? Is it the cheerful boy holding a red balloon, or the speechless girl surrounded by dazzling butterflies? Is the story that of Boogiepop chasing down the violent murderer of Shinyo Academy, or the girls avoiding being murdered on their path to graduation? Maybe it's the balancing of the forces of stagnation, keeping the students wrapped up in their childish impulses with a mysterious red drug, or maybe it's each and every one of their stories—meeting Boogiepop, taking drugs, trying to move on but held back by family and friends in the process.
I've made similar remarks about Durarara!! and other nonlinear narratives before, but where those narratives weave the complete picture together one thread at a time, Boogiepop Phantom feels like a dozen completely disparate threads whose paths happen to cross once in a while, usually leading to destruction and despair. A boy corners a girl in the medical room saying that there's a bug attached to her heart, and later the girl resigns herself to being eaten by the ghost of her crush. Next episode and things shift to the boy, and in the same scene we see the bug above her heart, a giant technicolor spider, which is also his food. Shortly after that encounter he learns the violence he's been inflicting on those around him, even as he sought to help them by eating their infestations away. The tangle between their two worldlines is brief, and one could even say it has no bearing on either, but from that scene both of their episodes took a turn for the worse.
What does get developed through these independent stories is a picture of the world's underside, of the murders, drugs, and supernatural horrors that creep through their middle school lives. Every episode gives us an appearance of Boogiepop, whistling an overture by Wagner, yet sometimes her clothing is slightly off or her voice is slightly more grainy. Sometimes we see her attacking a human who shouldn't be there, often tied back to the man-eating monster she awoke to exterminate, yet sometimes she suppresses our episode protagonist, with the classic Fist of the North Star reveal “you're already dead”. Sometimes our protagonists are misguided, just kids believing in a higher power they alone are privy to, and through them we usually learn more about the murders and legends of the Boogiepop. Sometimes they stray into the realm of antagonism; a brilliant episode called My Fair Lady is a fitting dual image to Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, told from the side of the obsessed basement otaku constructing his perfect woman like Pygmalion, while crossing the simulacrum with his real life coworker. And if these moments don't share concrete details about the Boogiepop conflict, they certainly help us place the schoolkids within the conflict's narrative: confused, frustrated, trapped.
Failing to describe the story in any more detail—it really has to be seen to understand just how complex the narrative can be—I want to turn back to the aesthetic details I mentioned before, in part because I rarely have so much to convey about aesthetics. Boogiepop Phantom was adapted from two books in a much longer novel series, but I can't imagine how books could capture the same essence as Takashi Watanabe and Masao Maruyama's anime. The washed color palate of Lain and Texhnolyze is made even more oppressive by shading the corners and edges of the screen with a black gradient, as if we were watching an old worn-down film. It is a show that could never be upscaled past it's native 480p resolution because it thrives in being rough, granular, with ill-defined borders and impenetrably dark nightscapes. We see everything we need to understand the progression of events, and there are even plenty of visual details drawn in, but all of it is thrown behind a veil, possibly to protect us from empathizing with the people on screen too closely.
And as with Lain and Ghost Hound, I have nothing but praise for sound director Tsuruoka Youta, who not only ties the entire package together but practically runs the entire show by himself. There's certainly a lot to be said for the soundtrack itself too, with contributions from a dozen or so lesser known artists that set the tone of each scene wonderfully, but to me the sound design is where all the magic happens. There is a note, a quiet reverberating high B, which breaks a lot of noise and tension throughout the show and forcing the background music to go absolutely silent. There is the anime classic Kagome Kagome, which resists the anime trend of being played cleanly for a stark, creepy focus in favor of being garbled, accentuating the muddled chaos of the city, yet still being stark and creepy. Some scenes work with layers added in different orders, such as whether the music is granular and the voices are clear or the other way around, or both, while many scenes would be silent save for a small background tone to create an air of mystery. Sometimes chaotic sounds yield to absolute silence; sometimes absolute silence yields to chaotic sounds.
The scale of Boogiepop Phantom is small, almost minute. While the overarching plots deal with the whole city, or the whole academy or a whole group of friends, the shaded borders are so claustrophobic and the shots so close that there is rarely more than one or two people per frame, nor much space around them. The individual character focuses between episodes also force us to concentrate on a single conflict or a single person developing at a time, even while forcing us to juggle the dozens of plot threads the show requires for understanding by the end. Compared to Lain or Texhnolyze, which use space and depth to create scale to their conflicts even under depressing and claustrophobic settings, Boogiepop Phantom gives no opportunities to see a larger picture, which makes sense when we're following middle school students who have no clue how to escape the trappings of their immediate surroundings, their lives, and their minds.
When I find a show I love this much, the question is usually not whether or not I'd recommend it, but what advice I'd give for watching it. First, don't try and understand the plot on the first pass. Remembering that there exist characters like the Boogiepop and the Manticore is enough without having to dive into where they come from and what they mean. More important is to understand what the characters want and where they come from as people, episode by episode. On the first watch, don't think, feel the experience. On the second pass, there are more tricks to do, details that foreshadow or clarify who's actually on screen (word of advice from a friend: always check what Boogiepop is wearing). Take notes, but don't forget to experience the show's atmosphere again, as the effect won't decay in the slightest. On the third pass, aim to understand the message. Rather than feeling each character from episode to episode, understand what Boogiepop Phantom has to say about growing up, about maturation versus stagnation, and how friendships and goals play a role in not just maturing but in stagnating. And yes, it is worth watching three times, probably more. There's nothing quite like Lain, Texhnolyze, and Boogiepop Phantom in any medium. To watch them is nothing less than to experience a radical form of telling a story.