All Detective Conan Movies

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Evelina Browder

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Aug 4, 2024, 6:51:17 PM8/4/24
to mentnudeger
Chronologicallyfollowing from our previous installment of the Detective Conan anime reviews, we're taking a little sidetrack to talk about the first Detective Conan movie, The Time-Bombed Skyscraper which came out at this point in the series.

We thought it was a pretty good movie in all respects. In the context of Detective Conan, it's like a good anime original episode with extra animation budget. A lot of extra animation budget. But even beyond its place in the series, it's a good action/suspense movie that doesn't even require any prior knowledge of Detective Conan to enjoy.


The movie begins in extremely media res, with a murder investigation in progress. The victim typed a mysterious message on his computer right before dying. Kogoro has narrowed the suspects down to three, and he thinks he has figured out what the message means and who is it pointing to. When his deduction turns out to be incorrect, Conan goes, welp, here we go, and knocks him out with the tranquilizer dart from his stun watch, and uses the voice-changing bowtie to deliver the correct deduction in Kogoro's voice and solve the case.


This is a wonderful way to introduce the entire concept of the series on the go, in ten minutes, without infodumping on us. You hear a lot about the writing advices of "start in media res" and "show, don't tell", and often these suggestions are warped and misinterpreted, but this scene is an excellent example of what they actually mean: it's useful to start with an interesting event, and it's better to deliver narrative information in a way that is integrated within the story. You don't need to know one thing about Detective Conan to follow this scene, and by watching it, you learn what the premise is. Kogoro is a famous detective but he's not actually that great, and Conan turns him into a mouthpiece to really solve the mysteries, by using the stun watch and the voice-changing bowtie.


Apparently this stroke of storytelling brilliance was unacknowledged by the movie itself, because right after this scene, there is an infodump sequence about what happened to Shinichi and the men in black and Agasa and the Detective Boys and all the gadgets. But almost all of the information in this sequence has either already been delivered in a natural way in the scene before, or will be delivered in a natural way in scenes forthcoming. Probably the only thing that needed this sort of exposition would be the explanation of Conan's true identity. But this movie didn't need three, separate explanations for the stun watch!


Returning to the actual movie, Conan receives a letter addressed to Shinichi. He is invited to a famous architect's party. Naturally, Shinichi cannot attend as himself, so he instead gives his invitation to Kogoro and his family, and that way the architect can meet another great detective, and then Shinichi can secretly be there anyway...


Conan calls Ran as Shinichi to tell her about this. Ran says that, if she's to do this favor for him, then he should go out for a movie night with her next week. She makes a point that it must be next week, on May 3rd, no rescheduling. Shinichi protests, but his objections are ultimately steamrollered.


Shinichi tries to think about what is so important about that particular day. He can't think of anything special on May 3rd, but his first thought is, instead, that May 4th is the day Sherlock Holmes fought Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls!


Later that evening, over dinner, Conan asks Ran why is she going on a date on May 3rd in particular. It's so that they will be out together until midnight when it becomes May 4th which is Shinichi's own birthday. He's a loser who first thinks of what Sherlock Holmes did on May 4th rather than remember his own birthday. What is wrong with him?


Ran tries to make sure that Shinichi's birthday is special for him, because otherwise she knows that he would not even remember it. He would just get older. And that's sad. Thank you, Ran. But you are wasted on him. He does not even seem to care about how she cares.


In the next scene, it's the day of the architect's party. He has architected a ridiculous English-style mansion for himself. The distinctive feature of many of his creations is that they're perfectly symmetrical. We noticed while watching this movie in Japanese with English subtitles that the characters were saying the English word "symmetry" as a loan word. Kogoro goes so far as to carefully define what "symmetry" means for the audience. His definition emphasizes that this is an "English" idea.


We went on a research tangent, and we've confirmed what this scene made us wonder: the concept of symmetry is foreign to Japan. The Japanese culture values what is natural, and balance is important, but a natural balance ebbs and flows. In contrast, the English idea of symmetry is a forced, unnatural state, linked to Victorian ideals of mankind dominating nature and bending it to its will.


On another day, Conan is at Agasa's house. They're watching the news, and they're saying that the house where the guy was murdered at the beginning of the movie burned down. It was one of that architect's creations. Also, there was a massive burglary at an explosives factory. As they're watching the news, Shinichi receives a call from a mysterious guy who is using a voice changer to distort his voice. He says he's set a bomb in the park by the river. Can you stop it from blowing up?


Conan busts out of Agasa's house on the solar skateboard and makes it to the park. The Detective Conan movies tend to really want to showcase the solar skateboard, even though it's one of the least-used gadgets in the series. We guess that it makes sense to reserve it for the high-budget scenes, so that we can have Conan zipping around all the bystanders and doing cool moves on the skateboard, and it does look cool in this movie... but overall, we are glad that the skateboard can usually be completely forgotten, because it's kind of a stupid plot device.


The bomb has been strapped to a toy plane that Ayumi, Genta, and Mitsuhiko are playing with. Conan manages to make the bomb explode without hurting anyone. When the bomber calls again, Conan is so flustered that he answers Shinichi's phone as Conan. He realizes his mistake and is about to speak through the voice changer, but it's a good thing he didn't, because the bomber can see him, and he's pissed at the idea that Shinichi sent a toddler to stop the bomb instead of facing him in person. But the bomber is also fully believing that this is the way things are going, which prevents him from realizing that Conan is Shinichi, so, that's how Conan is spared from having that problem too. The bomber tells him the location of a second bomb, and Conan rushes there next.


Conan had that whole chase on the skateboard, dealt with the bombed toy plane, ran out on the skateboard again, located the second bomb, stole some poor kid's bike to replace the broken skateboard, dodged oncoming traffic, avoided like 5 deadly accidents, was able to have the second bomb explode in a safe place... and the sideways blast of the bomb threw him against a tree, and that is what lands him in the hospital. Sad trombone.


When Conan wakes up in the hospital, he says that Shinichi sent him to take care of this bomb, and Kogoro is so pissed at Shinichi for risking Conan's life. Kogoro cares more about Conan than he likes to show. And if this had really been the truth of what happened, Kogoro would be right to be furious at Shinichi...


Conan receives another phone call on Shinichi's phone, and this time around Kogoro takes the call. That's enough having toddlers and irresponsible teenagers dealing with bombs - Kogoro says that now the bomber needs to deal with adults. The bomber explains that he's planted bombs on the train loop line, and they will explode at sunset or if the trains reduce speed below 60 kmh, so the trains can't even stop moving while the police are trying to locate the bombs.


The kids went to see Conan at the hospital, and when they left, they rushed to get into the train, and wouldn't have been involved if they hadn't been in such a hurry and didn't jump to get in before the doors closed. And they all say they're so lucky to have caught the train. Little did they know...


As the situation progresses, the investigation moves towards the identity of this mystery bomber, and why would he call Shinichi in particular. Are there people from previous cases that would want revenge against Shinichi? Megure zeros-in on what he describes as the most high-profile case that Shinichi has solved. A mayor and his son were involved in a lethal drunk driving accident. The son said he was the one at the wheel, but Shinichi realized that the son had taken the blame upon himself to prevent a political scandal, and that the one responsible for the accident had been the mayor.


Back then, Shinichi did this whole demonstration, having the son sit in the car, fasten the seatbelt, and even offered him the same brand of cigarettes that he usually smokes... this was to show that he could only reach the car's lighter with his left hand from the driver's seat, but the lighter only had fingerprints from his right hand on it, proving that actually the son was in the passenger's seat. But Shinichi already had all this fingerprint proof. He didn't really need to go through this whole demonstration using the same brand of cigarettes. He only did it to be a showy fuck, and as a display of dominance.


This movie is not actually part of the canon continuity, but if it were, the existence of this case would create a snarl: Inspector Megure said that this was surely the most high-profile case that Shinichi has ever worked on, but the series begins with the case that really put Shinichi in the limelight, the one where he threw the globe, so which one was Shinichi's most important case now? Also, the way it goes in Episode 1 implies that, at the time, it was a relatively new development that he'd started waltzing into crime scenes. Though, this is an aspect that will get increasingly retconned over the course of the series, what with adding like 25 "Shinichi's first case" episodes, going all the way back to kindergarten (not an exaggeration, this is literally something that happened)...

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