Boogiepop - Overview

Overview

To face the "enemies of the world", the shinigami Boogiepop automatically rises to the surface. In Boogiepop's world, the Towa Organization, a shadowy group seeking to control humanity, managed to capture an alien organism who had taken the form of a highly-evolved human. By studying him, the Towa Organization was able to create synthetic humans, people who have been artificially enhanced with special abilities. The mission of the Towa Organization and its agents is to find and kill MPLS, people who are more evolved than others and possess special abilities. However, Boogiepop will not let the Towa Organization get its way and he is not alone in his efforts.

The Boogiepop series is very much about the characters: their relationships, their pasts, their memories. This is especially true for how their pasts molded them into the people they are today. It can also be seen through scenes being presented from the perspective of different characters, and how the individual casts a different "feel" by how they relate to events. Another important theme is change. How the world changes and our different perceptions of this change, especially how one's perception of things changes as they grow up. Boogiepop Phantom is also highly metaphorical, with a character or an image representing much more than face value. It is also "a show about the inter-related nature of people's lives and the concept that they know of as time."

Kadono has published fourteen light novels and has serialized short stories in Dengegi HP, many of which have been published as a four-volume series about Pete Beat, a member of the Towa Organization. Two manga serials have been drawn for this series, which were serialized in Dengeki Daiou and Dengeki Animation. In 2000, the anime series Boogiepop Phantom aired on Japanese television; a drama CD, featuring Kaori Shimizu, was released to promote this series. Later that year, the movie Boogiepop and Others was released.