Post by Samuel di Curtisi di Salvadori on Oct 5, 2006 10:17:12 GMT -5
www.animeondvd.com/reviews2/disc_reviews/5664.php
For those who don't know, Chris is the owner of the major American anime site animeondvd.com, and also an important region 1 anime critic. He has previously commented on all CC DVDs, but here I extract his comment on the content of CC Movie 1. (He based his comment on the Japanese track, so it relates for all of us here.)
For those who don't know, Chris is the owner of the major American anime site animeondvd.com, and also an important region 1 anime critic. He has previously commented on all CC DVDs, but here I extract his comment on the content of CC Movie 1. (He based his comment on the Japanese track, so it relates for all of us here.)
Coming in during the second year of the TV series run, "The Time Bombed Skyscraper" is a surprisingly good romp that take the best aspects of the multi-episode stories and manages to work it even better due to far less time constraints. When you don't have to plan for weekly cliffhangers as well as commercial breaks, you're able to get a story to flow much better.
With it still being closer to when Shinichi became Conan, it has a rather fresh dynamic to it since the cast still hasn't completely pushed Shinichi out of the picture. He gets little note in later seasons but here he's still someone who is either in the area or close by. Since it was the first movie, it had to do something of a double duty in introducing the main cast of characters and the reasons behind Conan's situation. This is rather well done as it looks like it's reanimated key scenes from that event so that it matches the smoother feeling theatrical animation and is done as something of a bumper after the opening mystery is solved. Within the first ten minutes, we've seen young Conan use a good number of his basic toys and methods to solve a mystery and get familiar with the entire regular cast.
The plot for the film is rather involved which is good since it has a fairly wide net to cast in order to play out. Unlike a lot of the multi-episode stories from the TV series, this one avoids having a larger cast of potential suspects to deal with and keeps things much smaller and more of a mystery in action. After getting an invite to an architect's gallery as Shinichi, Conan wrangles it so he can go with Ran. Unfortunately though, he ends up being talked into a date the following weekend with Ran and he's got to figure out how to deal with that in the back of his head. Since he's keeping his condition a secret from her, it certainly brings in some additional challenges. Even more so since he's completely aware of how she feels and sees exactly what she's doing to prepare for the date.
When some plastic explosives material is stolen, Conan finds himself getting wrapped up in it personally as the man who has stolen it is using it to get revenge on him for something unknown. He's doing it in a curious way with bombings in different locations after he initially tries to draw him out only to get Conan instead. The bomber takes it as something of an insult or challenge that Shinichi has sent a kid to deal with him but of course he finds that Conan is more than he seems. As it progresses, the attacks are rather interesting in how they're achieved. While the radio controlled airplane wasn't all that much, I was actually interested in how the mechanics behind the train bomb was planned. Often in the TV series you can figure out most of the mysteries quickly but it's some of the setup and incidents themselves that are the most interesting to watch.
One area where this film in particular really won me over was in how it did a number of ties back to Shinichi when he was actively moving about as a detective. Seeing him in his older teenage form handling a case was something of a treat and it added a really welcome element to the franchise. The Junior Detective League gets a fair amount of time as well but their involvement is done better than in the series as well since they're not a focal point for the entire plot. They come in to be used for a couple of key scenes and some transition in order to achieve more tension, but they're not going to be the assistants to Conan that inadvertently solve the case for him. Even Kogoro gets some really good screen time here, though more as a parent than a detective.
