<>It’s strange, but one of the best detective dramas on TV isn’t live action but anime, a cartoon from Japan. Even more amazing, for its genre, is that there are no barely-dressed cyborg women, narrow-eyed evil swordsmen with long hair, or annoying spiky-headed kids who can save the world with the power of their playing cards/battle tops/pokemon. <>
It’s called Case Closed, a.k.a. Detective Conan, and it airs at one in the morning on Cartoon Network. It does have a typical annoying anime premise; 18-year-old detective genius Jimmy Kudo is poisoned by bad guys, which fails to kill but turns its victim into a little kid as a side effect. I can think of a bunch of people who’d pay to take that poison, but once you get past that the show turns out to be excellently written, solidly reasoned, and beyond that initial conceit almost more realistic than a cartoon has any right being<>.
But not quite! Little Conan Edogawa (you get a point if you can decipher the pair of references in Jimmy’s pseudonym), his former girlfriend/current gal pal Rachel and her lecherous, hack detective father Richard Moore tend to encounter more murder cases in their personal lives than in Richard’s line of work, and the number of deaths presided over by Jimmy’s elementary school posse is almost greater than those overseen by the police inspector. It’s so much that it pushes the limits of credibility more than the premise, but it’s nothing Father Dowling hasn’t seen.
And despite being both a detective’s daughter and a detective's girlfriend, Rachel never seems to notice all the weird things that have been happening since Conan joined them, and Richard never seems to notice how he can never remember how he solved all the cases that Conan so easily and conveniently causes to be attributed to him. <>
And Jimmy/Conan, seriously, is a blinking genius. The explanation that this eight-year-old kid is solving mysteries because he’s really eighteen fails to address the fact that most fifty-year-olds don’t have this kind of grasp of police procedure and the mortician’s trade. But of course the gimmick is just there to give us an excuse to watch and try to figure out mysteries. They’re like sardines tightly packed into their can, with most stories, complete with murder, suspect introductions, presentation of clues and dramatic ending fitting comfortably within a 30 minute episode, with the occasional two-parter. But it’s so different from the typical mystery genre that they make it new all over again, easily winning second place in the Strange Detective footrace (first place, of course, must go to Monk) that it’s surprisingly watchable.
Underneath the anime story tricks and implausibilities is a tightly-written puzzle mystery show in the classic style. The show isn’t afraid to make the viewer watch for clues, and Conan is very likely to refer to things that were never remarked upon by any of the characters, but just happened to be on the screen for less than a couple of seconds. There’s a good mixture of story types as well, with the occasional Columbo-style episode (murder shown at the beginning and the fun is in watching The Detective figure it out). And the murderers hardly ever raving psychos, but always have reasons, and usually elicit some sympathy from the viewer before they are brought to justice by the steel-eyed second grader.
Note that despite the heavy kid factor this isn’t for Saturday Morning, and no other show in Adult Swim’s lineup is as deserving of its late-night timeslot (1 a.m.) as this one. One recent episode featured a corpse that had been hacked to pieces, and Conan’s grade-school classmates have gotten up close and personal with bloody dead bodies on more than one occasion. Sometimes murder is shown graphically, and blood has often been shown splattered full and red on crime scene walls and floors. Word is that Fox Kids was all set to add this to their lineup, to the extent of licensing the show’s Japanese name Detective Conan, but apparently somewhere along the line they actually saw the show, and quickly realized there was no way they could pull a Dragonball-Z with this one, with blood edited out and the deceased magically “sent to another dimension.” Also, the show doesn’t quite fit their hideous toy-hawking mindset, what with the focus on crime scenes, murder weapons and alibis. It’d be like selling an Angela Lansbury action figure.
In Adult Swim’s sea of ultra-random Flash cartoons, prime-time cartoon rejects, and anime shows running the gamut from obfuscated giant robot to girl-sighing feudal dog boy, Case Closed stands out. It’s not quite Cowboy Bebop, or even Big O, but it’s interesting enough to stay up until the wee hours for. And with over 300 episodes in Japan, it’s unlikely they’ll run out of shows for some time.
