Synopsis: Boogiepop is about a string of drug-related disappearances that happen around a school which prompt a witch named boogiepop to appear. It turns out that a maneater is behind these disappearances, and the anime narrates the story from the perspective of the maneater as well as the people who are trying to track it down.
This is another anime that I dropped after two episodes. I would not say that it was bad, but it was unengaging and not particularly original.
It has a nonlinear narrative structure, a storytelling device which I am not a fan of; usually it’s usually used to give style to a story that is uninteresting and most people’s revealed preferences show that they like to watch series in chronological order — who watches Haruhi Suzumiya in the release order anymore? Some series can pull it off well (e.g. Baccano, The Garden of Sinners), but even then, I view it as a distraction more than anything.
The characters also look way too similar to each other, so its hard to track who is who, which makes the experience all the more confusing. When I looked up characters to give examples of why I thought this was the case, the first result was a cheat sheet that somebody made to help them distinguish between the various characters.
Another issue with this anime: horror does not work because cartoons are not as scary as live-action films. The best horror can do is to make stuff that is either eerie (e.g. Perfect Blue, Serial Experiments Lain), action-oriented (e.g. Attack on Titan, Berserk), or dramatic (e.g. Evangelion). This anime does not do any of these things, at least not in the beginning of the series.
The high-point of the anime is unironically the design of the main character, boogiepop. It would not be an overstatement to say that her character design alone is what made this anime a recognizable name in the community.
Why are cartoons from overseas so bad these days 😔