This Week in Anime

Move Over, Sherlock

Chris
Now Steve, I'm no Edogawa Ranpo, but I've got my own deductive skills, and this is a pretty easy one to figure out. Obviously, when you say the game is afoot...

...you mean we're doing a column on anime feet! I'm down, we'll top that incest column before the year is out, somehow.

It's no big mystery that we are, as usual, timely with this subject. The new Knives Out mystery released into theaters last weekend, proving that there's nothing more appropriate for Thanksgiving than a bunch of people barely concealing their murderous intentions in close company with each other. More pertinently to the anime scene, the new Precure series was revealed as being apparently detective-themed! Cue a million jokes about "Cure Columbo," never mind that the Cures from a couple of years ago were already based on a detective and their trusty dog.

Obviously, it's no secret that Japanese audiences are big on these characters and concepts themselves. We all love our Columbo cracks, but the scruffy detective is so well-loved in Japan that he inspired multiple drama adaptations in the country, and his "son" popped up in Lupin the 3rd. Lupin also clashed with Sherlock Holmes, naturally. Multiple times!

You can see why it's a gold standard for televised detective fiction, and I think it speaks to a key element that makes the genre: that is, there's a reason we're talking about detectives and not just mysteries here. Columbo famously shows audiences exactly how the crime goes down in every case before Columbo himself even shows up, so the story is less about unraveling a mystery and more about watching a force of deductive nature put their personality to work on it.

The most memorable anime detectives are the ones who use their character to get ahead!

I have to steer the conversation away from feet anyway I can.

God, you tried to blow by it in the intro, but the fact remains that before the end of this column, we're going to be so deep in Holmes we'll be wiped out by the next housing market crash.

But yeah, Undead Murder Farce shows how much well-constructed mysteries (plus all those literary allusions) can be enhanced by a healthy dose of personality from the eccentric character doing the sleuthing. It makes sense that Mamoru Hatakeyama would have a handle on directing this sort of production, given he previously handled another delightful detective anime in Love Detective Chika.

Put another one up on the Sherlock scoreboard! We knew we couldn't get through a column on detectives without Some People (read: Rebecca) urging us to bring up Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, and why the hell wouldn't we? It's a bizarre mishmash of gijinka-fied famous detectives like Holmes himself and Hercule Poirot doing battle with a villain based on, who else, Arsene Lupin. I'm told that Some People own a poster of said villain. I can't imagine why.

This is a weird one to talk about, least of all with its lack of physical release over here and being currently scrubbed from streaming, giving you an excuse for not getting around to checking it out. But Milky Holmes absolutely feels like a poster child for entertaining detective characters driving things more than seemingly minimal mystery-solving. They produced multiple seasons of anime and several video games off these girls and their poofy detective hats. This was one of the earliest of Bushiroad's entries in their multimedia franchise model, meaning we can draw a straight line between these colorful crime-solvers and series like Revue Starlight and Ave Mujica.

So thanks for that, anyway.

Given that it's entirely likely someone gets murdered in the forthcoming Ave Mujica sequel, it only feels appropriate.

Oh, good, for a minute there, I was worried you were reducing her appeal down only to that first visual signifier.

Agreed that Kotoko's great though. Her personality carried what could be a...laboriously paced mystery to unravel in the back half of In/Spectre's first season. And yeah, her rapport with other characters, including put-upon partner (checks notes) Kuro highlighted the Columbo-esque appeal of watching these types do their thing. Written well, detectives like this create a situation where someone smarter than everyone strutting around, getting on their nerves with their efforts, can be genuinely enjoyable and entertaining to watch!

Also highlights the importance of The Watson in these setups, so our delightful detectives always have at least one person to bounce off of.

There's a reason Kaiki's turn as the most direct detective Monogatari has featured is one of the strongest points of the series. And you're right about the tone. In/Spectre was a series I regarded as Monogatari-like when I was watching it. Both series are driven by characters' conversations discussing and unraveling mysteries. Monogatari just made it so those characters were also central to those mysteries.

Anyone can be a detective so long as they have a desire for truth in their heart. And also an appropriately nice hat.

Look, what is one's gender but the ultimate mystery to unravel?

Pretty Boy Detective Club, whose appeal is right there in the title, certainly feels like a natural place for the talky deductions of NisioIsin to wind up. The anime even reunited SHAFT and Akiyuki Simbo for the project! How well it succeeded is down to your own deductions, but I think it at least had that whole personality thing down pat.

It sure is reflective of our tastes that so many of our favorite anime detectives are gremlin-adjacent, vertically challenged ladies...

Officially a detective or not, Maomao's stories still routinely revolve around solving mysteries and, much like Columbo, routinely being underestimated. The Apothecary Diaries also adds some extra spice to its medical mystery flavor with its fictionalized Imperial China setting. So it's got historical and medical elements for Maomao to solve. Though even without those, I'd be down to watch Aoi Yuuki Aoi-Yuuki-noise her way through these deductions.

I see someone's trying their best to compete with Dorohedoro in the arena of "Grungy settings where characters with weird things for heads try to unravel mysteries."

Besides, you know I would never besmirch your appreciation for the more effortful badass approach to detective work. Why, just last month I finally got to watch the FUUTO PI movie about Sokichi Narumi/Kamen Rider Skull, who's light on detective work here but heavy on hammering home what being a hard-boiled detective means.

Kamen Rider W remains the franchise's premiere take on the detective genre, with plenty of homage paid. Philip is named after the lead from The Long Goodbye—textually, even!

Whew, a literary detective reference that isn't Holmes, finally!

The jacket, a strong nose well-trained for sniffing out clues, and BNA was getting by like 75% on style anyway, so I think it's fair.

Like technically Beastars is arguably stronger in the "mystery-solvin' furries" department, but it's hard for me to argue that Legoshi is a "detective." As you indicated, it's about vibes.

Aaaaand we're back to Holmes.

I like how even without a "Fate" in that title, you can still absolutely tell from its preposterousness that it has something to do with the Nasuverse.

Spin-offs where characters start a detective agency are a classic, so it's only fair that it even happened in the Fate series.

Ooh, the middle, so you're only about 70 hours into the game? I hear that's when Umineko really gets going.

I kid, any of my knowledge of Umineko comes from the fighting game and extremely dated imageboard memes. But I do know enough to know that, unlike Fate, it's the visual novel that has the detective-ing as the central feature, as opposed to being relegated to a spin-off.

I also appreciate how Nana ends up having to play Watson to Kyoya for a bit as she tries to cover her tracks. It's a fun subversion of that established dynamic, and creates a unique situation where both parties are doing sleuthing on their own level while trying to keep the other from catching on. These mind games are a big appeal with these clever characters.

This comes up in other series like Death Note, a more well-known series with a very noteworthy anime detective antagonist in L. But I'll always be way more partial to Talentless Nana's colorful cat-and-mouse murder games than Death Note's these days.

So long as we're talkin' enemy detectives who have homoerotic tension with the leads...

Understandable. They're very fine and normal women, themselves. I can't profess to love Anko on the level you do, but she's an amazing character. And it's neat that that can be deduced by following the clues we've laid out along all these other detectives: she's a personality force of nature in her pursuits, she was inspired by prior detective fiction, and she's absolutely a snappy dresser.

And then they tie that package up with the beautiful bow that is making her the villain of the piece! The antagonistic detective is a great inclusion for a series like Call of the Night, since it's not a mystery series (at least, not at first), so this archetype wandering in and threatening to unravel everything just shows how powerful she is outside of prescribed genre conventions.

As we've covered, Columbo can and does get thrown into random anime episodes from time to time.

But you're absolutely right about how iconic these kinds of characters can become. We didn't even get to touch certifiable legends like Detective Conan or the multitude of manga mystery-solvers out there.

Still, just looking at the loose list of faves we were able to throw out in this conversation, it doesn't take a super sleuth to figure out that those Star Detective Precure girls will be joining a pretty prodigious group of investigators when they show up early next year.