By the time a suave law enforcer from the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center turns up near the end to join colleagues from Yamanashi prefectural police, Nagano police and Tokyo’s Public Security Bureau (PSB), this bewildering but oddly enjoyable anime serves as a handy guide to Japanese bureaucratic structures. As this is the 28th film instalment (eat your heart out 007) of the bestselling manga centred on a crack sleuth forced to inhabit a child’s body, you will need to be some kind of precocious genius yourself to hack an intelligible path through the thicket of characters and byzantine skulduggery served up here.
Retired Tokyo cop Kogoro (voiced by Rikiya Koyama) witnesses a former colleague murdered at their rendezvous point, and he heads up to Nagano to follow up on the dead man’s investigation. It seems the helmeted assassin was trying to suppress information related to an assault in the mountains 10 months earlier, as local policeman Yamato (Yuji Takada) was pursuing an armed-robbery suspect before being shot by a third party. The Nagano police reluctantly accommodate Kogoro nosing around, but he forbids young Conan (Minami Takayama) from lending his considerable talents. The pint-sized Poirot manages to get on the scene anyway under the pretext of a visit to a nearby radio observatory.
The intrigue often takes place in several layers, with Conan eavesdropping on Kogoro and the unfolding manhunt through a pair of AR glasses, as he simultaneously milks his police contact (for some reason masquerading as a waiter) for information. Add in the PSB also bugging the mini-Maigret, the vengeful father of a suicidal biathlete and the subtleties of Japanese plea-deal policy and, unless you’re a Detective Conan initiate, you will be thoroughly lost.
Director Katsuya Shigehara, making his debut in the series, doesn’t so much tease out the suspense of the investigation, as dump it in avalanches of exposition as overwhelming as the ones the suspect uses to cover his tracks. But somehow this blend of hardcore procedural and Scooby-Doo amateur sleuthing gets by on sheer energy alone, rolling up different-toned vignettes – noirish requiem, heavenly hallucinations, AstroBoy-type action sequences, educational segments – in anime’s unmistakeable style. The beautiful credits sequence, dashing around a hyper-real crystalline snowscape, caps off this instalment’s jazzy panache.
• Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback is in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 September.
