Detective Conan: The Black Submarine: Fun, Fresh, and Tasty (review)
The new animated film adaptation of the franchise completely embraces its James Bond side, and it’s a real treat.
It’s always a pleasure to find an episode of Detective Conan At the movie theater. A series episode or a movie? Both, in fact, since what at first glance looks like an episode of a series – with credits setting the context and summarizing the previous episodes – turns out to be a “real” film of almost two hours, with a construction really adapted to its duration… Small reminder of the facts in case Detective Conan does not speak to you: it is one of the most popular franchises in the world (The Black Submarine is the 26th film adapted from the manga since 1997!) and which features the adventures and investigations of a high school student endowed with brilliant intuition but transformed into a 7-year-old schoolboy by a gang of conspirators.
The movie Detective Conan vintage 2023 has the good idea to drop the enigma side a little for -like the successful The Bride of Shibuya released last year – focus on the planetary technology thriller aspect. In The Black Submarine, Conan must protect an international submarine station from the shenanigans of a gang of gangsters, each member of which bears the name of a spirit (vodka, whisky, etc.), over the course of a story that deploys the entire arsenal of a real animated and youthful James Bond. It’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s surprising, in short, always a pleasure – necessarily a bit programmatic and in the codes of a series that can’t take risks, but that’s not what we ask him. And as we are ready to see one like this every year, an appointment is already made for 2024.
Of Yuzuru Tachikawa. Animation. Duration 1h49. Released August 2, 2023
