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cattnep
Preamble:
- While not an enthusiastic Detective Conan fan, I have been "into" the series for over 10 years. I haven't seen much of Conan, especially not modern Conan (I'd wager I watched the first 100 or so episodes when I first got into it at age 10 or so). I don't tend to keep up with it just due to the sheer commitment of it, but if a friend asks me "hey you wanna watch Conan with me?" I will almost never turn them down. I love a good cone.
- This movie was screened at Anime Expo 2025, which was where I saw it.
- Women were so awesome in this movie. Between Ran not hesitating to kick the shit out of Pinga, Kir getting a bullet through her shoulder and still daring Gin to blow her brains out, and Vermouth being Vermouth, I was fawning the whole time.
- Conan's action scenes are still incredibly stupid but still incredibly fun. Hype moments and aura despite themselves. This was actually the first time I'd heard the vocal version of the main theme, "Kimi ga Ireba". Cute song.
Complaints:
- Twist in which Pinga is revealed was under several layers of transmisogyny. The twist in itself (Pinga disguising as a female member of the crew) was fine, but it was lines like "I have reason to believe this person is not a woman" and "They have an Adam's apple!" that were incredibly unnecessary. Like, the neck bruise was already damning enough evidence. The fact that he kept the lipstick on for a while and also had earrings outside of the disguise didn't help either. I expect this kind of shit from early Conan, but guys, this movie was released in 2023. What are we doing.
- Naomi's goal of uniting races could've easily been explored more or executed a little better. Seeing that Naomi and Ai/Shiho actually knew each other and bonded over both being Asian kids who got bullied in America was genuinely interesting. Though it also just seemed like a shallow motive to give the person who just made an invention that would make racial profiling ten times easier, but eh. Glad that thing blew up.
- Still roll my eyes at any straight romance being pushed by the show especially between Conan and Ai. Though I do think it was extremely funny that Ai did CPR on him underwater and then was like "oh god we kissed. I need to do something about this" and then kissed Ran on the mouth so get Conan's cooties off of her. She's fucking hilarious.
- Screening was held in the third floor ballroom of the JW Marriott which is about four to five blocks away from the main convention site. They made us go through additional security to enter and the bathrooms had hands-free hand dryers. The venue was half empty. They absolutely did not have to rent a ballroom in a fancy hotel for this movie. Lol, lmao even.
- I was with my girlfriend who didn't know the premise of the show. They handed out flyers that gave a basic primer in the form of a relationship chart, but the chart itself was confusing. I don't even know why they bothered when all the movies give you a basic primer of the show within the first 10 minutes anyway. Though infodumping about the series premise to her before the movie did was fun.
- The part where Pinga was texting Gin to let him into the submarine and him getting left on read made the entire theater start laughing. I continued cackling for almost a full minute because it caught me off guard so bad. God.
- Event was hosted by a single guy, who was in a Conan cosplay. After the movie he made several announcements, them essentially boiling down to "Detective Conan is accessible in the west again". There's a new dub on Netflix and Crunchy, simulcast subs with new episodes releasing every week, as well as subbed and dubbed MOVIES releasing every week. There are also English volumes of the manga (with the Case Closed) branding available from VIZ. I'm cautiously excited about this news, but still have suspicions, for reasons I'll go over in a bit. He also advertised YAIBA, both its anime and manga counterparts, a series also authored by Aoyama Gosho.
- There was a short giveaway where the host asked three questions and picked people from the audience with their hands raised to answer in hopes of getting the prize. They were incredibly easy. First was "where can you watch Detective Conan streaming right now". Second was "name the three movies being released next week". Third was asking people how long they've been fans (30th anniversary incoming), with the movie's poster going to the person in the audience who's been a fan the longest. Something I noted was that after he asked who'd been a fan for over three years, almost everyone's hands went up, and they largely stayed that way until he got to twenty or twenty five years. A smaller group of more dedicated fans was a striking contrast to other more popular panels (Project Sekai, for example). Someone claimed he had been a fan for all thirty years of Conan's existence and was given the poster (me when I lie).
I had recently seen two other anime movies before and after watching this one: A Miku Who Can't Sing and Umamusume: Beginning of a New Era. Both of those movies had great subs, as well as translator credits at the end. This movie did not. That makes me quite a bit suspicious. Especially with their announcement putting a fine point on how much more accessible Conan is going to be, and all the buzz around companies using AI/machine translation. That kind of workload seems insane, unless we assume they've been building a backlog across several years. Either way, it reeks of human translator overwork, or use of AI/MTL to cut costs. The subs didn't have any obvious signs of machine translation (and especially none as obvious as the Princession subs being shown at the Kings Records booth). The dialogue made sense and followed the flow of conversation, though there were a few scant missing periods. Still, I couldn't get the feeling of something being... off. One particularly egregious example is halfway through the movie where Agasa asks the kids a question where the answer relies on wordplay. They just have one of the kids mention the idiom "mekujiri wo tateru", without so much as a note or anything, which I thought was incredibly bizarre. Searching that phrase verbatim doesn't even give you anything aside from a site that's ripped and uploaded wherever it got the subs for that movie onto a shady website. My colleagues say it's likely because English translations produced in Asia often have lower standards than we as westerners are used to, which makes sense. Still though. Concerning.
Final Thoughts:
- Have never seen Bourbon and Akai on screen either alone or together before but it only took one interaction for me to tell they have Something going on. Are they lovers? No. Worse
- I wish Conan yuri was real so badly man
