Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo Movie 1 (1996): Opera House, The New Murder - Review

 "Would do well to slow down a little. Focus on the significant and truly see the things that matter most."
- Dieter F. Uchtdorf


I recently watched and analyzed all of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo's first film called Opera House, The New Murder (Opera Zakan - Aratanaru Satsujin), created by Toei Animation in 1996. The movie starrs Kappei Yamaguchi (VA of Shinichi Kudo and Kaito Kid from Detective Conan and Magic Kaito by Gosho Aoyama) as the voice actor of our main character Hajime Kindaichi. Yamaguchi does a really good job as Kindaichi who is usually an emotional mix. He's a great voice actor.
The movie is sort of based on a long light novel case from 1994 of the same name (Opera House, The New Murder), but some of the events and characters in the movie get completely altered, , such as the doctor and the painter.

The movie starts with Kindaichi Hajime and his childhood friend Miyuki Nanase going to Uta Island in order to pay their respect to Opera plays. Miyuki shows that she's a pretty big Opera fan as she's used as the info dump character who explains most of the things about the actors and the opera play itself. Anyway, of course the main  policeman inspector Kenmochi also joins the squad when they get to Uta Island. We get a short mention about how Kindaichi doesn't want to go to the island because a murder case happened in the Opera already, referencing the manga files.

On the island we are introduced to nine different case characters and one deceased character from four years prior to the story. The point of the movie is that we gather this group of people connected to each other with an ominous past and start dropping some bodies. We get some nice animation here when the first victim is found brutally killed with her skull smashed by a fallen chandelier in a locked room setting. But that's about it.
There's a pretty big problem with this whole film: this movie is packed with events and potential for substance but it's all so incoherently put together. This is a feature length film but they just couldn't manage to pull this story off without it being literally all over the place. The flow of time and transitioning in this movie is abysmal. The atmosphere and artwork is amazing but without good pacing they lose the potential they had.
Detective movies rarely use breather time as they have to fit as much substance as they can in the couple of hours they run in a theatre, but that means that the script also has to be written for those 2 hours. I recently finished watching the 23rd Detective Conan film: Fist of Blue Sapphire and although that was similarly paced as this, it was still coherent and they manage to make it flow right. Here all the effort and budget has gone to the drawn frames. This movie might be good if it was a slow slideshow or a paneled manga, but as a film... yikes.

Let's talk about the meat of the story a bit. In other words the mystery. The film has ups and downs when it comes to the detective fiction stuff. The hints are used abysmally when trying to catch the culprit and some of them aren't shown to the watcher, barely any of them are focused on even. The movie spends a long time dealing with a lock to the locked room of the opera hall where the first body is found but it just doesn't make sense. None of it changes anything and they made it into a key aspect of the story. The explanation is bad to say the least even though the idea behind it was good. There are a huge amount of things in this film that reek of great idea, bad execution.
However there were also couple of great things here as well. The idea of "hide trees in the forest" is great here and I liked that. It brings a multilayered meaning to the efforts of the culprit that you don't see coming. It's honestly pretty impressive. The gist of it is basically that the culprit killed someone elsewhere and moved the body to where it gets found later, but the reason for moving the body there was to create an alibi. And to create an alibi one needs to trick others. Then later on that trick itself gets destroyed by a mechanism that is used to reveal the body, and in the end the tree gets "hidden by the forest", or more like forests as the body getting mutilated by the mechanism also hides it even further. Impressive planning there. There are also smaller clever moments here like characters carrying something important and that important thing being hidden in another thing that gets placed in the murder scene to make the murderer be able to use it, as well as a scene with paint under fingernails being used as clues but thinking about that one is really a pointless endeavor as the possibilities are endless and the movie does a really bad job at presenting anything to you in a way that you would be able to register them.

The plot of this film is your generic inner circle case on an island that gets cut off from outside world by a perpetrator that cuts the telephone lines as well as destroys the boat the characters use to get to and from Usa Island. Of course a massive storm is also a necessity as always. I'm honestly tired of these type of stories, there are thousands of them, but whatever.

The characters in this movie are nothing special and they do nothing that you don't expect them to. We have the Opera actor squad, a painter, a doctor, a businessman who wants to buy the island and turn it into a resort, a deceased girl and the director of the Opera, along with out main characters. None of them stand out. At the end of the film there's a long stretch where you just get to hear the whole story and it has that usual emotional punch with the sad soundtracks as Kindaichi cases tend to do, so in that sense at least there's some sense of the original series in there, but other than that... Soundtrack needed couple more Opera tunes as they overplayed the same soundtrack the entire film, the rest of the soundtrack were manageable but none of them are worth talking about. Kindaichi's soundtracks have never been good let's be honest, they're really low quality. It's a shame.

This movie is a pretty mixed bag. Some good tricks are in it if you pay really close attention. It has some really brutal scenes. Unrealistic acting. Nice looking. Awful pacing. Feels incoherent at times. If the film was done with proper pacing and presentation it'd be great, albeit with very generic tropes of the genre being used, it could have been very atmospheric. They had the script, just couldn't make it fit into a movie.