Hey everyone! I hope all of you who are in Japan managed to enjoy Golden Week. It’s peak season for Huis ten Bosch so I’ve been absolutely swamped with work! But I did manage to catch the latest Detective Conan movie before Golden Week started so I thought I’d just talk about it today.

Image from Tokyo Otaku Mode

This year’s movie takes place in Osaka and Kyoto, which is an interesting change of location but also means that it’s very heavy on the kansai-ben. I did manage to somehow understand the movie, but if I was giving the chance, I would totally prefer to watch this with subtitles.

Anyway, the movie has a really exciting opening, because it starts with a bomb exploding. Obviously Conan, Heiji and everyone else (except Sonoko who’s down with a cold and Ai who for some reason isn’t here – the two do make a few cameo appearances though) get caught up in it. Both Heiji and Conan do some physics-defying stunts and somehow get through it. It makes last year’s opening seem tame and that one had all the law organisations and Black Organisations in it.

The main mystery in this movie is related to competitive karuta, which is something that I did not know about. If you’re planning to watch it, it would probably be a good idea to read up on it first. From what I managed to google/observe from the show, it’s basically a card game where you try to snatch certain cards. The version in the movie is utagaruta (I think) and it’s based on 100 Japanese poems (waka) which means you have to be really good at recognising which poem is being read and be quick enough to grab it. There are more rules but this is as much as I managed to absorb.

And if you read the manga, you probably have seen Ooka Momiji, who is basically introduced when she calls Heiji her future husband. She plays a huge role in the movie, although my friend did say that she’s probably in the manga to drum up movie sales so I’m not sure how important she is to the Black Organisation storyline. In the movie, it didn’t seem to be connected.

There was also more than a few humourous moments in the movie, courtesy of Heiji. If you like the Heiji/Kazuha pairing, you’ll enjoy watching them here because they basically do their squabbling for most of the movie.

This was a really fun movie, even if a few of my favourite characters (Sonoko and Ai) were absent for most of it. I really enjoyed the setting and the fact that Heiji and Kazuha have such huge roles in the movie.

Here’s the trailer: