This may be one of the more poorly structured posts on this blog, I just have some thoughts about them I've been wanting to write down.
A lot of them are relevant to the recuring theme of this blog that we need to start paying as much attention to Anime Writers as we do Directors. Because for the most part the Detective Conan movies have been at their best when Kazunari Kouchi was the Screenwriter.
But make no mistake I find value in every single Detective Conan movie, so even the ones I shall be the hardest on in this post have good scenes in them, scenes worth watching once you're already a fan of these characters.
I made some recommendations back when I hadn't seen all of them yet.
I currently personally divide the Detective Conan movies into 4 eras chronologically.
Era 1 is movies 1-6: These were the ones Aniamted using Traditional Animation before the switch to Digital, and they are the ones that were part of the old Funimation Case Closed Dub, but that Dub is out of print and not officially streaming anywhere, so the most legal way to watch them is to find and buy old DVDs which are usually not cheap or guarantied to work properly. Of these 6 the last of them was the only one not written by Kouchi and it's my least favorite of all the movies so far.
Era 2 is movies 7-18: During this era you'll see the artstyle/character designs evolve from the Retro look of the early movies to the shiny modern Anime look they have now. Parallel to that you'll see how the approach to how they are written slowly changes to increasingly revolve more around action and explosions. But as long as Kouchi was writing most of them still could not be accused of being dumb action movies. He wrote all but 3 movies of this era. However movie 18 The Dimensional Sniper was his last, he passed away a couple years later.
Movie 7 was the last movie with the Director of the original 6 and it was a decent send off for him. I know some consider movie 9 one of the best and the end of the golden age, I also enjoyed it.
But it's also during this era that they slowly improved at making movies without Kouchi. I know for purely Nostalgia reasons some Detective Conan fans prefer movie 6 to anything after 9 whether Kouchi wrote it or not. Movie 6 was written by an acclaimed mystery writer who'd never actually written a Screenplay before, and in my opinion it shows, it has good character scenes early on before the plot really kicks into motion but once that happens it quickly loses me when I try to rewatch it.
Movie 10 definitely feels instantly inferior to the 3 that preceded it, but at least the good character scenes are spread out more. Movie 11 is probably my favorite non Kouchi film so far, it was like Pokémon movie 9 very clearly a product of the Pirates of the Caribbean zeitgeist, and like that Pokémon movie it's really fun.
Movie 12 has fun with the show's recurring gag of Conan being tone deaf, and makes thematically great use of Amazing Grace. Movie 14 if fun for having Kaitou Kid stuff and being basically Conan as a Die Hard movie. Movie 15 might by others be considered the first modern Detective Conan film, for better and for worse.
If I had to designate a least favorite of the films written by Kouchi it'd be movie 16 the Eleventh Striker, in fact I'd even rank it below movie 17 another non Kouchi film. Movie 17 would have been a lot better if they didn't feel the need to throw a random murder in and just kept the focus on Conan trying to catch an enemy spy.
Movie 18 was a great swan song for Kazunari Kouchi, it was also the first movie featuring certain recurring characters from the show and is probably in my opinion the best of this era. I kind of want it to be the next movie Dubbed but more recent ones will probably be prioritized.
Era 3 is movies 19-23: These are currently exactly the movies dubbed by BangZone for DiscoTech and thus the only movies easy to watch legally, you can even rent them on Amazon Prime which is how I first watched them. These movie were mostly the start of my Detective Conan experience, they were what got me into the franchise and so they certainly are fun movies that do capture the gist of Conan's appeal in an accessible way. But I fear that to people more in general difficult to impress then I am they might not be the best first impression. This is the weakest era of Conan films so far.
Comparing movie 13 The Raven Chaser to movie 20 The Darkest Nightmare is interesting. This won't be true anymore soon once movie 26 is out, but for now these are the only movies featuring the character of Vermouth, and comparing them can be an interesting study in quantity vs quality. If you did the math I'm pretty you'd find Vermouth has more screen time in Darkest Nightmare, but she doesn't do any of the things she's known for, any of what a Vermouth fan would want to see, she doesn't disguise herself as anyone or interact with Conan. In Raven Chaser she is mostly just prominent in one sequence but she does all of that and it made a perfect Big Screen debut for the character.
Era 4 is movies 24-present: Only two are out already, and the third we Americans who need Subs probably won't be able to see till Fall. Both movies feel like an instant improvement over era 3, like they're finally making an effort to recapture what made the older movies good. I wish Discotech and BangZoom would hurry and Dub these or Dimensional Sniper so I could have something better for a first impression easily accessible to recommend.
Kazunari Kouchi also wrote a number of episodes of the series though I hadn't bothered to check what they were when I first wrote everything above. Two of those 5 are one offs from the first 123 I recommended in the prior post of this Blog were his, The Mystery Weapon Murder Case and The Kamen Yaiba Murder Case, plenty of the others he wrote during that era seem to be memorable ones as well, his first was episode 14 (15 in the Funimation Dub), beyond that early era though his episodes are mostly ones even I haven't seen yet (okay the DetectiveConanWorld Wiki list his first as 14 but ANN says he also wrote 4 and 8-9, if he indeed wrote both 9 and 19 then that's both of the show's first two Columbo episodes). He also wrote all of the first 12 numbered OVAs, I don't recall if there even are more OVAs beyond them.
It's interesting because most of these ongoing kids shows with annual mostly non Canon movies are written by the same writer as the lead writer of the show, Takeshi Shudo wrote the first 3 Pokémon movies, Tomita and Enokido did the Sailor Moon movies. But Kouchi seems to have been more of an every once and a while writer.
It's interesting that movies 10 and 11 are so apart in quality when they have the same writer, Hiroshi Kashiwabara. Movies 10 is I think one who's biggest mistake was biteing off more then it can chew, the best Conan movies feel like they could have been extra long episodes of the show. But something else fun about movie 11 is it feels like it could have been a Lupin III movie, and this writer's main claim to fame outside of Conan is writing 12 of the annual Lupin TV movies, including the first few of them directed by Dezaki. Maybe the Lupin/Conan crossovers would have turned out better if he wrote them.
On the show Hirosh is the credited Anime writer for the first two episodes interestingly, but was by no means regularly writing the key plot episodes. He doesn't get to write any Anime originals till right after the Funimation Dub and what's on Filmrise stops. And he only has one case on Crunchyroll 804-805 which I think I haven't seen yet.
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