Review of Beautiful Bones -Sakurako's Investigation-

I don't know about you, but the whole "mundane, reactionary dude and a sociopathic genius with a knack for solving mysteries " set up has been rubbing me off as of late. I already had the atrocious "Ranpo Kitan" sear itself into my memory just weeks before Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation began, so realistically speaking (even with the cliche premise I described) the show could not be any worse. I sure as hell was right, but not by anywhere near as far a margin I would have liked. The mood Beautiful Bones goes for is a pretty strange blend between the macabre and the mundanevarying one weekly episodic endeavour to another. To give you an idea, the script goes from murder mysteries to something as innocuous as finding out the final wishes of a dead grandmother. This is not really a problem to me in theory since it isn't uncommon for episodic titles to jump back, forth and sideways between tones, nor should it be discouraged. Bluntly put, it's just that the mysteries are either boring, badly written or both. Right off the bat the series asks for a high degree of suspension of disbelief when Sakurako arrives at a crime scene with human remains and is allowed to push around and belittle the police their despite the fact she lacks the credentials to even be at a crime scene to begin with, and it only gets worse from there. To further illustrate my problems with how mysteries are dealt with in Beautiful Bones, allow me to draw your attention to another episodic title starring a genius investigator, Master Keaton. It's a series where you could reasonably make a case for the main character being a "Mary Sue" in how his deductions are never wrong and the way in which he can competently handle all kinds of dangerous situations, but the reason why Master Keaton can get away with it is because the writers restrict Keaton's intellect to his broad areas of expertise as a human civilizations buff and a former British SAS soldier. That way you can, at least, buy that he would know how to do everything from identifying obscure pieces of jewelry to disarming criminals at close quarters. Sakurako, on the other hand, spends her entire life studying bones as an osteologist yet is sometimes able to draw random factoids convenient to the situation at hand. One moment she can be an expert on knot-tying, the next, a 19th-century paint aficionado. The emotional impact the show tries to go for with some of these stories is always hampered for one reason or another, whether it be the realization of how the characters bring misfortune due to their own stupidity, the pacing being rushed, or the mysteries themselves being just too low in stakes to care about (without good characters driving them) the show always found a way to leave me cold.

If you watch Beautiful Bones for the character interactions, you may find yourself as disappointed as one looking for well-written mysteries. The only characters in the show worth wasting digital ink on are Sakurako and her sidekick Shoutarou. I already went into how Sakurako's Sakurako-isms are bad for the mysteries, but the character herself went someone I originally found to be mildly amusing to watch at 1st to one I found rather unlikeable by the end. There's a difference between being unsentimental and being outright cruel to people, and I was hoping that through her adventures with her social norm abiding sidekick she would come to find that line. Instead by the penultimate episode, Sakurako is still the type of person who would wave around bits of newly discovered human remains around the people that cared about the deceased. There's also some subplot regarding Sakurako's history with a dead younger brother which is continually hinted at, yet never gets any closure by the end, so much for that I guess. No better a character is her boring accessory Shoutarou, whose main role in the story is to be the voice of proper social etiquette to counterbalance Sakurako's wackiness (sort of like a straight man of a comedic duo but applied to a mystery anime). It wasn't enough for him to be a boring archetype, however, he also gets to be a part of annoying and cliche drama. Such as the time where he cries over how Sakurako doesn't show the same level of sentimental attachment to the bones of long dead cats (which shouldn't be a surprise considering not even seeing dead bodies phases her at all). The drama usually ends with Sakurako turning out to be a bit more kind-hearted than normal before ending the episode on a happy note before starting it all over again later. The formulaic drama didn't make me like either of them more as characters so much as it accentuated just how little the two seem to learn from each other. The final episodes put up one last-ditch effort to convince me of their friendship, yet failed since the two of them as individuals aren't particularly likeable, and the fact that it became clear that the main hanging plot thread (Sakurako's quest to stop a pretentious serial killer who collects sphenoids for some reason, aptly named "the Sphenoider") was left as bait for a 2nd season I don't care to ever see come into existence.

The worst thing I really have to say about Beautiful Bones, however, is that there is no reason to remember it now that it's done airing (asides from the fantastic background art). It's not utterly terrible like Ranpo Kitan, but it never showed enough promise to even be a memorable disappointment