Review of Beautiful Bones -Sakurako's Investigation-

Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru is a firmly middle-of-the-road series with a handful of modest strengths and a fair selection of minor flaws. I enjoyed the show overall, though perhaps to the bare minimum extent to justify watching it again. It often feels as though several steps were skipped in the creation of this show, or that a number of details should have been questioned by somebody along the way and never got cut. I find most grating the fact that Sakurako is not an actual detective, even though it would have cost nothing to make her one fromthe outset and this single detail makes the entire series a mere cavalcade of conveniences. The series revolves around her and Shoutarou finding corpses, solving mysteries, and showing up the local police like any good Holmes and Watson, but Sakurako has no stated justification for following through with any of these actions. She digs (up) bones, not criminal investigation. Instead of simply casting Sakurako as an official detective who might be routinely called to crime scenes and have the authority to perform investigations, every episode has to find some new contrivance to put her in close proximity to a mysterious body and then at the helm of an official pursuit. Making Sakurako a forensic specialist would have made a lot more sense than making her an osteologist who is related to a coroner, possesses inexplicable powers of deduction, and conveniently finds herself embroiled in some new scheme every week.

Sakurako’s investigations, despite being named in the title as very much an important part of the series, don’t get spared a great deal of air time. All CSI-type shows are guilty of condensing the amount of paperwork, research, critical thinking, and general grunt work associated with solving crimes, of course, but Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru doesn’t even pretend to care that few crimes are solved within a ten-minute span. No matter the situation, whatever piece of information that needs to be known in order to solve the mystery just happens to be known by Sakurako. Her expertise has no boundaries, so long as it helps hurry the episode to a safe conclusion. Hour-long live action series often have trouble slimming down a full investigation to a single-episode arc; this show moves much too quickly for any of the cases to seem realistic or for any of the events to have a significant impact.

Most of the characters do not warrant description, Shoutarou included. Shoutarou, despite being the lens through which the audience sees the events unfold, exists largely as a walking apology for Sakurako. Every time Sakurako says something blunt or takes a rather presumptive action, Shoutarou swoops in to admonish her in front of the other characters and thereby allow Sakurako to get away with whatever it is she happens to be doing at the time. He performs a necessary function, and if it were not for the hints at some sort of real back story to their relationship, I’d suggest that Sakurako took him on as an assistant purely for this reason. I find Utsumi obnoxious, Kougami a blank space, and the dog a more compelling character than most of the other faces nudging their way into the spotlight now and again. Only Sakurako herself is particularly interesting to watch; while literature and television alike are flooded with better examples of the aloof, impersonal genius detective archetype, Sakurako also isn’t the worst example. Shizuka Itou does a great job of bringing Sakurako’s personality to life with a commanding, insensitive, impartial voice that sounds genuinely confused when other characters get caught up with things like emotions and routine human behavior. Sakurako is aggressive, impatient, and surprisingly childlike at times, all of which further necessitate the need for a mediator in the form of Shoutarou, and all of which make her slightly more interesting by putting her at odds with those unfortunate enough to become involved in her investigations. The manner in which the show describes Sakurako and the manner in which Sakurako acts don’t gel perfectly, but I also don’t care quite enough to be bothered by the inconsistency.

For a bone-themed mystery show with a corpse around every corner, Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru feels very much like a quaint, saccharine ‘90s sitcom at times. Not content to contrive conflicts for each episode, the show often drags out side characters to participate in the weekly drama on the flimsiest pretenses. Some characters do actually receive a fair amount of development across episodes, but at the cost of being awkwardly shoehorned into various scenarios. The show winds up with an unfortunate trade-off: we learn a bit more about some of these people, but first we have to tolerate them being there at all. On a few instances, we’re treated to a perfectly schmaltzy, “Hey, remember so-and-so? Yeah, they’re doing just fine now!” Often the show feels too light-hearted, with bright lighting, a general lack of consequences, and even occasional instances of low-key fan service that, while reasonable to include if the teenage Shoutarou’s point of view is taken into account, don’t pretend to make any sort of real statement or push the show in any other direction. All it does is confuse the tone of the show. I find the attempts at wringing serious philosophy out of these situations as obnoxious as they are overbearing.

The last few episodes make the show feel more like a respectable mystery series; the solutions aren’t immediately obvious, the characters interact with each other in subtler ways, and a lot more is at stake emotionally and physically. I wonder if the show might succeed more if it could pick one major arc and stick with it over the course of a season, rather than chopping itself up into discrete episodes. Even at its best, Beautiful Bones still has quite a few issues, but if there were ever to be a second season, the show could be salvaged with moderate success.

The visuals are probably the show’s strong suit. I wouldn’t say it’s worth watching just for the pretty colors, but at least there’s something interesting to look at if (read: when) the plot begins to drag. The backgrounds are often beautiful and detailed, with usually a few scenes per episode getting a very special treatment that makes everything pop. In the first few episodes, Sakurako gets a trippy magical girl transformation sequence when she begins investigating a scene, replete with catchphrase. With bright, entrancing colors and a captivating proggy, jazzy soundtrack, this sequence is a pearl that helps the show escape its mundane surroundings just for a moment. Even if the transformation does become slightly tedious after the first couple of instances, I love the idea of introducing such surreal elements. A lot of the budget very clearly went into the visuals already, but given a bit more style and vibrance, I could forgive the show a lot more of its failings.

For all the show’s flaws and all the problems I have with it, I actually enjoyed watching Sakurako quite a bit. Nothing is offensively wrong with the show, only foolish or silly. I like watching Sakurako herself messily harangue her way through other people’s business, and though I had anticipated a much darker, less episodic foray into the depths of the criminal underworld, I’ll take a casual stroll through a monster-of-the-week curiosity anyway.