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Detective Conan: The Bride of Halloween. M, 111 minutes. Three stars

So, I learned some new things today. I like to think I'm highly pop-culture literate, but this film opened up a universe I didn't know existed.

This is actually the 25th film in a series of anime movies, part of a canon that also includes 400-plus television episodes and sales of more than 250 million copies of the comic/manga.

That's an impressive pedigree and while I can't quite see the appeal myself, the film made a motser at the box office in its home country of Japan, so I suspect there might be another 25 films to come.

It's a kooky story that is mostly a formulaic detective whodunnit.

With all those episodes of narrative and character development, it would be fairly impossible for a fresh audience member coming in cold to understand the many characters, and so the filmmaker begins the film with lead character Detective Conan narrating a brief backstory.

Conan's backstory is a bit convoluted - he's an adult detective who was poisoned by an evil gang called the Black Organisation, only instead of being killed, the poison transforms him into a young child.

His child's body with the sharp mind of an adult and with police training is the perfect and unwitting disguise for him to take down criminals, which he does with the help of his childhood best friend Ran and her father Kogoro, and with a handful of friends he has made at the primary school he must attend.

That's just his backstory, and the plot of this film seems to pivot to a handful of newer characters, with Detective Conan and his school friends among a number of people targeted by a bomb-maker.

The bombs have been employed to take out a group of police officers some years earlier, but now the killer is back and setting bombs to take out anyone who might come close to revealing the bomb-maker's identity.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district (famous for its traffic crosswalk) thousands of people are dressing up for their Halloween celebrations, which gives the killer a high-profile target.

Some of the things a film critic might mark a film down for in every other instance but a Japanese anime are strangely positives in this drama. The screenplay from Takahiro Okura is a big old mess: some of its narrative lines make sense, plenty don't. Particularly, many of the series' regular characters appear for token throwaway lines, completely superfluous to the action. This is a strength and possibly setting up a handful of characters for a spin-off.

Composer Yugo Kanno's score is sometimes intrusive, sometimes clowny, if that's a real adjective, but that's what you expect supporting the action in an anime.

It's a prescient plot that has a bunch of Russians as the bad guys.

The animation is fairly standard 2D traditional anime, well coloured, with just a handful of scenes getting a bit of pizzazz, particularly the scenes set around the Shibuya Crossing.

There are 28 Marvel movies and it's been the work of many hours over many years to take that narrative in. Those films are worth the investment of time because of their clever long-form storytelling and performances.

While I enjoyed Detective Conan: The Bride of Halloween, I don't know if I enjoyed it enough to have loyally punched my way through another 24 films.

The other folk at the screening I attended on opening day were a mix of Japanese language speakers and language students enjoying the rare experience of immersing themselves in this original language version.

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