Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine North American Premiere Review (Anime Expo 2025)

By J.D.

If you know me, you might know that Detective Conan/Case Closed is my favorite anime and one of the ones that got me into actively watching anime. With this in mind, it makes sense that when I heard that the franchise’s 26th film Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine would have its North American premiere at Anime Expo 2025, I added it to my schedule, and made sure my butt was in the seat when the showing started.

For those that are new to the franchise, here’s a quick rundown: Shinichi Kudo, the teenage great detective, solves a murder while at an amusement park with his friend/love interest Ran Mouri.  He spots some suspicious men in black outfit and decides to follow them.  He sees them making a shady deal and before he can report it to the proper authorities, he is knocked out by one of them and inject with the experimental poison APTX-4869 (Not so nice!).  Instead of killing him, the poison causes his body to de-age about 10 years. With the body of a child but still possessing his great mind, he disguises himself as Conan Edogawa, taken from books by Arthur Conan Doyle and Rampo Edogawa in his family collection he spotted when asked for his name, he solves crimes generally by knocking out Ran’s father Kogoro and using a voice change to reveal the perpetrator’s identity.  He does all this in hopes of one day bring down the organization the men in black belong to and returning himself to his original body. Like most long-running franchise movies, this is also covered much more clearly in the first few minutes of the movie.

That can be a lot to take in and then, add on to that the wide cast of characters this franchise has created over more than 30 years, I don’t know how much people are going to get out of this as their first exposure to the franchise. Luckily, they did provide us with a relationship chart on the back of the promotional material provided to all the attendees which covered most of the major players.  

So, as for the actual movie, it starts in Germany where a Europol agent is chased through the streets of Frankfurt by members of the Black Organization and eventually killed by Gin, one of the members Shinichi was tracking at the amusement park.  I should also note here that the members of the Black Organization all use codenames based on alcohol. Male members tend to be named after distilled drinks like Gin, Vodka, and Bourbon, while female members are usually named after wines like Sherry, Vermouth, and Chianti. This might seem unimportant but give it a second.

Okay, now to our main characters, one of Ran’s friends Sonoko arranges for Conan and his friends including Ran, her dad and Dr. Agasa, think the Doc Brown to Shinichi/Conan’s Marty, one of the few people who knows the truth about Shinichi’s situation, to go whale watching at a resort owned by her family on Hachijo-jima. After learning from one of his contacts about the Europol agent’s death including the appearance of another member of the Black Organization Pinga, named after a Brazilian spirit made of distilled sugar cane, and spotting a few inspectors he knows on another boat, Conan sneaks on and is taken to the Pacific Buoy, a surveillance operation hoping to connect all the security cameras across Interpol nations. The Black Organization apparently has its sights set on sabotaging this technology to keep its agents from being discovered but it also wants to acquire the “All-Age Recognition System” created by one of the software engineers at the Buoy to help find missing persons. Realizing how much trouble this could be for him and his friend Ai, actually Shiho Miyano, a former member of the Black Organization and the developer of APTX-4869 that took it in hopes of killing herself but ended up shrinking just like Shinichi, Conan now has to rush to stop the Black Organization from reaching its goals while making sure he and Ai can keep their identities a secret.

Is this what it sounds like to my aunt when my sister and I try to explain anything that goes on in a Marvel movie nowadays?  

The Detective Conan movies are usually more action-packed than the series and this film does not disappoint in that regard. My favorite of the sequences was the kidnapping scene which provides us with both a fight between Pinga and Ran where she gets to show off her karate skills as she manages to hold her own against a secret agent and a car chase with Conan and Agasa pursuing Black Organization members in another. An addition element is thrown in when Conan decides to give chase on his motorized skateboard, one of Agasa’s many inventions. The chase eventually ends with both the Black Organization’s car and Conan plunging into the ocean.  All of this got some of the loudest cheers and other reactions from the audience that might only have been matched by some of the ending sequence. While some of the greater arc of events might be predictable, the action sequences make this a very enjoyable time.  

Everything else is about what you would expect from a Detective Conan animated story whether as an episode or a film. The voice actors for most of the main cast have been doing this for decades and have their interpretations of the characters down pat and the voices of the new characters play the roles of the characters of the week (or year in the film’s case) without standing out. The music uses a lot of the cues from anime some a bit more energetic and action-packed for the film and bigger budget. That might also be because I’m currently more than a decade behind in the anime but I do love the usual tunes.

I mentioned it on one of our streams that it would be hard for me to rate something like that as a big fan of the series. Even if it’s just serviceable, I would be likely to rate this highly just out of my love for the franchise. Despite that, if you’re not already a fan of the series but are willing to accept that you might not understand some of the characters and relationships between them, I think there’s enough action here to keep you entertained.

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Overall Review: For someone like me, this an A-. For someone with no interest in the series, this is probably closer to a B-/C+.

Pros:
+ All of the elements you would expect of a Detective Conan entry
+ Great action scenes

Cons:
- If you’re not already into the franchise, you might be confused by everything going on

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As for the rest of the premiere, there were announcements about the franchise. A few days before the event, the franchise had dropped a batch of episodes including a new dub on Netflix and Crunchyroll detailing Conan’s run-ins with the Black Organization. Hopefully, we’ll get even more in the new future. In addition, the films are being released on the TMS Entertainment YouTube starting with The Darkest Nightmare the Saturday before I wrote this. Two other movies were announced for release this way on following Saturdays. There was also a giveaway to the person who had been following the series for the longest, I thought I had a decent chance having followed for roughly 20 years at this point but someone must have been reading Shonen Sunday in Japan when it came out because the winner claimed to be following the series for 30 years.  

Overall, this event was a good time and left me excited for the future of the series in North America. The trailer for Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine can be found below.