Detective Conan: Magician of the Silver Sky

Kaito Kid sends a letter announcing that he will steal a jewel aboard an aeroplane. The plane takes off with Conan, his friends and the suspects on board. A murder is committed in the air and the pilots are poisoned. Nobody is left who can land it. Conan has to find the killer and bring the aircraft down. Yasuichiro Yamamoto directs. The source is Gosho Aoyama's manga; it is the eighth feature in the series. The idea of the series is the closed room puzzle. Most Conan films are built on a group trapped somewhere, and this one uses an aeroplane; the number of suspects is fixed and there is no way out. Kaito Kid comes from another of Aoyama's series and appears in the Conan films as a guest; their meeting is among the best liked patterns in the series. The second half moves from puzzle to action and abandons realism entirely, the landing being the example. The animation is better than the television series and the interior of the aircraft is drawn in detail. It did well commercially in Japan; the series releases a film a year and this is among the most watched. Who it is for: viewers of Detective Conan and anyone who likes classical puzzle narratives. Who it is not for: there are many characters for a newcomer, the logic of the solution is forced, and the last section abandons physics completely.