Beautiful Bones

Overview

Beautiful Bones -Sakurako’s Investigation- is a fairly episodic anime about a boy and an osteologist who always end up finding human remains while out in the field searching for new specimens. The series is less about collecting bones, and more about solving cases from missing persons to murders.

While the anime is mainly episodic (other than a few two-part episodes) there is also an overarching plot that involves someone who has been taking the sphenoid bone, a delicate butterfly-shaped bone, out of skulls.

Characters

Sakurako is one of the two main characters of the series. She is an osteologist, someone who studies and arranges bones, who frequently goes out in the field in search of new specimens. She lives with a housekeeper in a large, old house which is hidden away. Sakurako doesn’t really enjoy interacting with other people much and would rather be surrounded by skeletons.

Despite her dislike of human interaction, she has a fiancé and becomes quite fond of our other main character, Shōtarō, over time. However, even though she becomes closer to Shōtarō, she usually refers to him as “boy” rather than his actual name.

Shōtarō is a high school student who originally met Sakurako when he ended up at her house while searching for his missing neighbor. He became interested in Sakurako after she helped him find his neighbor and he’s been helping her search for specimens ever since. Shōtarō also has a slight crush on Sakurako.

While Shōtarō helps Sakurako with her work, he also often serves as her babysitter despite her being the adult. Sakurako tends to want to keep the human remains they find, but Shōtarō always ends up calling the police so they can take in the bones as evidence.

There are also a number of supporting characters who occasionally help Sakurako and Shōtarō with their work. These include one of Shōtarō’s classmates, a science teacher from his school, Sakurako’s housekeeper, and Sakurako’s fiancé along with a few others.

Conclusion

I actually really liked Beautiful Bones if only because it was a murder mystery genre anime which isn’t very common. That said, I gave it a 6/10 in part due to its episodic nature and only 12 episodes.

This is a bit of a shorter review, but I don’t feel like there’s really anything else to say about this series that doesn’t spoil some part of the series. So I’ll close by saying that this is a good “real-world” anime, and by that I mean it’s not any form of fantasy and there’s no magic or superpowers or anything unrealistic in the series.