Case Closed - Reception

Reception

Meitantei Conan has sold more than 120 million volumes of manga in Japan; individual volumes frequently appear on the lists of best-selling manga there. It won the 46th Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōnen category in 2001, and respondents in an online poll for Japanese citizens in their mid-twenties voted Meitantei Conan as one of the top three manga they wanted to continue running in publication. Case Closed has appeared on the New York Times Manga Best Sellers list several times. In France, the series was nominated for the Angoulême Festival Graphic Novel award among the Japanese selection. In the United States, Case Closed received praises from Mania. com's Eduardo M. Chavez and IGN's A. E. Sparrow for its stories—telling the mysteries and how they were unfolded by the investigations of Conan and gang. Sparrow called the style of the series a mix of Scooby-Doo and Sherlock Holmes, while Chavez believed the manga had appeal to readers of all ages. The series ranked on About.com's top continuing manga series of 2010, under the title "Best Underappreciated Gem: Shonen" category.

The animated adaptation of the series was also popular in Japan, appearing in the top six of Japanese TV Rankings at various times. The television series ranked among the top twenty in polls conducted by anime magazine Animage from 1996 to 2001. It also placed better than twenty-third in polls for the top-one-hundred anime conducted by Japanese television network TV Asahi in 2005–06. The series received considerable airtime in China; it was the second most broadcasted animation there in 2004. Several of the franchise's films were nominated for awards in their home country. The ninth film was nominated for the feature film category at the 5th Annual Tokyo Anime Awards, and the next five films were nominees for the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year in their respective years of release.

Melissa Sternenberg from THEM Anime Reviews reviewed and praised for its animation and plot. In the United States, the dubbed series faced several negative reactions toward its changes to localize the content for North American audiences. Jeffrey Harris of IGN found it pointless to change the names of the characters, and Anime News Network's Carl Kimlinger said that the changes of certain Japanese cultural references rendered several parts of the mysteries and their investigation illogical. The voice-overs proved to be a mixed bag for Carlo Santos, who reviewed the first DVD release of Case Closed for Anime News Network; he said that while the main characters sounded like "real people", the secondary ones " off as caricatures". Lori Lancaster of Mania.com described Case Closed as "a clever series that had mysteries at every corner", noting the "bizarre" and "interesting" nature of each case. IGN's Chris Wyatt was positive to the manner the cases were set up, relating them to Agatha Christie's "closed room" mysteries. He described the series as "Inspector Gadget meets Law & Order but in an anime style." His colleague, Harris, however, expressed annoyance with repetitive elements in the show and the contrived methods the series uses to keep Conan's identity a secret from certain characters.

In 2006, the Japanese government used Conan in campaigns to help promote crime awareness among children. Targeting the same audience, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Conan and his friends in two pamphlets: one to promote the ministry's mission, the other to introduce the 34th G8 summit held in the country in 2010. Several characters in the series featured in the sixth installment of the Anime, Heroes and Heroines commemorative stamp series issued by Japan Post in 2006. Aoyama and his creations are celebrated in his hometown Hokuei, Tottori; a museum with exhibits of his work is located there, and several bronze statues of Jimmy Kudo, Conan Edogawa, and Rachel Moore are installed in various locations throughout the town.