What Is Detective Conan? The Long-Running Mystery Icon Turning 30, Explained by Marine

Article

Marking 30 years on screen in 2026, Detective Conan remains one of Japan's most consistently popular mystery franchises, still releasing new cases every year.

A Detective Trapped as a Child

Gosho Aoyama began serializing Detective Conan in Weekly Shonen Sunday in 1994. The story follows Shinichi Kudo, a teenage detective forcibly shrunk into a child's body by a mysterious organization, who continues solving crimes under the alias Conan Edogawa. The TV anime began airing in 1996 and has continued nearly uninterrupted since, alongside an annual theatrical film released every spring.

30 Years and Counting

January 2026 marked the announcement of a "30 Year Project" celebrating three decades of the anime and film adaptations. The franchise's 29th theatrical film, "Highway no Datenshi," released in Japanese theaters on April 10, 2026, continuing the series' tradition of major annual releases.

What To Know

Detective Conan's case-of-the-week structure layered on top of one continuous overarching mystery (the organization that shrank Conan) is a format that lets fans jump in almost anywhere while still rewarding decades of continuous viewers — a structural balance few other long-running mystery franchises manage as successfully.

Detective Conan's annual spring theatrical film has become a genuine cultural fixture in Japan, regularly ranking among the year's top-grossing domestic films — it's one of the clearest examples of a manga/anime franchise becoming a mainstream annual box-office event rather than a niche fandom release.

What Fans Are Saying

• "30 years and Detective Conan is still one of the biggest anime films every spring."
• "The case-of-the-week format makes it so easy to jump back in after years away."
• "Curious what else the 30 Year Project has planned."

Original Japanese

• 「30年経っても春の劇場版が大ヒットし続けているのはすごいです」
• 「1話完結の話が多いので、久しぶりに見ても入りやすいですよね」
• 「30周年プロジェクトの続報が気になります」

Easy Japanese

「名探偵コナン」は、青山剛昌さんが描く推理マンガ・アニメです。1994年に始まり、日本で長く愛されている作品です。