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Dec 14, 2023
Being a massive fan of Junji Ito's manga, i'm terribly sad to be giving this adaptation such a low score. The same exact score as for the 2018 "Collection" unfortunately.
Horror is quite a peculiar genre, requiring a lot more suspension of disbelief than others and is usually much more effective the more it leaves to the imagination. Which is why it tends to work much better in prose, or graphic novels, where your mind has to fill in a lot more between each sentence or panel with your own personal terrors. This is true for all the greatest horror writers like Poe, Lovecraft, or
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Stephen King, with very rare exceptional adaptations actually doing justice to the original work. In the case of Lovecraft, i'm still waiting for a good one, despite all the attempts.
When the suspension of disbelief is stretched too far, horror quickly turns into into its opposite - comedy. And the line between these two genres is surprisingly thin. Often fused to great effect in many movies - Peter Jackson's early filmography being a prime example in my mind. But here the laughable moments are not intentional and just constantly break any possibility of imersion and enjoyment. The minute you find yourself slowly slipping inside the unfolding world being portrayed, some utterly non-sense scene, or some ridiculously absurd dialogue, just pops up to brutally remind you this is all fake.
Junji Ito is a master of atmosphere, but doesn't really know how to end a story most of the time and he tends to lobotomize his characters of most of their common-sense... This certainly doesn't help the job at hand, but is completely forgivable in the manga format, where the ambience and pacing superbly make up for it. On screen they become hugely exacerbated to a point where i almost suspect the studio was deliberately trying to highlight these flaws. I refuse to believe Junji Ito is impossible to adapt and i rather think the story-boarding work for this anime was rather lazy - basically adding frames between the manga's panels, beat by beat, without any artful attempt at an actual proper re-telling.
This is the third peculiarity of horror adaptations: different media require different approaches and the more faithful you try to be to the written word, the less effective you will generally be in a visual format. This becomes a specially huge problem in this genre, where you are much more likely make to a good horror movie, the more you stray from the original work (and the more you risk alienating fans) - a fact that is masterfully evident in The Shinning. But you wouldn't need to go to that far to make a better adaptation, had the story-telling not been absolutely flat and linear, had there been more creative applications of rhythm to the scenes, paired with better sound design, better animation, better camera work, better almost everything...... This could've easily been double the score.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Dec 14, 2023
Being a massive fan of Junji Ito's manga, i'm terribly sad to be giving this adaptation such a low score. The same as for the more recent Netflix Maniac.
Horror is quite a peculiar genre, requiring a lot more suspension of disbelief than others and is usually much more effective the more it leaves to the imagination. Which is why it tends to work much better in prose, or graphic novels, where your mind has to fill in a lot more between each sentence or panel with your own personal terrors. This is true for all the greatest horror writers like Poe, Lovecraft, or Stephen King,
...
with very rare exceptional adaptations actually doing justice to the original work. In the case of Lovecraft, i'm still waiting for a good one, despite all the attempts.
When the suspension of disbelief is stretched too far, horror quickly turns into into its opposite - comedy. And the line between these two genres is surprisingly thin. Often fused to great effect in many movies - Peter Jackson's early filmography being a prime example in my mind.
Junji Ito in particular doesn't really know how to end a story most of the time and he tends to lobotomize his characters of most of their common-sense... This is fine in manga format, where the ambience and pacing superbly make up for it. But on screen they just become exacerbated. I refuse to believe it's impossible to adapt and i rather think the story-boarding work for this anime was rather lazy - basically adding frames to Junji Ito's panels, beat by beat.
This is the third peculiarity of horror adaptations: different media require different approaches and the more faithful you try to be to the written word the less effective you will generally be in a visual format. This becomes a huge problem where you are much more likely make a good horror movie, the more you stray from the original work (and the more you risk alienating fans) - a fact that is masterfully evident in The Shinning. But you wouldn't need to go to that far to make a better adaptation, had the story-telling not been absolutely flat and linear, had there been more creative applications of rhythm to the scenes, paired with better sound design, better animation, better camera work, better almost everything...... This could've easily been double the score.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Oct 22, 2020
This show has so much potential I wish i could give it a 10!
Sadly a 7 is already generous, considering I can't bring myself to rank the story, or art, and therefor the enjoyment anything better than a 6. The sound alone is so dreadful it should plummet the final score to a 5, with some of the worst karaoke tunes to come out of Japan for theme songs and an utterly annoying pinball machine soundtrack.
The characters however shine through, with some of the most memorable faces and personalities to ever grace the screen. Paired with a brilliant premise of a Demon Lord being adopted
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by a juvenile delinquent attending a school full of thugs, this show had everything to be as entertaining an action-comedy as One Punch Man.
Regretfully this never happens. The comedy is just overdone gags after overdone gags, delivered with terrible timing and some of the most amateurish animation to ever come out of a professional studio. The same goes for the fighting sequences, which are rarely ever more than still frames with lots of moving squiggly lines, or powerful explosions seen from afar...
The main arch is quite interesting and gripping and I wish more time and attention was devoted to it, because it's just drowned out in an endless stream of boring and repetitive reaction faces to completely unfunny and irrelevant side-stories. It's like hitting the mother load on a gold mine and then deciding to mine around it for 60 episodes. Absolutely depressing.
Still, humor is subjective, as is artistic taste, so by all means do give it a try and find out if it's your cup of tea. I honestly hope some people might appreciate this show's qualities where I could only find flaws.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 18, 2020
I was really looking forward to enjoying a good laugh with an anime, while waiting for new Olympia Kyklos episodes and still mourning the end of Asobi Asobase and Kobayashi-san...
While this show does a good job of telling a story and manages to be quite gripping at times doing so, its entertainment value depends completely on you really REALLY enjoying toilet humor, lots and LOTS of it.
If watching a guy bleeding out of the ass after being impaled by a stick is the kind of thing that tickles you, then this show is perfect for you. Be prepared however to have the limits of
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your enjoyment thoroughly tested by a barrage of crotch-peeping shots, followed by buckets of crotch-sniffing and boatloads of crotch-whipping. All very generously seasoned with plenty of scat and watersports.
I'm far from a prude, I like myself a good dose of ecchi and am not entirely mature enough to not snicker at a well delivered fart joke. But whatever titillation you may get from a panty-shot, expect it to be completely drowned out half-way through an episode of uninterrupted sweaty cleavages and incessant upskirts.
In a way this show becomes the antithesis of ecchi, by overloading a viewer with as much of it as it's possible to cram in 20 minutes that it ultimately desensitizes you.
After a few episodes i found myself just following it for the story, not really because there's such a great plot to speak of, but just because I was emotionally invested in it, having undergone what I can only call torture, chasing the carrot of a laugh waist-deep through a bog of garbage.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Oct 17, 2020
Interesting story and concept, but very bland execution.
Characters are dull, ranging between being annoying (Kyoko) to lifeless (Yuuko, Kenichi, Denpa), with very little in between. The art, while pleasant on the scenery, is very ugly here giving characters somewhat simian features with horrible pear-shaped heads and ape-like snouts. Only one characters stands out (Megabaa), and it's not for its beauty either. I won't mind a show with visually unappealing characters, but it just adds to the dissatisfaction and when so much of the show revolves around their feelings that stands as an obstacle against relating to them. Were there many redeeming features elsewhere this would've
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been a non-issue.
Then there's the one antagonist, the Searchy (Sacchi) which is constantly showing up to fire lasers at everything, parroting its one line in a horribly annoying voice, designed like a cheap children's toy, little more than a bloated knock-off Mr. Potato Head that never really poses any perceivable threat to the characters, who often just run around a corner to escape it. Again, just bland and uninspired.
The main problem with this show I'd say is its length. It would've been a much better paced and engaging narrative if its interesting parts had been more condensed. Instead it draws out what feels like 10 episodes worth of material into 26, replaying dream sequences and flashbacks over and over and having characters constantly engaging in long retrospective dialogues (retelling their feelings about what happened on screen) or introspective monologues which add almost nothing to the story and don't really inform the viewer on anything except perhaps the character's motivations and state of mind - which are often too predictable to matter and end up feeling like filler.
All this results in a very unimpressive and unmemorable show. I'd actually seen it before and re-watched it with little more than a slight sense of deja vu on a few occasions.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Oct 14, 2020
What's with all the glowing 10/10 reviews for this show?!? Genuinely baffling.
Is it because there's a kawaii neko for a supporting character? I've rattled my brain and can't find any other valid excuse...
The art is dull, the youkai are boring, the characters are all flat, their interactions equally so. There's no story to speak of, only random encounters with the same formulaic resolution. No archs whatsoever, just self-contained episode after episode of rehashed encounters with mundane outcomes. There's no deep lore being slowly unraveled to the viewer about the supernatural elements at play, what you learned in episode 1 is pretty much all there is
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to know. There's no character development, you're pretty much stuck with the same wuss of an MC for the entire show, so you better really love spineless characters.
And despite being such a straightforward premise, there's still so much that makes absolutely no sense, like it was just thrown into the show after a fever dream... An all-powerful spirit decides to tag along and help the MC on a whim, and despite being offered a prize he much coveted once the MC dies, it makes absolutely no effort to cause him harm and in fact goes out of his way to protect him for the entire series. It's basically a horrible plot device to guide this clueless MC on his journeys, help him to work out how to use the book of friends (which he immediately masters on the first try), throw alien space bats at all the insurmountable obstacles in his way, catch all the magic missiles fired at him and serve as a personified narrator for all the times the plot gets twisted in a knot.
Go watch Mushishi instead.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 7, 2020
Confused anime riddled with plot holes.
An attempt to build a hard-science epic with half-grasped quantum physics concepts stretched to utter absurdity.
While it manages to hold your curiosity for a few episodes with amazing art, tech and set design, great animation and dense mysteries it quickly unravels into a crapfest of mumbo-jumbo quotes as it tries to tie the science with oh-so-dear concepts a living soul, the majesty of feelings and all-together human greatness...
The PE=wmc^2 scene being particularly offending to anyone with any fragment of physics awareness. But pretty much a complete let-down every time the show actually comes to a point where it
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must tell you something concrete about what's been unfolding.
I could bear another amnesiac main character if it led to a somewhat philosophically profound promised ending, but it's just sentimental dribble and romantic clichés all the way down.
Should've taken the hint when the show goes straight from introducing characters in a sci-fi utopia into a Twilight Zone Edgar Alan Poe adaption on the 3rd episode. As a fan of both hard-science and Poe, this mash-up fails to deliver on both. But if you can bear to ignore all that, there's plenty of eye-candy to enjoy.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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