Itou Junji: Maniac

I think that this was the best adaptation of Junji Ito's works! Most of the artsyle was able to translate and I think it is a great way for anybody new to Ito's work to get into them!

Ofcourse I think the manga is better, that is just a given as it translates better in manga than anime with the horror he potrays but I think this is a great and much more affordable way to enjoy quite a bit of his short stories.

The sound track and voice actors were amazing! The 2d animation was aswell! The only critique I would have about it is ... the 3d animation, it doesn't seem to be the animators main skill and it didn't look the best but it wasn't used too often so I can put that aside.

Last critique I'll give it, is the story pacing, although it mostly does the originals justice, it isn't the best with the pacing and seems a bit fast pace compared to the originals to me. All in all though this is a great adaptation and I mostly loved the Soichi parts, would love to see a comedy come from that lol.

Unfortunately a bunch of really bad stories with no point bring the whole thing down (horror stories with no point is kind of staple for Junji Ito though, so if you don't mind creepy things that don't really lead anywhere, you might like it more than I did). The animation is also quite basic and kinda static, but it has some good scares and detailed monster frames at times. Just wish it had more of that, and better animation. As it is, the aimless episodes don't work as well as they do in the manga without the amazing art style.

However, wanted to write this review ... to list the parts I thought were at least worth watching and I would recommend the show if you watch only these (rest not mentioned I think can be skipped, and are better experienced in one of Junji Ito's Mangas instead). My favorite episodes in order:
1. Layers of Terror (felt like the most complete story)
2. The Bully (this one freaked me out and I felt bad long after watching the episode. Really really good)
3. Whispering Woman (not really horror IMO, but I liked the feelings it evoked)

Tomb town and Ice cream bus are honorable mentions that I almost liked. The rest really didn't bring any cool visual or scares and so I felt kinda bored watching them but if you like all of the ones I listed above then you can try the rest of the episodes.

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 ... 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.