It is a spin off of the long-running short series Yami Shibai, and very much in the spirit of it insofar as being a collection of 4-minute long one-off horror shorts with no protagonist throughout. Ninja Collection differs however by having a small cast of recurring bishounen ninja we know nothing about, who take turns showing up and killing the ghost or monster of the episode.
Almost every episode of Ninja Collection plays out as follows:
A person living in Tokyo is having a normal day, until something Weird happens. Things keep getting Weirder until they become Scary, and the person realizes they are in danger, being pursued by some kind of malevolent entity, like a ghost or a demon. Right before this threat can hurt or kill them, a ninja shows up and saves them by killing or otherwise containing the entity, and then they disappear in an instant and the person is left wondering if any of that actually just happened. Cue upbeat ending song.
There are some outliers, but they aren’t different enough to challenge this formula. Even if a ninja doesn’t save the person we’re following, at the end of the episode one does show up and slay that which killed them anyway. Even if the random citizen of Tokyo turns out to be the monster of the week, we still follow them as if they are the victim of some supernatural harassment, until they are found out and a ninja kills them. There are just 2 episodes that are more about the ninjas than a random citizen, but we barely know these ninjas, so they don’t feel any different from the one-off citizens really. In both a ninja is transformed into a demon themselves and dispatched by another.
These titular ninjas are by far the weakest element of the series, for a few reasons. One, their AnimeProtagonistTM designs clash with the otherwise realistic characters and mundane setting that is Real Life. Two, they don’t have names and don’t function as characters, so why include them as part of a recurring cast? And three: the promise of every threat being neutralized by one of these random ninja at the 3 minute mark undercuts any tension throughout.
It would have made more sense for this series to more closely follow something like Kagewani than Yami Shibai. If you’re going to create characters to connect otherwise completely unrelated shorts, then they should… be characters! We should follow them, like we followed the protagonist Banba in Kagewani as he explored scenes of various supernatural horrors, with a loose plot that spans the entire series and leads to a conclusion. Instead of closing each episode with one of a handful of ninja showing up and stabbing a ghost, the episodes should open with us following one of these ninja as they pursue the ghost of the week, or perhaps investigate a grisly scene, or set a trap to catch a horror we wait in suspense to see.
The main gripe I see against this show is that it is badly animated, or not animated at all. And yes, those claims are true, but this style of animation (which means to invoke kamishibai, a traditional story-telling method that uses still images) isn’t unique to Ninja Collection – it’s also used in its main series Yami Shibai, and in other horror shorts like Kagewani and Sekai no Yami Zukan. The visuals may turn off mainstream viewers who have no interest in this type of show, but there is clearly an audience for it. So why is it rated so lowly in comparison?
My belief is that Ninja Collection stands out as particularly bad compared to other entries in the genre of “barely animated horror shorts” because there is no reason to include any ninjas, and no effort made to integrate them into a series of shorts that would function better without them. The main differentiating element of this show isn’t just superfluous, it actively robs the much more prevalent horror element of any tension.
I don’t believe Ninja Collection deserves to be touted as the worst of the worst when it comes to anime – it’s a masterpiece compared to the likes of Skelter+Heaven, etc. But it is dull and conceptually ill-conceived enough for me not to feel compelled to defend it much more than that.
