Disaster Report: JUNJI ITO COLLECTION

An anime based on the works of Junji Ito should be a success by any measure.  Ito's combination of Lovecraftian horror stories combined with his spooky, heavily textured art has been a favorite of many for decades.  His works have only increased in popularity over the years, making him one of the very few horror mangaka to enjoy success outside of Japan.  Yet translating those works to motion seems to be another matter entirely.



There were a few live-action adaptations of Uzumaki and some of the Tomie stories last decade, most of which were hampered by the inherent cheapness of most Japanese-made live-action adaptations.  Another short story, Gyo, got an animated film in 2006 that suffered from awkward CGI and a story too schlocky and ridiculous to be scary.  Yet people still had hope when the Junji Ito Collection aired in the winter of 2018, based on an actual published series of Ito short stories.  With so many stories to choose from, how hard could it be to translate them to animation?

What makes Junji Ito's work so effective on the page is not just the quality of his artwork, but his sense of pacing and atmosphere.  Yes, his use of heavily hatched shadows, oppressive black voids, and lovingly detailed nightmares do plenty of work for him, but he's also very good at carefully building atmosphere.  He uses dialogue and page composition to create a sense of dread in the protagonist and reader alike.  Sometimes the reveal of the horror is sudden and shocking, while others are slow-dawning realizations, but it is always punctuated with large panels filled with imagery that burns itself into the reader's mind.


Yet while watching Junji Ito Collection, you don't get any sense that anyone involved in the production had any interest in Ito's manga.  Hell, you don't get a sense that anyone involved had the slightest notion of how horror works at all, much less how his particular brand of horror does.  This is a show that begs for rich art direction, a moody score, and a director that respects the original source material and understands how to build atmosphere.  Sadly, this show didn't have that.  It had a dozen different mid-tier episode directors and storyboard artists working on each episode, supervised by a man best known for the hateful, inept adaptation of Diabolik Lovers.  He professes to be a fan of Ito's, but the gap between his concept art for the series and the show in execution shows that the only thing he took away from Ito's art was the style and not the substance.

This show was made by Studio Deen, so you have to expect a certain level of incompetence. This show's issues go beyond shoddy animation, though.  Virtually everything outside of the voice acting is off.  The direction is lackluster, and the stories are adapted as flatly and literally as possible.  The pacing is shambling and dull, relying too heavily on narration to move the story forward, and most do not so much end as they tend to just stop inconclusively.  The staff's notion of replicating Ito's signature style was to draw everyone in thick, brush-like strokes, color everything in dreary, muddy tones and call it a day.  As for the animation, it starts off stiff and minimal and only gets worse in the second half.  The only thing that visually stands out is the opening, thanks to its rich dark color palette, the kaleidoscope of stylized images, and the jangly tune by The Pinballs.

Thus, most episodes live and die on the quality of the stories that are adapted, but even that is something of a mixed bag.  Stories are paired together seemingly at random, and in the first half the staff struggles to figure out how to make them fit in one 25-minute episode.  Thus, visually bizarre tales like "Hell Doll Funeral" or "Slug Girl" are crammed into a few minutes, while other stories are left to drag on past the point of incredulity.  This becomes less of an issue as the series goes on, but it's yet another way this show starts out on the wrong foot.


There are some stories that manage to shine in spite of the show's limitations.  Many of them are tales of more esoteric horrors, be it living out eons while dreaming in "Long Dream," a house full of alternate worlds and alternate selves in "The Ongoing Tale of Okishiri Collection."  Others are more visceral like "Greased" or "Shiver," while others are surreal like the strangely beautiful twist on vampires in "Blood-Bubble Bushes."  The strongest ones of all are the trio of stories featuring one of Ito's most iconic characters: Tomie, a woman whose beauty and lies drive men to madness and whose body can never be destroyed.

Sadly, these are too often paired up with lesser-known stories that are too feeble or ridiculous for the tone that the show tries to strike.  Nowhere is this more obvious than with the stories featuring Souichi, a self-important weasel of a boy with a knack for creating curses that almost always blow up in his face.  There's certainly room for more light-hearted horror stories like his, but turning them almost episode-length bookends for the beginning, end, and midpoint of the show is just another way that Junji Ito Collection keeps fumbling over itself in some vain attempt at creating atmosphere.  It would almost all be laughably bad were the results not so tedious to watch and so insulting to such good manga.



While Ito stated publicly that he was pleased with the results, Junji Ito Collection quickly faded from the collective seasonal conversation.  The only good thing to result from it was a series of licensed shirts from Hot Topic that do a far better job of showcasing Ito's work than the show that inspired them.  Yet hope springs eternal again, thanks to the recent announcement of a four-part Uzumaki OVA for Toonami.  We'll have to wait until next year for the results, but already I have more faith in it this Ito adaptation.  Some of that faith is due to the choice of director, a man with a long history of helming manga adaptations that capture the charm and mood of those works and experiment with visuals in interesting (and sometimes divisive) ways.  Mostly it's because after having watched Junji Ito Collection, there's no way they could handle it worse than this series did.

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