Junji Ito "Collection" - Reviews

• Let me preface this by saying that I've never read any his stories and I enjoyed this anime a bit. That's, I suspect, because in general I don't really watch any horrors and I've gone to make the circumstances as good as possible in the terms of scariness: no lights, closed doors etc.

• Having said that, this is a collection of stories, 2 per episode. As I recall, it usually was a lighter and a creepier story paired together. They usually left me pretty creeped out, but often enough I was laughing throughout the episodes enough to lose the immersion. That's because all the setup, all the creepiness of the worlds and characters managed to get nullified by trash-tier animation and some laughable scenes. So technically-wise, it's a very bad show.

• However, there are some stories Deen managed not to fuck up and these gave me a good creep, for example I found the stories about the model, the painter, the lady harassing a boy next door, the crossroad foretellings and about the lady marrying into a ghost family (sorry for not remembering the episodes, was watching this weekly) really nicely done, or at least they managed to create an unusual atmosphere, which I can appreciate, because I don't often encounter that in anime. The show opens with Shouchi story which can be a little disappointing and discouraging, I suggest you skip the first episode or go into it remembering that it's not representative of the show.
• Overall, I'd say that 40-60% of the stories are worthwhile if you don't have very high expectations or you're not Junji's fan with a specific thing in mind.

• The OST is nothing to write home about. OP/ED are fantastic though.

I've read Junji Ito's manga before and the artwork in is so God damn good, it creates that heavy atmosphere like somone has a hand to your throat and it does creepy and horror like nothing else. This falls short of that by a hundred million miles and is really just kind of laughable in comparison. Because the animation quality is so poor it completely makes a mockery of what was originally a creepy and chilling story, so while I would normally give any Junji Ito story a 10, the anime deserves not much more than a 5 for the way the stories were presented. What I was hoping would come from the anime was animation that can give the same creepy vibe to the stories as the manga does, something similar to Yamishibai or Mononoke. That feeling from the manga would be hard to do of course, especially when Ito optimizes the use of the page turn in horror and you can't really get the same effect with anime but this was just unnecessarily BAD.