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Junji Ito: Collection Series Review

by christina

4 years ago

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Japan’s legendary horror mangaka got an animated series of his short stories with Junji Ito: Collection. Even though I was looking forward to the outcome of adapting his work to moving image, it seems that the creators of the show did not exactly think of ‘adapting’ anything, rather than just using Junji Ito’s stories to the exact page, and overlaying them with some pretty poor production. Enjoy.

Synopsis

Junji Ito: Collection is heavily based on the short stories the mangaka has produced in the last thirty or so years. His themes usually include innocent protagonists that find themselves in unlikely absurd situations and vary in context.

Art & Music

How can I possibly talk about the art of the show without going off on a long monologue on how badly it was handled? There were a few things that were done right, on occasion: the muted color palette, textured material on disturbing elements, the environments in the oily episode house, and the hands of the creepy window lady. Now, apart from that… everything else was terrible. Terrible is actually the most gentle word I can come up with; I was actually surprised from the low-quality productions still out there. The characters are poorly drawn and all look the same, the animation is next to non-existent, the figures look awkward and constantly off. It’s not even properly stylized; I mean if they wanted to save on a budget, I’d rather have seen the whole thing drawn in pencil, in some experimental way; instead, the art is literally a bad copy of the manga, with some sloppy animation added to it. Such a shame.

The music is slightly better. The opening and closing themes (even though still very poorly produced) had some pretty catchy tunes to them, and the show’s overall soundtrack was not… noticeable, but at the same time not bad. Just uninterestingly there. The voice acting varied more – there were some decent performances and some that made me think the production team picked just random people the do the voicing other than actual voice actors. The screaming was pretty good.

Themes & Trivia

The show displayed numerous themes that are prevalent in Junji Ito’s imagery and storytelling. The use of spirals, snails, nightmares, the concept of the domestic space, body parts growing in unexpected places, the inevitability of events, a lack of justification of why all these horribles things happen…and Souichi. Damn, I hate Souichi. He’s like a comic relief character where one is not needed.

What a shame

Plus:

Junji Ito’s stories

Minus:

Very bad production
Poor animation and graphics
Not living up to standards

I do hope there will at some point be a more respectful reproduction of Junji ito’s work in an anime. This show had so much potential. It was so sad to watch it fall to pieces.

What did you think of Junji Ito: Collection? Were you excited or disappointed to see his stories on screen? Let us know in the comment section.