LukeToThePast
Active Member
So I don't create web content (even though I would like to in the future) but I do enjoy writing things or designing things that I plan to do. I usually design more than I write, because I don't know what I would specifically want to do/review on Youtube, because I like the majority of media, but I did an anime review of the first episode of Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories, where it's written like a series introduction. I was planning to write it as if I'd review all of them in 1, but the amount I wrote for the first one shows that if I were to do it, I'd have to do it episode-by-episode. Still, I'd appreciate it if people read what I wrote and point out any things, apart from spelling mistakes, that i can do to improve. Thanks!
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Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories Episode 1 (The Talisman Women) Review
Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories is a folklore-horror Anime series, directed by Tomoya Takishima, produced by both Naoko Kunisada and Noboyuki Hosoya, and written by Hiramu Kamamoto. The anime itself consists of 13 episodes no more than 5 minutes long, where the narrator, who is a disturbing man that interrupts children playing in a playground to tell them of these ghost stories, tells a ghost story. Why the fact that a). no parents are there to supervise these children that must be no older than 8 or 9, and b). why the children go up to some 40-year-old man with a creepy mask on is beyond me.
However, it’s quite good that these children go up to see what this old man, because this is a chilling anime, which admittedly has it flaws, but overall, this is a really good anime to watch if you’ve got an hour to spare.
The episodes themselves are all either 4 minutes and 30 seconds long, or just slightly short (As the last episode is only 4 minutes and 29 seconds), so it’s got very little time to tell a story to the reader. As they’re all so short, I feel like I should go over all 13 episodes, highlighting the plot, the animation and overall if I find the episode good or not. There will be major spoilers about every episode of Yamishibai, and it’ll be in-depth. If you haven’t seen them them and want to, it’s on Crunchyroll if you need to.
The first episode is titled “The Talisman Women”. It’s about a guy who moves into a “particular” apartment. From the very first seconds of the anime, you can already tell what the animation is like.
Unlike some Animes, where the body language presented by characters is almost always changing, Yamishibai has the animation style that’s similar to stick puppets; for the majority of the time, a character will keep his position until something else happens, in which it will cut to a different position.
Because there rarely are frame-by-frame changes in how a character moves, they have the movements of puppets on sticks almost PERFECTLY.
It’s incredible how well it replicates what it would be like if you were watching a puppet show. All the characters are almost never still (unless they’re shown laying down); if you had to keep your hands held up in a position, it’d almost be impossible for it to be completely still. As the animators knew this, there are the slightest movements with the characters, and that’s what makes it stand out in my mind.
The style is also quite incredible too; all of it looks gritty and rough, with a filter that makes it look aged and worn-out. Personally, the animation and art style is the best part of Yamishibai and it was a joy to see what was going to be shown next in each episode.
Anyway, the episode starts with the main character relaxing after moving his boxes into his new room. He lies down on the floor, but notices a piece of paper next to his light on the ceiling. He looks at it and realizes it’s a talisman. He then looks to his left to see a girl, that’s quite similar to Kayako from the Grudge, staring directly at him. He then closes the curtains, afraid.
Presumably the next day, the main character goes outside to throw out his rubbish, when he looks back at the window in which the girl was yesterday, with her once again staring directly at him. Whereas the first time in which he just closes the curtains, this time he runs back in petrified, which is a slight overreaction. So far all she has done is stare at him, but that was enough for him to run away in fear.
It makes even less sense in the next scene where he tries anything to get away from his apartment to avoid the girl who so far has just been staring at him. Like, it’s not as if she’s been threatening to kill him or she’s being doing some messed up things; all we’ve seen of her is her staring at him. For all we know, she could be a person who has a crush on him, but is too shy to ask him out.
Actually, if you look at her for more than 5 seconds, you can tell it’s probably not that.
As he gets home, he reaches to unlock his door, but it’s already open. To which he says “Huh? Did I forget to lock the door?”. Considering the fact that a girl he’s seen for literally 10 seconds at the most has rendered him too afraid to even look at her, he doesn’t even think that it could possibly be that the demon-looking lady broke into his house. It’s quite confusing when you think about it for a while, but if you only watch it for the first time, you should enjoy it quite a bit.
Our main character falls to his bed once again, and déjà vu, another talisman is by the light on the ceiling. However, this time, the faded window opposite our protagonist’s apartment has no one in it. As he reaches for the paper, she comes in and scares both him and me. I’m terrible with jump scares, but this was admittedly light in comparison to other jump scares. However, what annoys me about this is that it was only scary because of a loud sound simultaneous with it. It’s a lazy way of getting a cheap scare, and I wish media would stop doing this.
Let’s go back to the sound quickly, and I do mean quickly. There is very little sound with this episode; it has an eerie suspense to it, like in LIMBO. The lack of sound makes the moment with sounds scarier than they should be, so while a lazy jump scare does annoy me, it had some great setup.
The episode then cuts to the morning, where the police are taking the woman away and it makes very little sense. The protagonist doesn’t have any physical damage to him, nor does the woman. They presumably just waited for the police to arrive 15 hours later. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, at all really. Nothing big happened, but background elderly women are gossiping about her breaking into his house as if she sacrificed his family to Satan.
What you do notice now however, is why the main character was likely so afraid of the woman; her stare as she’s driven away burns into your mind. It’s reminiscent of the Scream, where you see it once, and you’ll remember it for the rest of the month, and then every now and again in 7 years’ time.
We go back to the protagonist’s apartment, where he’s cleaning the shoe marks that the woman left (but you’d think that she’d probably be barefoot rather than wearing trainers/boots), where he sees another talisman drop from his table. As he looks under, he flips it over, where hundreds of talismans are stuck to it’s underneath. He rips them all up in a fit of rage, but as he looks up, he sees spirits that look as if they’ve been hanged. He repeats to himself “I don’t see anything!” and then it ends.
See, here’s the biggest issue with Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories. Excluding the intro and outro, the episodes are roughly 200 seconds long; while this can be a good thing, as I was able to binge watch all 13 of them in under an hour, but it’s abrupt when it gets to the end.
In more than one of the episodes, it just ends without much explanation as to what the message is, or what actually happened in the end. It’s psychological horror so I can see it getting a pass by some people, but when you tell a story with no real ending, it can turn me away.
Nevertheless, I still enjoyed this quite a bit. As it’s a pilot, it can make or break your opinion on whether or not you want to watch it, but because it’s only 4 minutes long, you’ll most likely watch more, and you’ll see that it DOES get better than this.
The graphics, animation and sound design (for the most part) are what really shine through in this, as well as a clever premise to begin with, albeit clichéd. Unfortunately, it does start to fall apart when you look at it with a storytelling point of view, where the short-story style episodes shoots itself in the foot. Still, it was an above-average pilot with brilliant presentation.
6.5/10
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Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories Episode 1 (The Talisman Women) Review
Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories is a folklore-horror Anime series, directed by Tomoya Takishima, produced by both Naoko Kunisada and Noboyuki Hosoya, and written by Hiramu Kamamoto. The anime itself consists of 13 episodes no more than 5 minutes long, where the narrator, who is a disturbing man that interrupts children playing in a playground to tell them of these ghost stories, tells a ghost story. Why the fact that a). no parents are there to supervise these children that must be no older than 8 or 9, and b). why the children go up to some 40-year-old man with a creepy mask on is beyond me.
However, it’s quite good that these children go up to see what this old man, because this is a chilling anime, which admittedly has it flaws, but overall, this is a really good anime to watch if you’ve got an hour to spare.
The episodes themselves are all either 4 minutes and 30 seconds long, or just slightly short (As the last episode is only 4 minutes and 29 seconds), so it’s got very little time to tell a story to the reader. As they’re all so short, I feel like I should go over all 13 episodes, highlighting the plot, the animation and overall if I find the episode good or not. There will be major spoilers about every episode of Yamishibai, and it’ll be in-depth. If you haven’t seen them them and want to, it’s on Crunchyroll if you need to.
The first episode is titled “The Talisman Women”. It’s about a guy who moves into a “particular” apartment. From the very first seconds of the anime, you can already tell what the animation is like.
Unlike some Animes, where the body language presented by characters is almost always changing, Yamishibai has the animation style that’s similar to stick puppets; for the majority of the time, a character will keep his position until something else happens, in which it will cut to a different position.
Because there rarely are frame-by-frame changes in how a character moves, they have the movements of puppets on sticks almost PERFECTLY.
It’s incredible how well it replicates what it would be like if you were watching a puppet show. All the characters are almost never still (unless they’re shown laying down); if you had to keep your hands held up in a position, it’d almost be impossible for it to be completely still. As the animators knew this, there are the slightest movements with the characters, and that’s what makes it stand out in my mind.
The style is also quite incredible too; all of it looks gritty and rough, with a filter that makes it look aged and worn-out. Personally, the animation and art style is the best part of Yamishibai and it was a joy to see what was going to be shown next in each episode.
Anyway, the episode starts with the main character relaxing after moving his boxes into his new room. He lies down on the floor, but notices a piece of paper next to his light on the ceiling. He looks at it and realizes it’s a talisman. He then looks to his left to see a girl, that’s quite similar to Kayako from the Grudge, staring directly at him. He then closes the curtains, afraid.
Presumably the next day, the main character goes outside to throw out his rubbish, when he looks back at the window in which the girl was yesterday, with her once again staring directly at him. Whereas the first time in which he just closes the curtains, this time he runs back in petrified, which is a slight overreaction. So far all she has done is stare at him, but that was enough for him to run away in fear.
It makes even less sense in the next scene where he tries anything to get away from his apartment to avoid the girl who so far has just been staring at him. Like, it’s not as if she’s been threatening to kill him or she’s being doing some messed up things; all we’ve seen of her is her staring at him. For all we know, she could be a person who has a crush on him, but is too shy to ask him out.
Actually, if you look at her for more than 5 seconds, you can tell it’s probably not that.
As he gets home, he reaches to unlock his door, but it’s already open. To which he says “Huh? Did I forget to lock the door?”. Considering the fact that a girl he’s seen for literally 10 seconds at the most has rendered him too afraid to even look at her, he doesn’t even think that it could possibly be that the demon-looking lady broke into his house. It’s quite confusing when you think about it for a while, but if you only watch it for the first time, you should enjoy it quite a bit.
Our main character falls to his bed once again, and déjà vu, another talisman is by the light on the ceiling. However, this time, the faded window opposite our protagonist’s apartment has no one in it. As he reaches for the paper, she comes in and scares both him and me. I’m terrible with jump scares, but this was admittedly light in comparison to other jump scares. However, what annoys me about this is that it was only scary because of a loud sound simultaneous with it. It’s a lazy way of getting a cheap scare, and I wish media would stop doing this.
Let’s go back to the sound quickly, and I do mean quickly. There is very little sound with this episode; it has an eerie suspense to it, like in LIMBO. The lack of sound makes the moment with sounds scarier than they should be, so while a lazy jump scare does annoy me, it had some great setup.
The episode then cuts to the morning, where the police are taking the woman away and it makes very little sense. The protagonist doesn’t have any physical damage to him, nor does the woman. They presumably just waited for the police to arrive 15 hours later. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, at all really. Nothing big happened, but background elderly women are gossiping about her breaking into his house as if she sacrificed his family to Satan.
What you do notice now however, is why the main character was likely so afraid of the woman; her stare as she’s driven away burns into your mind. It’s reminiscent of the Scream, where you see it once, and you’ll remember it for the rest of the month, and then every now and again in 7 years’ time.
We go back to the protagonist’s apartment, where he’s cleaning the shoe marks that the woman left (but you’d think that she’d probably be barefoot rather than wearing trainers/boots), where he sees another talisman drop from his table. As he looks under, he flips it over, where hundreds of talismans are stuck to it’s underneath. He rips them all up in a fit of rage, but as he looks up, he sees spirits that look as if they’ve been hanged. He repeats to himself “I don’t see anything!” and then it ends.
See, here’s the biggest issue with Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories. Excluding the intro and outro, the episodes are roughly 200 seconds long; while this can be a good thing, as I was able to binge watch all 13 of them in under an hour, but it’s abrupt when it gets to the end.
In more than one of the episodes, it just ends without much explanation as to what the message is, or what actually happened in the end. It’s psychological horror so I can see it getting a pass by some people, but when you tell a story with no real ending, it can turn me away.
Nevertheless, I still enjoyed this quite a bit. As it’s a pilot, it can make or break your opinion on whether or not you want to watch it, but because it’s only 4 minutes long, you’ll most likely watch more, and you’ll see that it DOES get better than this.
The graphics, animation and sound design (for the most part) are what really shine through in this, as well as a clever premise to begin with, albeit clichéd. Unfortunately, it does start to fall apart when you look at it with a storytelling point of view, where the short-story style episodes shoots itself in the foot. Still, it was an above-average pilot with brilliant presentation.
6.5/10
