What They Say:
Episode 4
“Collection No. 034: Shiver / Collection No. 060: House of Puppets”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This week feature two stories I had not yet read so it was a bit of a different experience to me. I quite liked the first one, although, saying it like that makes me feel a little creepy.
Shiver is a comprehensive story which is kind of an achievement considering this anime’s problems with pacing and cutting stories short. It also succeeds in painting a complete picture while still leaving some things up for you to interpret.
Yuuji is a normal boy who, like most Junji Ito characters, just happens to stumble into weirdness, or more accurately, he lives right next to it. His neighbor, a young girl by the name of Rina, has been sick for as long as he can remember, she never even leaves the house. At first, I thought she might have some mental health issues since she starts screaming bloody murder when her doctor comes to visit and she’s terrified of insects that according to her mom are not there. It soon becomes clear, Rina is suffering from a real physical condition, although I’m pretty sure her mind is half-gone too. One day, as Yuuji is looking out his window, he sees Rina smiling at him. The girl pokes her arm out her own window to point at something. As you can expect, Yuuji is in shock to discover Rina’s arm is covered in holes and not tiny chicken pox scars either. These are some big holes, that seem to go way too deep into her skin.
What’s surprising here is that Yuuji has seen something similar before. He was a small child but he remembers his grandfather’s body was covered in holes by the time he died, even though his mother keeps telling him he must have dreamed it. At this point, I was starting to wonder if the problem didn’t lie with Yuuji himself, but later on, his best friend, Hideo comes by. Even though he didn’t believe Yuuji either, since there is no disease that makes you develop this type of holes, he asked his mother about it just to be sure. His mother was a nurse and she was there when Hina was born under some very special circumstances. Once they find the grandfather’s diary and start reading it, it becomes extremely clear that whatever is happening there is not precisely natural. I don’t want to spoil the entire story so I’ll stop there. Suffice to say it was one of the few that felt like a complete story with enough twists and mystery to keep you guessing what was going to happen next. Hideo does suffer from the terrible disease affecting many horror story characters. You know, the “I don’t believe obvious stuff even when I see it and by the way let me go do dangerous things at night” syndrome.
The second story is not bad, in fact, it is creepy as hell. I guess it depends on your mileage, but puppets creep me out. This one is also a complete story, and I did love that the episode was once again divided equally. My main issue with this story is the visuals, I feel like this one probably works ten thousand times better on the page.
House of puppets introduces us to a traveling family of entertainers. The father, two brothers and a younger sister travel from town to town, putting on puppet shows. As a consequence, none of the kids get to make permanent friends. When Haruhiko, the younger brother, invites a classmate of his, Kinuko, to see his family’s home, she is fascinated by his lifestyle but gets creeped out by one particular puppet: Jean-Pierre. Haruhiko explains it’s a magician’s puppet and it’s his brother’s favorite but Kinuko is not amused. She throws the puppet against the wall when it gets too close to her. Yes, I know what I just wrote. Haruhiko apologizes for startling her but I wasn’t convinced it was Haruhiko moving the puppet. Later on, when his brother is complaining about the life they lead, he says he wishes his father got sick so they’d have to stop moving. It’s just a tasteless joke from a bitter kid but then it actually happens.
He is still displeased with his father’s obsession with puppets, although to me it only looked like his father really loved his work. Yukihiko disagrees, he believes it’s the puppets who control the puppeteer. His father has to keep moving and working because it’s the puppet’s will. Finally, he runs away from home.
The story picks up once again, many years later, when Haruhiko is already a grown man, taking care of his pre-teen sister. He gets reunited with Kinuko who believes God brought them together and everything is going fine, but then Haruhiko receives a letter from his brother asking him to come over to his house. It turns out he is very successful and lives in the same town. Both siblings are impressed with the size of the house but once they enter things take a turn for the bizarre and that’s putting it mildly.
This one is kind of fun in the sense that it throws you in for a loop, making you believe one thing and then the other. The ending is pretty horrific, well almost everything is at least uncomfortable, but as I said before, the visuals, which are, in concept, interesting, feel weird. Even for someone like me who doesn’t like puppets very much, some stuff just looked funny. Junji Ito does have a weird sense of humor but being familiar with his brand of absurd jokes this one felt unintentional. It’s not really a good thing when you are watching an anime and your mind starts imagining how it must have looked in the manga.
One more thing I noticed as I re-watched some scenes from House of Puppets, is that there does seem to be a deeper, more subtle concept behind everything that happens, that maybe the incidents at Yukihiko’s house were not the only orchestrated events, but that it started long before that. Isn’t it a bit suspicious that everyone ended up living in the same town within walking distance of each other? I’m guessing this was more apparent in the manga and I do which they’d played up this angle more in the adaptation. It would have made for a deeper, more meaningful story,
Ito’s stories, however, are too good to be completely buried by cheap production values, so the story does end up being very creepy anyway, no doubt in part thanks to Jean-Pierre’s unsettling design.
In Summary:
This one was better mostly due to the fact that you didn’t feel like the stories just ended. Both had a proper ending and both were very creepy which is what we supposedly expect out of a horror anime. It’s not like it shines on the technical aspects but the content was good enough to compensate. I think in terms of pacing and flow this was the best the series has managed, and it succeeded in making want to read these ones.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
