“Boar Meat”
What They Say:
Yamishibai is a picture-story style of animation whose motif is surrounded and based on the rumors, and urban legends throughout the history of Japan.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The latest tale is one that focuses on a young girl who has moved into the country and is now at school where she’s having to fit in with the kids there. Of course, one of the boys trips her just after the introduction and it sets a dour tone for her from there on in. When home with her mother, she spends some time planting flowers and spending time with her mother, but while her mother is away another girl named Botan shows up and starts talking to her. Botan invites her to plant some flowers elsewhere and practically drags her to a bit of a remote place, telling her to keep it a secret. It’s cute seeing the personality change that she goes through over the next few days as she has a friend now but we discover there’s something more to Botan when the mean boy throws rocks at them and it’s Botan that gets hurt, causing him to really panic.
In Summary:
The show really teases out the horror aspect of this because you think it’s going to surface several times at different points but it’s really not until the final minute or so, even less, before it delivers the horror part. It’s all wrapped up in the childhood aspect of things where what they understand as reality isn’t always real, or makes sense from an adult point of view, but seeing the truth about Botan here definitely puts our leading character in a hard place as she grows up and tries to reconcile things.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
