#282: Theatre of Darkness - Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Studio: ILCA

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

 

Starting here in 2013, ILCA's Yamishibai franchise would continue on until October 2024*. Its name is taken from kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, using drawn illustrations where the narrator would tell a story around them. This became popular during the 1930s, and the Yamishibai series nods to its origins, always opening its episodes for the first series with an older man with his little wooden theatre about to tell the stories to young children, an art form which dwindled against the advent of television. It has found itself being paid tribute to and resurrected in a variety of ways, from revivals of the original art form to works paying tribute to it in influence, like Suehiro Maruo taking influence for his ero guro manga Shōjo Tsubaki (1983-4), translated into the West as Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, for the main character and plotting.

Yamishibai is probably one of the most successful examples of a "micro-series", those that are usually less than ten minutes long including opening and ending credits, in how it has now had over thirteen series from this original 2013 production. It felt appropriate to start off and review the first series by itself with what could have been a one-and-done, thirteen ten plus minute episodes less than an hour altogether only to lead to this lineage, and the animation studio behind the series, ILCA, have mostly focus on these sorts of short form programmes. They have produced the likes of Onara Goro (2016), the deadpan surreal comedy by Takashi Taniguchi, and whilst they have produced some anime series in length, they have still focused as much on these micro-length productions as much as help out on live action and animated productions in CG production like Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016). Their core focus is clearly on programmes, including the long standing renewal of the Yamishibai franchise, allowing the staff to flex their creativity. Whilst minimalism with the production values certainly helped, with a friendly budget to allow so many seasons to exist - Yamishibai does include more animation than merely illustrated images with dialogue, but it follows the idea of kamishibai of letting the still images with the voice acting convey the horror - I can already see how this was intriguing enough to become a regular event on TV Tokyo and AT-X in its original broadcasts.

As much of it is clearly because the project a nice crossing of modern day pop culture meeting the traditions of the past, especially as just in the first season along, you are seeing crossed together traditional ghost story structures with modern and vintage technology, rural and urban locations, and even Japanese online urban legends. The stories themselves, with little time to work with, tend to be more eccentric than traditionally scary haunting tales, with episode one entirely about a man moving into a new apartment only to be creeped out by the woman on the other side of the street and her paper talismans he keeps finding in the apartment. A lot of them obviously set up twist endings, as this does or episode 2, about a guy who broke his foot and finds his fellow male patients in the hospital creep him out, barring in mind there is not a lot of time to set up stories whatsoever. There is not even enough time for more than a creepy minute of a distorted pop song, sounding like Hatsune Miku if demonically possessed.

Some of the stories even have a slightly misanthropic side to them, like the cursed girl of episode 9 who, trying to be cured by a Shinto temple, ends up with her infliction by the wrath of others on their ancestors not going away. Working with this artistic medium, there is aptly too the crossing of times and culture too. Shinto temples and modern apartments intermingle as mentioned, with a good amount as set in the rural communities as in the urban cities, where horror can come as in episode six where a guy on a crowded train notices a flesh creature in the baggage overhead no one else sees. The last episode is clearly based on a Kunekune, a figure that spread on Japanese websites as an urban legend from 2001, one which drives people insane and into fits of wiggling frantic movement if you directly look at them.

It naturally follows a tradition too that Japanese horror was arguably quicker to consider how ghosts and the supernatural would adapt quickly to technology. It does have some stranger moments around this - episode four is about a female primary teacher working late at night, baffled by hair lines in her photocopying - but that adds to the personality, alongside natural conclusions like a girl getting a phone call in episode 7 from a friend who made the ill advised decision with her boyfriend to enter a deserted hospital, or the riff on the Ring premise in episode 11 where three male middle school students, rather than do homework, make the decision to watch a video with a ghost supposedly on it. Even the toilet is not safe, with episode 10, about a high school baseball team at a training camp lodge, and the one who blanked out falling into a pit toilet when he was younger there and finding himself in a phantom world with a monster in the bog.

It is ridiculous at times, but it is not like The World Yamizukan (2017), a spin-off of a similar structure which was explicitly inspired by American pop culture and had the fingerprints of a future collaborator on the Yamishibai project by season two involved, live action filmmaker Noboru Iguchi, who started in the adult video industry and working on over-the-top films like The Machine Girl (2008) before this interesting growth in his career, working with ILCA on these projects, and Tales of Bliss and Heresy (2023), an anthology romance film I would have never expected from the director when I first learnt of him but feels like his attempt (nobly) to flex his own creativity. One of the other prominent reasons I choose to cover the first Yamishibai by itself is because it was the only one without Iguchi or Takashi Shimizu involved, the later a prolific filmmaker most famous for creating Ju-On/the Grudge franchise, and seeing how before they came onboard the series' first tentative steps for a single season.

From the initial pitch of Yamishibai being a way to flex storytelling ideas from classic ghost and horror story tropes, both presented matter-of-factly or deliberately exaggerated, I get the appeal for this even if this had never sadly gotten all those additional seasons onwards. Some episodes suggest morality plays, like the father who regrets shirking his wife and daughter on the latter's birthday trip to a shopping mall because he needs to go back to work, only to end up in the elevator of the unknown, but a lot of the stories in themselves are there for their pure macabre natures, with the art style itself distinct and relishing the still images for spooky effect. When a lot of these projects exist only up to thirty to an hour long when you binge all the episodes, never to get the change to last any further, it is interesting, tantalising even, to know this will be one which lasted and has to now figure out how to constantly tell stories for the decade it lasted for.

 

* The review acknowledges that, written in October 2024, there could easily be more Yamishibai series to come.

#265: The World YAMIZUKAN (2017)

 

Studio: ILCA

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Screenplay: Noboru Iguchi, Oolongta Yoshida, Takashi Iizuka and Uuronta Yoshida

Voice Cast: Takumi Saitou as the Storyteller

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

A micro-series of weird tales, this has made me more fascinated with its creator, studio ILCA, who come off as real experimenters with what can be described as a magnificently bleak and screwed up tale of alien abduction in less than four minutes. With a company name that literally is “I Love Computer Art”, they have worked in video games, supporting the production of the likes of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (2021), as well as animation, specifically in terms of what I have called “micro-series”, productions where the episodes are less than fifteen minutes, where I have encountered their work before. They have worked in a variety of genres, such as with animator Takashi Taniguchi, the original creator of such idiosyncratic looking titles like Onara Goro (2016), a deeply strange set of stories about sentient farts, but have made a name for themselves in horror. Alongside titles like Kowabon (2015), their most successful franchise in terms of number of series is Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories, directly inspired by the kamishibai method of story-telling, street storytellers who used illustrated miniature stages, which started in 2013 and continued into the 2020s. Yamishibai is explicitly about Japanese folklore and ghost stories, whilst YAMIZUKAN is its one-series sibling, which is affectively an interpretation, with exceptions, of American horror tropes.

To give an accurate description of what this visually looks like, most of this series is still images, clearly influenced by the kamishibai storytelling style as well – some paper cut animation is used, but mostly it is hand drawn images, set to voice acting, the score and the narrator. Each episode however takes on a different art style, something seen in the contrast from episode one to two, the later even more misanthropic in tone in suggesting the 1982 animated interpretation of Raymond Briggs's The Snowman, a Christmas tradition in Britain, if the snowman was more likely to eat the child. One aspect about YAMIZUKAN, alongside the bleakness of many of these narratives, is how ridiculous some become, and there is a sense as much of this is a pastiche, where the plot twists are more entertaining the least conventional and strange they turn out.

I think everything is explained by who the chief director is, an unexpected surprise for me as it is Noboru Iguchi, a man I only knew for his live action work and was surprised to learn has worked with ILCA with the likes of this and a season of Yamishibai. Iguchi is a man, part of the Sushi Typhoon group of cult Japanese cinema in the 2000s on, behind films like The Machine Girl (2008) and Dead Sushi (2012), knowingly ridiculous genre films which do wink to the audience. These films can be hit and miss to me over the years, but here Iguchi’s sense of the strange, writing many of the scripts with others, works entirely for me. The emphasis on American tropes, with all Western named characters, with some exceptions based on European tropes is clear, obsessions with fortean concepts of UFOs to the perils of hitchhiking, even for episode five with a very distinct art style based on American pulp illustrations the sci-fi trope of mechanical man for a gleefully nihilistic narrative. This is a really good series to show how the micro-series as I have called them, short multiple episode works, are at their best in allowing experimentation and artistic creativity. Still images, mid-show, stand out as incredible and gleefully weird here, where here you have to take a pinch of salt at how deliciously ridiculous this can get, like man-eating cars or mimicking Akane Shimizu’s series Cells at Work (2015-21) in anthropomorphising antibodies, but the art and craft behind them are magnificent.

Throughout, there are a lot of memorable episodes. Episode seven, about a dangerous clown who travels in reflections, is even live action, with actors photographed in a series of still images. One episode is the entire premise for an American horror film, about a cursed musical box, that even brings in The Exorcist (1973) and becomes an over-the-top tribute, or pastiche, of the country’s genre films, as is the throwback to older b-movies about a mad scientist turning people into a gill man army. The two inspired by European tropes make nice contrasts too, like the case of a cursed mask that sees the end of many found in an antique store, like a pulp tale from the eighteenth century, or the last episode, a bittersweet tale of an orphan girl which is actually haunting for all the content here, a great end tale and a surprise change of pace as it is one of Noboru Iguchi’s stories. For a work up to fifty minutes long altogether, these breezed pass with such a vibrancy, and sense of fun, where I have come from the end of YAMIZUKAN with a greater respect for ILCA and so much of their productions I now want to see.