#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.