Junji Ito's Work Should Have Been Left Alone

LOOK y'all I don't know if you've read his work, but he's made some horrifying creations. They're amazing and the stories are quite chilling. I often find myself absorbed unable to stop reading them. I wonder what's going through his mind as he writes manga. To some degree I believe he has to be just a little twisted to come up with some of them. 

Now recently, his work has been made into an anime titled The Junji Ito Collection. It unfortunately is not that great. It's actually pretty disappointing. For some reason the episodes lost seriousness and became comical, which is something I doubt he was trying to do in his manga.

Now here's where I think it went wrong within the art, and animation. I'm not an animator just so you all know, so I don't know a lot about the process, but I feel like based on my many years of consuming the product, I think I can tell decent animation from, well, not decent animation. So that you all know my scale I'll tell you which anime did animation extremely well in my opinion and those that didn't. (Side note: Just because the animation sucks doesn't mean I didn't like the anime). Kiznaiver, Castlevania, and Kakegurui were some anime I thought had great visuals, exceptional to be honest. Anime that I thought could have done so much better, Ajin, Aku no Hana, Quan Zhi Gao Shou, they are really good so I definitely recommend them, but their animation and art style is pretty awful.

I don't think that The Junji Ito Collection is close to the art and animation of Ajin or Aku no Hana, but it wasn't Kiznaiver, but a lot of anime fall into that category, you know somewhere in between. So what's the problem you're probably still wondering, I personally didn't think it was clean, and not in the sense where it needed to lose that grittiness if had, but I feel like because it was animated it should've had that hyper realism. Somewhere in the realm of  Attack on Titan. I know for a while the art style and animation of AoT made it a little terrifying to watch. If The Junji Ito Collection was like that it would have gotten under my skin so much more. There were a few stories like that, like, the one with the jade stone with the holes, but I'm sure that's because it played on a phobia.

Take the episode with the model who was obviously a creature, for example, if that were hyper-realistic, I would have been disturbed tenfold. On top of this, the music didn't help set the mood for the show. The opening theme was upbeat and dance-y, it wasn't misleading, but knowing how psychologically horrifying his work can be, the opening just seemed inappropriate for the anime. There is one anime that comes to mind when I think about appropriate music for the horror and gore it provided, and that's Elfen Lied. That opening theme, Lilium, although I like the song, it gave me goosebumps and to this day I can't hear it without remembering a scene where this girl got her limbs ripped off. But I digress. The music missed the mark completely.

Isn't the magna terrifying 

Like I said I'm not an animator, but I also want to let you all know I'm not a voice actor either. I didn't have any qualms with the voice acting except when some of the characters expressed fear. It kind of reminded me of Scooby Doo, I'm sure that was definitely just me though. Overall I liked his stories in manga form, but watching them, I was disappointed. They were lack luster, with the exception of a few.

If you on the other hand really enjoyed the collection as a whole, please don't be afraid to let me know how I wrong I am to dislike it. Maybe you'll change my mind.

I'm going to go watch anime now!