Itou Junji: Maniac

I think that this was the best adaptation of Junji Ito's works! Most of the artsyle was able to translate and I think it is a great way for anybody new to Ito's work to get into them!

Ofcourse I think the manga is better, that is just a given as it translates better in manga than anime with the horror he potrays but I think this is a great and much more affordable way to enjoy quite a bit of his short stories.

The sound track and voice actors were amazing! The 2d animation was aswell! The only critique I would have about it is ... the 3d animation, it doesn't seem to be the animators main skill and it didn't look the best but it wasn't used too often so I can put that aside.

Last critique I'll give it, is the story pacing, although it mostly does the originals justice, it isn't the best with the pacing and seems a bit fast pace compared to the originals to me. All in all though this is a great adaptation and I mostly loved the Soichi parts, would love to see a comedy come from that lol.

This is a compilation of some Junji Itou stories. I put mixed feelings. I personally have not read a single Junji Itou manga. I plan to and it's definitely on my list. With that said, I personally enjoyed the series well enough. A few stories were lackluster. Some stories were obviously incomplete. Though it also had some good stories as well! I'd watch for the food adaptations alone.

Though I'll say with caution. Watch this before reading the manga. A lot of the people who have read the manga, says that this series doesn't compare. ... Reading the manga ruined the enjoyment of this series, because they just saw this as an inferior version of the manga.

Being a massive fan of Junji Ito's manga, i'm terribly sad to be giving this adaptation such a low score. The same exact score as for the 2018 "Collection" unfortunately.

Horror is quite a peculiar genre, requiring a lot more suspension of disbelief than others and is usually much more effective the more it leaves to the imagination. Which is why it tends to work much better in prose, or graphic novels, where your mind has to fill in a lot more between each sentence or panel with your own personal terrors. This is true for all the greatest horror writers like Poe, Lovecraft, or ... Stephen King, with very rare exceptional adaptations actually doing justice to the original work. In the case of Lovecraft, i'm still waiting for a good one, despite all the attempts.

When the suspension of disbelief is stretched too far, horror quickly turns into into its opposite - comedy. And the line between these two genres is surprisingly thin. Often fused to great effect in many movies - Peter Jackson's early filmography being a prime example in my mind. But here the laughable moments are not intentional and just constantly break any possibility of imersion and enjoyment. The minute you find yourself slowly slipping inside the unfolding world being portrayed, some utterly non-sense scene, or some ridiculously absurd dialogue, just pops up to brutally remind you this is all fake.

Junji Ito is a master of atmosphere, but doesn't really know how to end a story most of the time and he tends to lobotomize his characters of most of their common-sense... This certainly doesn't help the job at hand, but is completely forgivable in the manga format, where the ambience and pacing superbly make up for it. On screen they become hugely exacerbated to a point where i almost suspect the studio was deliberately trying to highlight these flaws. I refuse to believe Junji Ito is impossible to adapt and i rather think the story-boarding work for this anime was rather lazy - basically adding frames between the manga's panels, beat by beat, without any artful attempt at an actual proper re-telling.

This is the third peculiarity of horror adaptations: different media require different approaches and the more faithful you try to be to the written word, the less effective you will generally be in a visual format. This becomes a specially huge problem in this genre, where you are much more likely make to a good horror movie, the more you stray from the original work (and the more you risk alienating fans) - a fact that is masterfully evident in The Shinning. But you wouldn't need to go to that far to make a better adaptation, had the story-telling not been absolutely flat and linear, had there been more creative applications of rhythm to the scenes, paired with better sound design, better animation, better camera work, better almost everything...... This could've easily been double the score.