Today’s stories fell a bit flat for me as one of Ito’s tendencies to not explain his horrors actually somewhat backfired. In the first story we had a tale about a jade stone which cursed people with a disease that causes holes to open up on their body. The story itself was relatively simple but I can’t help but notice some logical inconsistencies. For one they state that the girl next door had been afflicted with this hole disease for all her life and yet when other people are infected they die within days. So what was this girl so special that she lived so long with the disease? The disease itself doesn’t make much sense either and while Ito does tend to stretch credibility to make his monsters come to life, here is another example where I feel he pushing things too far. This hole disease does create holes in the body as shown by the last victim who even had one of his eyeballs falling out of it’s socket due to a hole under his eye. Yet the victim can still somehow live which makes me wonder just how blood circulation works when the body is full of holes. Who was the doctor and why was he connected with the stone? Frankly I feel the horror of the story fails because we as the audience just know far too little of the situation to get what is even happening. At most we can speculate and even with that we have far too little information.
The Marionette Mansion story also has issues but at least there is more to work with when it comes to that story. Being about a brother that comes back to town and mysteriously his family are controlled by strings like puppets. The key factor her appears to be the puppet at the end who somehow must have been in control of all the strings. If i had to guess I would believe that the brother never actually came back to the town and the family which our protagonist was talking to was just puppets controlled by Jean-Pierre. The reason I believe was to somehow trick the protagonist and his sister into joining the house as it appears the older brother abandoned the puppet, he needs a human to be “complete” so to speak. Though in this puppets case he wanted the roles to be reversed. Again this story has it’s holes, namely that if the main protagonist found the house to be so suspicious then why did he keep coming back to it? He was clearly wary of the house and it’s puppet antics and yet he still let his sister stay there and kept coming back. Also why did the puppet freak out so much over the jealous girlfriend and attack the protag? How does the house ever work in regards to being controlled by strings all day? How do the puppeteers know what they want to do? The final reveal just kinda felt on the weak side as it was pretty obvious that was the case.
If there is a big flaw with these stories though it would be the endings. I have noticed this so far with all the stories but they tend to end far too suddenly. There isn’t really a sense of finality to the conclusion, instead it feels like the story just stops suddenly and is rather unsatisfying as a result. Even if that is the stories ending in the manga it would be better to dwell on it a bit to let the ending sink in before cutting to the credits. Another issue is with the presentation which while fine is still far too similar to watching a slideshow of the manga. Their is very little animation or attempts to truly adapt these stories to screen. They are essentially the manga put into an animated format without any real adjustment. Which may be fine for purests but when the anime just ends up an inferior version of the manga then people might as well just read the manga instead.
