Even Ito’s less impressive stories can contain notable images and effectively creep out the reader. But that’s a tricky element to incorporate in a moving image that you still want to be legible, and consequently the anime is literally brighter than Ito’s art - which in turn dampens the atmospheric dread. Giger (to say nothing of his acknowledged forebears in horror manga, like Kazuo Umezu), he sometimes verges on chiaroscuro. One could make a case for Ito as the best contemporary comic book artist working in black and white he’s a master of shading and especially contrast.
The impact is simply not the same.Ī big reason for the loss of detail across formats is the transition from black and white in the manga to color in the anime. In the anime, the man… looks mildly perturbed and confused as he sort of slides into the floor via a haphazardly composited visual effect. This guy is fucked and he knows it, and all he can do is plead for someone to explain what is happening. Ito pencils in deep wrinkles and beads of sweat. One man’s face is a mask of torment - his eyes gape, with dark circles under them emphasizing his terror, while his mouth is slack-jawed. In the manga, every brick is richly textured, and the stippling drawing of the floor makes it look almost animate, as if the characters are being digested. The climactic set piece, in which several characters attempt to escape the tunnel, sees most of them fail, screaming as they merge into the tunnel. The plot concerns a disused train tunnel that lures in hapless people who are then absorbed into its walls and floor. Most stills from this show look like they could come from any number of other anime.Īs another example, take “The Story of the Mysterious Tunnel,” one of my favorite Itos. Ito’s art is immediately recognizable not just for his signature character design but even his way of drawing stains or shadows. Ito draws the stuff to look so viscerally revolting that I gagged slightly the first time I read the story in the anime it’s oddly smooth and clean. There’s a moment in “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings” when one of the titular siblings vomits up ectoplasm during a seance. It makes what’s technically the same imagery much less vivid. In contrast, Studio DEEN adopts a generic, often sterile aesthetic.
Whether he’s drawing something slick with fluids, jagged and rough, or crusted in grime, you can nearly feel it under your fingertips, and then you’ll shudder even more. (This is most apparent when he ventures outside of horror.) He layers his pictures with countless small (often gross) details that lend them weight and uncomfortable verisimilitude. Even if he wasn’t a horror artist, his work would be impressive for his intricacy. Ito is admired by fans for his appreciably fucked-up imagination, but there’s more to his illustrations than how creatively he can render monsters and awful body contortions. So why are stories like “Hanging Balloon” or “Whispering Woman” so terrifying to read but not nearly as involving to watch?Īt issue is the disparate amount of effort involved from one medium to the next. While watching, I could pull out the original manga and read it almost as a storyboard for an episode. This anime exactingly and faithfully replicates Ito’s stories, often to the point of precisely reproducing his panels in many shots. Yet this also makes it an oddly fruitful case study for anyone interested in the vagaries of adaptation, and why what works so well on a page might not on the screen. I can’t recommend Maniac on any of its own merits, because it has none - anything worthwhile about the show comes directly from Ito’s ideas and imagery. Unfortunately, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre is as awkward an adaptation as its title suggests.
Studio deen shimo r series#
And now an anime anthology series has come to Netflix, made up of segments each based on one of his short stories. at a brisk and steady pace for years now, giving him even wider exposure. His various series and collected editions have been getting officially translated and published in the U.S. He went from a cult figure among manga fans to a sort of creepypasta icon as his work was shared over social media sites like Reddit and Imgur. Junji Ito has drawn some of the most indelible horror images of the past decade. People from all over feel an inexplicable compulsion to enter human-shaped crevasses that appear in a cliffside, and when they emerge from the other end… Well, that’s become the stuff of internet lore. Insectoid mechanical limbs power themselves with the rotting corpses of sea creatures (and eventually humans). A man experiences his dreams as if they last thousands of years, and ultimately desiccates and crumbles in his bed.
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