Junji Ito Collection

Episode 11

Junji Ito "Collection" must know it's being judged. The past few episodes have represented a noticeable jump in the overall quality of the series. It's still not consistently scary and the production values are still far below expectations, but it's at least risen to ‘interesting’ or higher over the last couple weeks.

The primary portion of this latest episode, ‘Supernatural Transfer Student’, mostly succeeds at that minimum of keeping our interest, even if it's structurally all over the place. Tsukano is the titular transfer student, but the story plays coy for a while on whether he's supposed to be the main character or just an element of the ensuing mystery. A distracting number of left-turns occur just within the opening dialogue between the other students, who invite him into the Supernatural Club, as they whiplash between insisting that there is no supernatural phenomena in the town then claiming that club leader Shibayama possesses mysterious powers. Trying to figure out exactly where this was going became so distracting that I was excited when the freaky eyeball flowers appeared to interrupt the conversation.

Once Tsukano actually starts interacting with the club, it becomes rather obvious that he's mostly there to troll their supernatural interests, particularly Shibayama and his supposed psychic powers. The obvious nature of the reveals in this case aren't exactly a bad thing, as even though there isn't much mystery at the heart of the group's dynamic, seeing Tsukano call the kids out on this is amusing in its own way. Tsukano is endearing in his joviality, turning the whole thing into a funny story of a cheap faker getting dunked on by someone genuinely freakier than him.

‘Supernatural Transfer Student’ is a good concept overall, but it's perhaps spread too thin for its own good at this point in the whole series. The animation is still on the bad side, which isn't much of a hindrance in the early scenes of characters standing around explaining things. But as the story goes on and its ambitions increase, the presentation gets out of hand. This is particularly notable in the case of the laser-beam ‘supernatural powers’ the kids pick up, since their jerky execution makes their presentation confusing.

The lackluster revelation of a lake-dwelling dinosaur is only a preview for the major missed mark toward the end of this episode, with the water-bloated Shibayama getting presented too quickly to land as a shocking moment. It's the kind of image that should linger more, but perhaps the staff knew they didn't have the resources to render the image at an effective level of detail at this point; this is yet another scene that likely worked far better as a sudden page-turn in manga form. With the resources barely holding up at this point, the escalating absurdity of this story feels less like an outrageous climax of ideas and more like a plot going on for one twist too many.

There is a genuinely good idea baked into Tsukano. Does he introduce and escalate the supernatural phenomena around him, or is he simply the only one who calls attention to it in the first place? He also calls out the club members for supposedly desiring this outcome but not liking the results. I'd honestly watch a whole show about this guy. Unfortunately, the lackluster pacing and production don't match up with the concept. I would be here for over-the-top supernatural stories, but the final climax of this plot, while fun in its own way, just comes across like bargain-basement Dragon Ball Z.

By contrast, the shorter story ‘Scarecrow’ has its own intriguing idea, but it doesn't develop enough beyond the initial premise. It has to start out jumping through some arbitrary hoops just to get the idea laid out, with the dead girl's father impulsively throwing a scarecrow on her grave because he wants to chase off the husband he disapproved of. This guy's “Are you kidding me?” reaction to the father's move is at least a humorous highlight of the episode.

A lot of stories adapted in this series so far have dealt with the concept of traditions, especially those regarding treatment of the dead. Coming so soon after the Bridge story from the last episode, this one immediately runs into the issue of finding anything new to pull from the same well. This scarecrow story does at least get its own novelty from touching on how a tradition like this might have actually gotten started, as other members of the community plant their own grave-scarecrows in an effort to duplicate the facial-feature success of Yuki's father. The problem is that the story doesn't go anywhere meaningful after that.

There are a lot of weird turns crammed into the short runtime of ‘Scarecrow’, but few of them seem to actually mean anything. It almost seems like the situation with the scarecrows starts turning bad simply because that's what needs to happen in a horror story. It's possible to interpret the idea that holding on to someone's memory too hard is bad, but even that's difficult to determine. At least some of the musical accompaniment in this piece is nice. There are a lot of neat ideas flying around in this episode, but whether because of pacing, production, or other problems, they don't gel strong enough by the end.

Rating: C

Junji Ito "Collection" is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.