An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: October 2024

Let’s Ghost! – Dark Gathering Spoiler Review

Let’s finish the spooky season strong with some ghosts and ghouls ripped from the rumor mills and brought to horrible, horrible life upon the screen. Let’s talk about Dark Gathering.

At its heart, Dark Gathering is a show about a little girl, Yayoi, who is determined to make a ghost buster of herself in order to hunt down the spook that took her mother’s soul. Her methodology is pretty unique, though, as she captures lesser ghosts, stuffs them in mystic substitute dolls so that anything spooky that tries to hurt her will damage the dolls instead, and ultimately trains them up to fight for her, making Yayoi basically the ultimate Ghost-type Pokemon Master.

However, Yayoi is not the main character.

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Respect for the Classics – Ayakashi: Japanese Classic Horror Spoiler Review

Ayakashi is an anthology of, as the title would suggest, classic Japanese horror tales. So strap yourselves in and get ready for a slice of period spookiness.

Specifically, across its 11 episode run, Ayakashi covers three stories: “Tenshu Monogatari”, “Yotsuya Kaidan”, and “Bakeneko”. The last of these is notable because it gives Ayakashi its dubious claim to fame: technically being the predecessor to the show Mononoke, which is often regarded as one of the all-time greats, but is beyond the scope of this review.

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7 Minute Monsters – Kagewani (& Shou) Spoiler Review

Kagewani is a story about monsters. It wants to be something new and refreshing: neither the tale nor the monsters seem to be derived from any other source material, providing a wholly original matter. The tale is spun across two seasons, Kagewani and Kagewani: Shou, with a grand total of twenty six episodes.

Each of those episodes averages about seven minutes of running time, though. Bold choice, let’s see if that pays off for them.

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Inner Scars, Outer Junk – Mayoiga/The Lost Village Spoiler Review

Take a cast of colorful and engaging characters, and then put them somewhere you can have a creepy atmosphere of suspicion and fear. This is a pretty basic recipe that often turns out a fairly good story.

A cup of sugar, half a cup of butter, one egg, scant two cups of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a couple teaspoons of cinnamon, and bake at 350 F for about ten minutes. This is a pretty basic recipe that usually turns out a fairly good cinnamon cookie.

But if you double the flour, turn the butter into sesame oil, skip the baking powder, and season the mix with crab innards rather than cinnamon I don’t think you’re going to get a good result. The analogy: Mayoiga, aka The Lost Village

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