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
Now, the name of this anime is something of a little contention. Its Japanese name is “Mayoiga”, referring to a particular myth that I addressed in my review of Tsugumomo of all things. For those who don’t want to read all about the surprising pathos of a show that fetishizes sadism, towels, and little girls who are actually centuries old power beings, the basic outline is this: Mayoiga is a place (either a village or a house or mansion) that one finds only when hopelessly lost, which may bring incredible good fortune to decent sorts who take from it what they need.
This myth does somewhat underscore the plot in the anime… but technically the cognate location isn’t called Mayoiga. Rather, it’s known as Nanaki Village, and has its own in-universe mythology and lore that’s fully distinct from the supernatural and period-friendly Mayoiga. This, as well as the fact that westerners are unlikely to recognize the name “Mayoiga” and know the details of its myth, is likely why the official Western title is simply The Lost Village. For my part, I’m going to default to calling the show Mayoiga.
In any case, we begin with a bus full of people. They want to travel to the mysterious and legendary Nanaki Village, because they believe they’ll be able to start their lives over there. We painstakingly go through their self-introductions, and in that you’re liable to notice one of the issues with Mayoiga, the doubled flour. Specifically, including everyone who will figure, there are north of thirty of these folks.
They introduce themselves by their online names and most briefly state what they’re about or why they’re done with their former selves, and honestly it seems… really weird. The atmosphere is extremely celebratory as they get involved with this extremely fishy offer, and many of them have some pretty shallow stories.
As the bus rolls on, we focus on, mercifully, a few of these characters. There’s Mitsumune, who seems like a normal kid of uncertain youth level, his friend Hayato who really isn’t into this whole thing, and Masaki – a pretty, shrinking violet sort of girl with anxiety and motion sickness who Hayato immediately starts to bond with.
Eventually, the show tries to get a little more grim as various voices on the bus ruin the mood, notably one angry guy among the passengers, and the driver who’s needlessly bitter. They pick up a second admin in addition to the guy who was running the tour, a folklorist who is kind of the brains behind identifying and locating Nanaki Village.
On the last leg of the way to the village, the bus slides down the side of the decaying road and gets stuck. The crew continues on foot, leaving the irate driver behind, only for it to be strongly implied that he encounters something evil. They get to the village with no further issues, and find it abandoned.
The party splits up to search. As they reconvene, the bus driver also appears, still acting fairly high and mighty, but two individuals are missing: Masaki, and a rapper dude who it was strongly implied wanted to have his way with her and who it was strongly implied wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Getting to this point takes two episodes, but that’s because I’m leaving out the boring bus games and the homeopathic development of folks like the trashy mean girl, the crazy chuuni, the survivalist, and the gun-nut cat. I suppose we do pass a few words with a weird girl who goes by Lion and who seems like she might be relevant, but again we’re keeping thirty freeking people in the limelight, there’s not enough time to do much with them.
Following this, Masaki is quickly found, as is evidence of something with massive claws shedding some blood, which is taken to be a bear. Masaki relates that something distracted the rapper from his rapey intentions and then he just vanished. She fell down and had a panic attack. This situation causes the entire crowd of mentally unbalanced weirdos to start going insane, ready to declare this a game of Mafia. Or Werewolf, but somehow I don’t think citrus fruit is going to save you this time.
As they try to recover from this, the chuuni bullies the quiet kid, who lashes out violently and is revealed to have done so in the past. So much for starting over, as everyone gets quick to judge. He’s locked up, and one girl in particular seems particularly eager to execute him, and anyone against executing him. Suffice to say, these folks are going insane with economical speed. Finding the rapper floating dead in the river sure isn’t going to do any favors to that.
In all honesty, other than the cast being beyond bloated, the opening bits here aren’t strictly terrible. It’s believable that anyone who would have been on that bus isn’t right in the head, and thus would probably be pretty volatile once things start going badly. And while there’s a strong implication that something supernatural is going on, as well as an atmosphere that does get legitimately a little creepy at times, keeping us in the dark by blaming an animal is a decent way to have suspense ratchet in this scenario since we as the audience expect that to be wrong… but don’t have a better answer, drawing out the mystery.
But the lead is annoying and so is most of the rest of the cast, so let’s see who bites it next, shall we?
With this, the party hears the roar or scream of the something in the woods again. Deciding that a dangerous wild animal (even though the sound seemed different to each person) is too much, the greater portion decide to book it. They make it to the crashed bus, but can’t get it out of the ditch without a winch. They can’t go back either, because it would be dark before they arrived. So instead of overnighting in a bus that can make loud noises on command and that has a steel shell that should deter most natural animals, they decide to go on a perpetual hike through the dark and the rain.
As the storm intensifies, the chuuni falls to his apparent death. The rest of the crew find train tracks to lead them out of the village area, but come to a tunnel where those who go in see something absolutely terrifying, related as a giant Mitsumune.
Somehow, this lot make it back to the village to find that the quiet kid, Jack, has breached containment. Their ringleader gets to accusing everyone of everything, crazy girl shrieks about torturing and executing whoever displeased her most recently, Mitsumune and the slowly defrosting trashy mean girl make up a little, Lion claims Mitsumune is a ghost… it’s a pretty random breakdown of paranoia. Some of the radicals hatch a plan to interrogate Mitsumune (with the psycho wanting to go immediately for torture) but Masaki rescues him. On their way out she tries to strike up an important conversation, but they see a giant monster that rises over the hill… in the form of a ruined penguin plushie.
They try to make it look creepy and intimidating, but this thing is somewhere south of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. And I get what’s going on. As is confirmed after an episode running from various manifestations, the “monster” seems to take a form based on whatever the person looking at it fears, or perhaps more accurately has emotional or psychological hangups about. Trashy mean girl saw her old boyfriend (who looked rather like Mitsumune, as was established), Mitsumune sees a plushie indicative of his identity issues around his crazy mother, the catgirl gun nut sees a giant bee as some bullies tortured her with bees, crazy “execute everybody” girl sees a demon from the sake bottles an abusive priest in her backstory drank, et cetera.
Most of the folks who tried to torture or execute Mitsumune see their monsters, and as they escape his, Masaki leads Mitsumune to the tunnel. She passes right through, but the Penguin is very solid to Mitsumune, driving him back to the village.
After these several sightings, the jumpy loons decide something supernatural must be up, and hit on the idea of Masaki being a ghost since she does seem to have some connection to the village. They trick Mitsumune into getting out of the way and then pretty much make to murder her without doing anything to confirm whether or not she really is a ghost or if getting murderous would actually solve their problems. This is in part because people keep listening to the crazy girl who shrieks about executions, and in part because Hayato seems to be kind of yandere for Mitsumune and thus really wants to be done with Masaki. Mitsumune is alerted, and he gets in the way. To save him from the potential trouble of the mob, Masaki offers to tell all.
Her story, that she’s been to the village before and lost her cousin there due to him seeing monsters when she didn’t (and still doesn’t) only stalls the witch hunt briefly. What ends it is the bus driver coming in, complete with bus and crazy, to abduct her (and in the process Mitsumune and Hayato). The folklorist and the more reasonable of the two guys who could be called “the angry guy” (named Valkana, the other angry guy being the witch hunt ringleader) team up to find the bus first since they want actual answers, but in the process run into the weirdly not dead chuuni guy.
Going through the tunnel in the bus, we come to a different Nanaki. Masaki is afraid, driver vanishes after seeing his daughter, and Hayato forces an exploration. Eventually, Masaki peels off on an excuse, and Hayato reveals that he’s a terrible controlling person thanks to his terrible controlling parents. The group splits again, leading Mitsumune to encounter Valkana and the monster… now much smaller and less hostile in his eyes, since he’s faced up to his inner demons. Lion, MaiMai (the formerly trashy mean girl) and a detective-like lady end up running into that cousin of Masaki’s.
This entire mess of crossing paths leads to Mitsumune seemingly reaching the outside world, where he finds the mysteriously not dead rapper/rapist. What.
Apparently, they were both “saved” by an old man mainly referred to as God, who knows everything about this situation.
Most of the explanation retreads what we already knew about the monsters (themselves called Nanaki) being born of psychological scars, but there are two reveals. One comes from God, who explains that losing one’s Nanaki entirely is actually a bad thing since it’s part of a person’s soul, causing rapid aging among other bad effects. The other is that a B-plot among B-plots reveals that the folklorist girl seems actually sinister, controlling a couple of the screwups from the group. Most everyone else also seems to be afflicted by extreme lethargy, in an unnatural manner. This is attributed to Nanaki being outside a person, slowly reducing them to husk status.
In the last two episodes, we get a ton of new rules, and the events become extremely tangled, so I’ll just try to hit the high notes: the Reiji that people met is Masaki’s Nanaki. He wants Mitsumune to save Masaki, and sends the bus driver (who reached proper catharsis) to ferry Mitsumune in in order to do just that. It’s a good thing too, since he arrives right as Masaki falls into the clutches of the two who remain murderous psychos — the glasses guy who is always angry and never believe anyone who disagrees with his arbitrary assumptions and the girl who’s spent the whole show doing her best impression of a Dalek. Also, the folklorist wants to breed some super powerful Nanaki and uses Mitsumune’s rejection of Hayato to swell his to titanic proportions via breaking him down with a speech.
For some reason, everyone can see this as the same giant monster. Hayato also controls it, and uses it as a giant battle platform. Mitsumune talks him down, only for the folklorist to try to work him up again, which causes the monster to go out of control. The Folklorist’s motive was trying to find a way to save her dad, God, from his premature aging.
Hayato sacrifices himself to his Nanaki which evidently reunites him with it and returns him to reality. Mitsumune and Masaki talk it out, presumably become an item, and return as well. Back at camp, everyone hears the full truth from Reiji and a few decide to stay anyway while the rest go back the normal way after presumably accepting their scars and coming out happier people. The end.
Now, one thing to question about Mayoiga is its genre. I’ve seen people claim that Mayoiga is actually a comedy, or is meant as a parody of horror anime. There are times when this feels like it’s true, like when we first get introduced to some of the “monsters”, or how astoundingly jumpy and idiotic most of the cast seems to be. But I don’t think, on the whole, that the evidence bears this out. At the very least, if Mayoiga is supposed to be a parody, it falls into something like Poe’s Law.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to parody horror. Parody in media is a little easier than parody on the internet (as Poe’s Law pertains to), and it can be done to great effect. Young Frankenstein, for instance, is one of the funniest movies you’re likely to see and is of course a parody of the classic horror Frankenstein films. And, of course, I’ve already mentioned Ghostbusters in this review.
But Mayoiga reminds me more of the film Lady in the Water. Lady in the Water is usually billed as a horror film, but the plot is more an urban fantasy fairy tale. However, it is distinctly shot, edited, and scored like a horror movie, presumably because that’s what creator M. Night Shyamalan knows how to do. And it doesn’t work very well as a horror movie even as it appears to be trying its damnedest to earn that title.
Mayoiga is like that – it comes off as something attempting to be legitimately creepy. Sure, some of the monsters, like Mitsumune’s penguin plush, are pretty laughable when they first appear. But even that the show attempts to make creepy, giving it a bit of his mom’s visage sewn on in a terrible way, or grisly appendages when Mitsumune faces it in the tunnel. Most of the others also try to be both symbolic of these traumatizing things and legitimately creepy despite not consisting of things that would normally hurt or frighten people in a lot of cases.
If Mayoiga is seen as a horror piece, it falls very flat, providing few scares, a clueless mystery, and several extra helpings of the kind of stupidity we normally accept a little of in better works of horror. If viewed as a comedy, it falls flat because, well, it’s not very funny. The only real humor in Mayoiga comes from its seeming incompetence, rather than from any deliberate intent… and without Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo present, it doesn’t fly. Even if they were, it wouldn’t be an endorsement of the original material.
The third position would be to view Mayoiga simply as a drama. Its take on death (namely its lack thereof) and catharsis is much more in line with emotional character dramas than it is with traditional horror. But even that doesn’t work because the biggest thing that holds Mayoiga back, the fact that it tries to stuff thirty characters into twelve episodes of anime, bites it far worse from that perspective than from any other. If it was a competent horror piece, we’d probably cut down that cast pretty quickly while developing the characters who were going to actually be around. If it were really a parody, it would know to frame scenes to draw attention to the absurd excess of the single-noted nobodies in a way that would actually provoke laughter. And to actually do character drama, it would need to cut the characters that we don’t have time to get actual development on and focus on deeply exploring the ones that matter.
No matter how you look at it, Mayoiga doesn’t work. And that’s kind of a shame. The core ideas here are actually interesting: you send these characters to a mysterious place that they can’t properly leave, and force them to encounter and face off against twisted representations of their psychological trauma. If it was done well, that could be really dynamite. As evidence, I submit Silent Hill 2, which is… exactly that. But Silent Hill 2 has one main character and few side characters to work with in a reasonably lengthy play time, so we can really try to understand both what the character is going through and the symbolism around their torment as the game continues and the creepy town and its horrors are more explored. It even has monsters based on things that don’t look traditionally scary. The final boss is basically a sick woman in a bed frame… as a flying monster. Even the iconic Pyramid Head would probably look pretty dopey if he was undersold by poor animation and a lack of atmosphere.
In addition to the raw genre issues, there are more general show-writing issues. Mitsumune, Masaki, and oddly enough MaiMai are pretty alright, but most of the other characters who do a good deal of plot moving range from dull as dishwater to, like the girl who constantly shrieks about executions, horribly annoying. The art is bog standard at best, and while there are some creative ideas they aren’t really sold very well. And of course the back third of the show is just a tangled mess of constant change and rewriting rules, which actually wouldn’t be too bad (because the rules were fairly mysterious) but it has no sense of pacing and seems to just camp the fast forward button. Maybe if we had an odd count, something like sixteen episodes, the climax could have worked well… but not rushing there wouldn’t have saved the show.
I respect some of what Mayoiga is trying to do, but the final production is, in a word, lousy. I guess it could entertain someone in a sort of “So bad it’s good” way because there’s a lot to potentially make fun of, but in terms of unironic enjoyment? You won’t find it here. I’ll give the show a D, move on, and suggest you do the same.