I don’t tend to review a lot of anime made primarily for the younger bracket. Most of what I look at is at least targeted towards teens, if not Adults. So in some senses I have to really switch gears to look at something that’s clearly intended for more the grade school bracket, such as Ghost Stories here.
All the same, there are some basic fundamentals of storytelling, so I don’t feel I’m really at a loss to evaluate the topic. Especially not when the topic is what it is with Ghost Stories, hooking in to several, well, ghost stories (some of which even an invested westerner such as myself might be familiar with from other sources) to provide a horror-genre show for kids. Growing up in the West, I had things like “The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo”, and there’s a degree to which this is clearly cut from the same cloth.
However, it wouldn’t be entirely fair to judge a show for kids, again especially a horror show for kids, by the same standards used to grade works that are more mature and don’t have fetters placed on them by their audience alone. Because of that, I’ll be once again busting out the Pass-Fail scale for Ghost Stories, with the understanding that it should really be looked at for what it could bring to a younger audience, and that there might not be as much there for adults.
It is important to note, though: I watched this show, as I always try to, with subtitles rather than dubbed. The Ghost Stories dub is infamously unfaithful and according to some reports quite funny on its own, but I’m dealing here with the more conventional subtitled version.
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