Animating Halloween: Yami Shibai 2 Episodes 11 and 12 Review

Episode 11 – Picking Up

Plot: A college student finds a draft of someone’s novel on the train home. He becomes entranced with reading it, but soon becomes weirded out when he somehow ends up on a bench at the train station later that day without realizing it. As he’s about to throw the novel away, he notices an ad for a novel writing contest with a prize of three million yen. Unable to resist, he sends in the novel and surprisingly wins. However, getting credit for the work of another has a way of biting you in the end.

Breakdown: I hate plagiarism. I hate art theft. That’s why stories like these aren’t quite as scary. It’s hard to feel scared when deep down you’re happy that something bad is happening to someone.

Not to say that plagiarists and art thieves deserve being killed, going crazy, being sent to hell, etc. but this is fiction, so I can fictionally laugh at them when this does happen in fiction, fictionally.

This is basically a cautionary tale against such a thing, and admittedly the visuals aren’t that interesting. Just a lot of skeletons. However, if you have ever done anything similar, this might be something to creep down your neck.

Episode 12 – Netsuke

Plot: A college student named Kaoru is helping out her grandma at her store for a while since her grandpa recently passed away. She’s taking some toys and things that her grandpa would’ve wanted her to have. As she’s gathering things, she stumbles upon a box and asks what it is. Her grandma explains that they’re netsuke that her grandpa always forbade her from touching them. They’re two tiny carvings of faces. Kaoru asks if she can take them as earrings and her grandma agrees. As she happily wears her new earrings, Kaoru starts to believe she’s being followed. Do the netsuke truly not belong to her?

Breakdown: This one actually had me going in the middle because they do a fantastic job with that chase scene and making the pursuers seem pretty creepy. I knew a jump scare was coming, but it still got me anyway, and I continued to feel tense throughout the scene.

Not much to say about this one except I feel like the grandma is either an idiot or a complete bitch, based on the ending. I won’t spoil why I think that, but geez.

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Animating Halloween: Yami Shibai 2 Episodes 9 and 10 Review

Episode 9 – Ominie-San

Plot: A teacher moves from the city to start a job in a school in the country. While she’s enjoying her new job so far and the students seem to adore her, she is grossed out by the fact that everyone seems to be obsessed with weird looking purple meat called Ominie-san. She can’t bring herself to eat it, but once you’ve had one taste, you’ll be hooked for life.

Breakdown: This one is just kind of weird. That’s it. Everyone in this town loves to eat Ominie-san but the teacher doesn’t find it appealing at all so she avoids it at every turn without even trying a bite. I don’t feel like it’d be a big deal to spoil this one since I find it horribly anti-climactic so here goes…..she eventually is tricked into eating some and also becomes hooked.

Now you may be thinking, “Twix, you must only be giving us a part of the story. Ominie-san must be human flesh or something frightening to eat. Maybe it makes the people who eat it become something horrible like serial killers, zombies or politicians! Maybe it makes you into a demon! Maybe it KILLS YOU!” Maybe it does nothing…..because it does nothing.

Outside of being super yummy and giving you slightly bad table manners (and sounding gross when you bite into it), there are no real side effects to eating Ominie-san. People just really like to eat it. Kids get excited when it’s on the menu for lunch, people order it like any other food at a restaurant…..it’s delicious.

They seem a little addicted to it, but the people act very normal otherwise.

All that would be left to be somewhat creepy or frightening in this situation would be where the meat came from, right? Well, they never tell us or really give us any hints. People were suspecting that it’s probably demon meat, but even that’s not really scary unless the meat actually does stuff to you, and it doesn’t. Maybe the demon’s still alive considering they’re still calling it Ominie-san….Okay….so? Meat is meat. I’m pretty sure most meat-eaters wouldn’t care if what they were eating was still alive somewhere as long as it wasn’t a poor innocent animal perpetually suffering, and I can’t imagine that’s the case if they have an endless supply of this meat (though it is possible.) There are even some foods that are served whole as living creatures that people eat without killing beforehand or cooking. Not saying I’d do either of those things, but it’s not uncommon. And I can’t even say either of those is the case here, because, again, they never explain.

Remember that episode of Futurama where they revealed that the popular and addictive soda, Slurm, was goop that came out of a giant alien slug’s ass? That prompted much more of a physical response than this episode did.

They could replace this meat with any other really good food and it would work essentially the same way. The only scene that even seemed a little scary was the furnace scene. The teacher can’t bring herself to try the meat at lunch so she puts it in a bag and tries to throw it into the furnace. However, the meat moves right before she throws it into the fire. It’s a cheap jump scare, and if you feel scared even for an instant, remember that you’re being frightened by a lunch item and that fear will go away soon enough.

Unless you were traumatized by cafeteria lunch meat as a child, this episode is just barely a little weird.

Episode 10 – Bugged

Plot: A man writes diligently in his journal every night, though for the most part he just constantly complains about everything around him. In the midst of the summer heat, he gets more and more aggravated with everything, especially the damn bugs that keep getting louder and louder….

Breakdown: Why bugs? Why? Just eughghghghsjdasjhdjk First puppets now bugs. I hate bugs. I just do. I will look at them from afar, but keep the hell away from me.

That being said, this one is a pretty good story. It’s basically a descent into madness story with bugs being the main point of threat. Thing is, it’s not made clear if this guy is legitimately getting increasingly mad or if he’s being influenced by the bugs. One might say that the bugs are feeding off of his constant hatred and negativity, but they may also be contributing to his feelings.

There are a few shots here that are just nope-worthy, but overall not horribly scary. Just squicky and a bit freaky.

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