English Dub Review: Junji Ito Collection “Greased / Bridge”

They sure did that.

Overview:

A young girl fears there’s too much oil in her house. Elsewhere, a village haunts the last remaining survivor.

Our Take:

I’ll be honest, Greased was the only Junji Ito short story that I didn’t want to get animated, but here we are. Most of Ito’s works focus on body horror or monsters, but this time, the body horror is quite literal. A young girl’s family runs a grill and is abused by her younger brother. Her younger brother has taken to drinking oil, and that combined with the oily air in the house causes him to break out. To torment his sister, he decides to squeeze out all his pimples on her face. It’s definitely horrifying. I didn’t want to reread the chapter when I first went through all of Ito’s stories, and I absolutely didn’t want to see it in anime form. In that sense, I’ll say it’s a success in managing to gross out its audience but it’s still very extreme.

Bridge is also a strange story. It’s unclear whether the first sequence was really a dream or a premonition that Kana had about her grandmother. This one focuses on generational horror and the unspoken boundaries between generations. The village tradition dictates that corpses be floated down the river, and those who sink will have their souls linger for all eternity. There are numerous ghosts lingering, but Kana is still skeptical. Regardless, her grandmother begs her for one thing: to not let her corpse go down the river.

Despite the warning, Kana still fails at her duty. Even though her grandmother warns her that she doesn’t want to float down the river, Kana remains idle on the riverbank. Perhaps she was unable to stop it, but she doesn’t even try. as a result, her grandmother joins the rest of the village, and her long-lost husband, in death. It’s an unchangeable tragedy.

The animation is still not great, but the Grease segment really… really should not have been animated.