English Dub Review: Horror Collector “The Red Notebook”
Overview (Spoilers Below):
Rumors spread about a mysterious figure in a hood as people start noticing surreal and terrifying apparitions.
Our Take:
Do you remember the “Goosebumps” movie with Jack Black, where the books’ monsters leap from the pages into the real world? That’s what immediately comes to mind when I read the plot synopsis for Norio Tsuruta and Midori Sato’s horror novel series. But instead of the monsters from R.L. Stine’s book series, Japanese urban legends invade the real world. Spoiler alert: they’re more terrifying than Stine’s monstrous creations. Fortunately for us, one special person is brave enough to send these legends packing.
The first episode introduced viewers to Fushigi Chino, a boy wearing a red hood with a vast interest in Japanese urban legends. Armed with his mystical notebook, he travels across the region to investigate supernatural phenomena and capture them. He’s also allied with his partner, Jimmy, a photographer turned into a dog with a human face, which emphasizes the concept’s freaky nature. In the English dub, Jimmy is voiced by Larry Brantley, who has voiced several other characters in other anime. But what caught my attention is that he also voiced Wishbone in the PBS children’s television series I grew up watching. Now that’s another core memory I unintentionally unlocked during my research.
“The Red Notebook” introduced us to a structure in which Fushigi saves people from the monstrous legends attacking them, later revealing that he’s searching for the person responsible: his twin sister, Himitsu. In this case, he saves a young girl named Hiromi from the Crimson Woman in the first half, while in the second half he captures the Wriggler, but not without a casualty. Rather than focusing on these encounters from the protagonist’s perspective, the episode shifts to the victims’ perspectives, emphasizing Fushigi as an urban legend. It’s respectable in how it reflects the mystery surrounding Fushigi, and the animation suits its horror aspects. However, it doesn’t quite evoke the terror it’s meant to convey, mainly because the English dub struggled to match the scenarios’ horror through the cast’s performances. Hopefully, the later episodes would be able to up the ante on its urban legends amid the protagonist’s collect-a-thon.
