English Dub Review: Junji Ito Collection “Painter / Blood-bubble Bushes”

She’s finally here.

Overview:

A beautiful woman brings murder with her. Elsewhere, a young couple stumbles across an abandoned village.

Our Take:

Tomie, one of the most famous of Junji Ito’s creations, is finally here. After being teased in the opening for so long, this was long overdue. She’s a girl of incomparable beauty, who draws people into her. Despite her rotten attitude, she has a mysterious allure to her that manages to make people rapidly and madly fall in love with her. She is a whirlwind, and brings people close but never close enough.

Tomie’s powers are strange. Her actual powers revolve around her inability to die and to create new bodies from her scattered pieces. Her beauty is maddening, but what happens to her comes more from the state of the people she entices. She is rude and standoffish, vain and self-centered, but none of that warrants murder. Those that fall in love with Tomie throw everything away of their own volition and become violent as soon as she turns them away. It’s her rejection of their efforts and their belief that they can own her that brings them to the point of murder. That sort of entitlement isn’t honestly unknown in real life, for outright rejection by women is known to turn men violent. While Tomie is clearly an exaggeration, there is some sort of eerie similarity.

The blood fruits are a different kind of body horror, mixing vampirism with the disease. It’s unclear how the fruits are spread, whether it’s through biting or through simple contact, but that disease sweeps up an entire village and later, its two new visitors.

The anime cuts out a lot of the chaos that happens afterward and instead decides to keep it to the couple fleeing. The return of the children and their feast on the villagers is cut entirely, and that dulls the impact. It makes it seem like the two of them politely left, as opposed to escaping in the middle of a storm of madness. Of course, the village is contained in its isolation, and by the mysterious man staying tending to the trees. But Kana and Anzai have escaped, and Kana ends up consuming the fruit. Whether she will attack Anzai or be free to roam, either way, the infection is bound to spread.

While the animation for Blood-bubble Bushes is pretty low quality, the Tomie segment is done fairly decently. It’s unfortunate they couldn’t be evenly done, but considering Tomie is one of the most famous Ito creations, this isn’t unwarranted.