English Dub Review: Junji Ito Collection “Shiver / Marionette Mansion”

Not for the faint of heart.

Overview:

A boy sees that his neighbor is afflicted with a disease opening holes up all over her body. Elsewhere, a young man is contacted by his brother, who reminds him of the puppets his family used to perform within his youth.

Our Take:

The first segment is a Junji Ito classic: Shiver. Definitely not one for anyone with trypophobia, or anyone unnerved by holes. Yuuji’s neighbor Rina has been afflicted with holes since she was born, but as a young adult, she is constantly fearful of bugs creeping inside her. Still, she remains friendly to Yuuji, often wordlessly conversing with him when they see each other through their windows. She’s often pointing at something in the family garden, but it’s not initially clear whether this is part of her delusions or a more meaningful message. While Rina is nice to Yuuji, seeing her disease drags up unfortunate memories from his childhood, where he spotted his grandfather’s corpse— similarly ridden with holes. Upon discovering his grandfather’s diary, Yuuji realizes that the holes are actually part of a curse, carried by a piece of jade.

The anime leaves out a portion of the manga, namely the origin of the jade, and how it was taken from a remote tropical village by a team of explorers that Yuuji’s grandfather was part of. While Yuuji’s grandfather didn’t originally take the jade, it ended up in his possession, and the curse followed him in the form of holes— and a doctor. Having a doctor as an agent of the curse was interesting since doctors are supposed to cure disease, not perpetuate it. They carry a degree of trust to them, so to have a doctor be one of the carriers of the curse is pretty unnerving.

Shiver’s adaptation was fairly well done, but there was something missing with Marionette Mansion. In the original manga, the puppets were all quite creepy and unnerving. Yukihiko’s family deciding to relinquish their power and will is far more disconcerting, but somehow the anime’s execution falls flat. The part where Haruhiko finds the puppeteers in the ceiling are equally soulless was also cut, implying that Jean-Pierre’s power extends much further. Instead of the slow creep of fear that the manga has, this segment just felt campy— which is a shame. Dolls fall into the uncanny valley, and this could have been a much stronger sequence, but DEEN just didn’t do a good job.