Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Yamishibai Japanese Ghost Stories: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 8, 2016

There was a funny passing comment on Comedy Central’s @Midnight recently, a show which is obviously directed largely at Gen Y-ers and Millennials, that with the recently announced closing (or more accurately, renovation) of Tower of Terror at Disney World that parents will no longer have to explain to confused children what The Twilight Zone was. Parents who don’t mind freaking out their kids a little may want to consider simply showing them one of the brief (typically around five minutes) episodes on the intriguing Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories, for even without the dulcet tones of Rod Serling offering literary takes on the supernatural, there’s the same spooky ambience and at least hints of the sorts of twists that used to populate that old classic series.

The briefness of the episodes is in fact probably the single biggest obstacle that Yamishibai has to overcome, since development is at a minimum and therefore the horrors tend to be somewhat anemic at times. What helps the series immensely is its really fascinating visual presentation, one that is based on the art of Kamishibai, a kind of “paper puppet” theater. The weird two dimensional quasi-rotoscoped appearance of the episodes is almost inherently creepy and helps to add to the overall ambience of a series that is strong on mood if sometimes pretty short on narrative thrust.

Yamishibai Japanese Ghost Stories: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. As mentioned above, this series' really distinctive aesthetic is one of its chief allures. While the interlaced presentation doesn't offer typical bugaboos like combing artifacts (especially since nothing ever moves very much due to the "paper puppet" artifice), there are some recurrent issues with noise and compression anomalies, typically showing up as almost chroma-like flecks of blue. The series tends to exploit tones in the beige to brown spectrum, and so nothing ever really "pops" in any meaningful way, save for some spectacular if brief moments like an injured man's vision of three ghosts on a hospital roof which is nicely suffused in a hellish red hue. The series has been intentionally "distressed" to give it a weathered, battered quality, something that probably tends to detract from overall detail levels.

Yamishibai Japanese Ghost Stories: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories features a workmanlike DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track in the original Japanese (with forced English subtitles in easy to read yellow). The series tends not to exploit typical horror gambits like loud low frequency effects, instead building its spookiness out of the weird visuals and sudden appearances of spectral beings. Dialogue and narration are both offered cleanly and clearly with no problems whatsoever.

Yamishibai Japanese Ghost Stories: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements of any kind on this release other than trailers for other Sentai products (which I never include as part of the official supplements score).

Yamishibai Japanese Ghost Stories: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories offers a really interesting visual aesthetic, but it fails to generate lasting creepiness, mostly due to the fact that the stories are simply too short and undeveloped. Still, this is a rather interesting release, and anime fans looking for something a little unusual may want to check it out. Recommended.