Main cast: Shimono Hiro (Oshikiri), Hikasa Yōko (Amano Chiemi), Senbongi Sayaka (Amano Eri), and Mutoh Tadashi (Hiratsuka)
Director: Tagashira Shinobu
Intruder is not an easy story to adapt into animation, because there are some things in the source material that don’t translate well into the other medium.
In this one, a loner, Oshikiri, is avoided by other students in his high school because they are certain that his quiet and withdrawn demeanor is a sign that he’s not quite all there upstairs.
One day, he befriends three students that are interested in paranormal elements. When he tells them that he always hears footsteps in the upstairs of his home, but there is always nobody there when he checks, these kids all decide that they would head over to his place and investigate the matter themselves.
What can go wrong, after all? Ghosts, monsters… nothing four school kids can’t handle, really!
What they find is something that could have been scary, perhaps, but the script and the mediocre art as well as animation all make this more like a discount bin episode of some paranormal cartoon for kids.
Also, the script could have been tighter. Some things that are made clear in the source material come off as ass-pull developments here. The final scene, for example, is far more likely to confuse folks unfamiliar with the source material.
The Long Hair in the Attic is far more of a traditional ghost story, this time with the ubiquitous pale, wane, skinny Japanese young lady with long, long black hair.
Hair is very scary in Asian horror, for some reason, and I’m not just talking about the tedium of shampooing and brushing such long hair.
Chiemi has been dumped by her boyfriend. He says that she is far too quick to agree to whatever he says or wants her to do, and now he is bored with such a submissive doormat of a girlfriend.
Our poor lass proceeds to spend her time being all despondent and lachrymose, until eventually, she decides that, since he ex asked her to grow her hair long, she’d cut it to move on and become a strong, independent woman, that kind of thing.
Her upcoming debut as one of those permanently angry young women screeching about their misadventures in dating on TikTok, however, isn’t off on a great start when her hair disagrees with her plan to cut it.
Now, this one could have been terrifying, especially the final few minutes of this segment, but yikes. The supposedly scary scenes end up being unintentionally hilarious. Just check out the facial expression on the corpse in the attic, that one has me laughing out loud for a minute or two because it’s so, so… adorable.
So yes, once again, the execution fails the story.
I am starting to get confused by this show. Sure, the animation and art style are more suited to a kiddie cartoon but that would still work had the people behind this show used it to contrast the style to the adult nature of the stories in order to amplify the sense of wrongness in these stories.
Instead, I’m now starting to feel that the people behind this show really do intend the show to be something for kids. How would that work, given the adult nature of some of these stories? Just look at the second segment alone; it’d more likely to give kids nightmares than joy.
Something tells me that the show is as confused about its existence as I am.
