Main cast: Sugiyama Riho (Morinaka Kazuko), Kishio Daisuke (Shiraishi Shinya), and Nomizu Iori (Fujino Kagumi)
Director: Tagashira Shinobu

The story of The Hanging Balloons is an interesting variation of the usual “Monsters are swarming our homes, and we’re trapped inside!” premise popular in horror with an apocalyptic bent, but trust Itō Junji to do something quirky yet macabre in his story: instead of zombies or vampires or aliens, the monsters this time are actually giant balloons, each with a dangling noose.

Each balloon has its specific targeted victim: the person whose face is on the balloon. When the victim goes too near to it, the noose winds around the victim’s neck, and the dead victim now dangles from the noose as the balloon floats around with some odd kind of sentience, interacting with other balloons and such.

That’s the problem faced by our protagonist Kazuko as her family and friends are taken one by one by these balloon-things. Soon, she’s left alone in her home, trapped and starving.

Don’t expect her to do anything useful to help herself, though. In the grand tradition of sadly too many female characters in Asian literature, she’s completely helpless once the males in her vicinity are gone.

To be fair, the men here aren’t any better. Her father, for example, insists on risking his life to go to work even when there is mass panic over the balloons showing up everywhere and the TV has shown a few cases of these balloons capturing their victims in real time. There’s dedication, and then there’s this, Japanese suicide-by-work taken to self-parody levels.

Is the high-pitched volume of the wife’s and the daughter’s voices so bad that death is preferable? Perhaps it’s the suffocating, clingy dependency of the two useless creatures on the poor man that drives him to embrace death, who knows.

As usual, the animation feels and looks janky, and everyone sounds already dead inside even before the balloon shows up. Seriously, the balloons have more animated facial expressions that the humans in this episode, although perhaps that’s by design, who knows. Maybe the balloons are the living things here, and they are taking back the souls stored in those hollow vessels called humans to become whole or something?

There are no answers here, of course, and once the balloon shows up, there’s nothing much left to savor as the protagonist just cowers in her room and does absolutely nothing.

The dark humor in the original is lost in translation here, even in the Japanese version, which to me once again drives home the fact that this sort of animation doesn’t fit the tone and style of Itō Junji’s works.

So, once again, I’m repeating myself but it bears doing so: one may as well go read the source material to have fun. If you’re one of those people that think reading is boomer antics and you’re too cool for that, well, have fun watching mediocrity burn into your retinas!