If you're looking for a comedic, bad art style collection of things not to do in any horror situations then congratulations, you've got a 10/10 anime right here, go ahead.
If you're looking for an anime creation of some of Junji Itou's sickest works then you'd probably have better luck creating it yourself.
Now, a lot of fellow Junji Itou fans warned me off watching this. Being a relatively new fan, I took their warnings into consideration but I still chose to watch this with a friend as something for us to do in the evenings. Part of me really wishes I'd listened to other fans of Itou, but part of me is also now glad - at least I know now that when I read the mangas I have yet to read, I'm going to enjoy them ten times more.
Although the storylines in this are spectacular and follow Itou's work perfectly, the art style in this let it down. The only word I can use to describe it is just. Lazy. Terrible pan shots, notable repeated uses of the same frames, and just some generically bad drawing where some characters didn't even have their full noses drawn on. Each episode seemed to drag on longer and longer and the only reason I continued watching this was to avoid dropping an anime and having my first red mark on my MyAnimeList statistics. It was simply shocking. Although the sound work and seiyuu's brought this to life, the artwork fully ruined it. As many other's have said - this is somewhat of an insult to the beautifully constructed art frames that Itou spends so much time and energy to create.
Maybe they were rushed and that's why it just seemed limp and pale, but there was no excuse for this to be rushed. They should have tried to hire Itou on board as the art creator and director, frankly. This was just an abomination and I wish Splatter would work on sections of the brain so I could forget I ever forced myself to sit through this.
I think truly the thing that most disappointed me in this was just that I ended up laughing through a lot of the scenes. I ended up sitting and laughing through scenes that were meant to be sad or disturbing because the artwork was so bad and - if I'm honest - that actually hurt a little bit. I shouldn't be laughing through the work of one of my favourite authors for his disturbing and intriguing work. It's just not right.
Miss this, if you're an Itou fan, truly miss it. Learn from my mistake and run for the hills like every other Itou fan in this review section is warning you to do.
