Bonus: The Shiboyugi anime’s beautiful, stylized direction doesn’t elevate hollow material
This anime is shallow pulp, utterly confident that it’s an art film. By the time this season ends— by copying the “congratulations” scene from Evangelion, infuriatingly satisfied with itself— I was yelling at the screen. “This isn’t profound!”
I watched the hour-long first episode of Shiboyugi: Playing Death Games To Put Food On The Table on a whim, and a few minutes in I paused the episode and wondered, “Wow, does the whole show look like this?” I expected Shiboyugi’s drastically different style to give way to more conventional animation after the first few minutes, but that never happens.
This horror-without-horror anime, about (exclusively) girls competing in sadistic Squid Game-via-Saw death games for the entertainment of unseen audiences who bet on the proceedings like a horse race, holds the same emotional distance from its lurid subject matter as does its icy heroine, Yuki.
Shiboyugi’s “camera” makes you aware of it from the first moments, as in addition to the unusual animation style, the screen size and aspect ratio are constantly shifting. The anime likes to play with point of view: the stories of Yuki’s games are told out of chronological order, with each ordeal recalled in a series of numbered segments, as though presenting a series of disjointed, hazily-recalled memories. (I did have to check if this series was by studio Shaft given how hard it jacked their style; it’s actually by Deen.)
We are shown most of the physical action from a measured distance, performed by low-detailed but very fluid (rotoscoped?) silhouettes. The show consciously pulls its camera out, or turns it away, from the messy fates of the doomed girls. Even the blood that gushes from their wounds transforms instantly into white, snowy fluff. There is no bathing in bloodshed here, only slow, creeping dread and the aftermath: cleanup crews in hazmat suits dragging bagged bodies out of venues covered in that feathery fluff.
