It's a live-action adaptation of the horror anthology Yamishibai... and it's brilliantly, bizarrely faithful to the original. They're reproducing its "cut-out paper theatre" non-animation style, which means shooting the live-action actors in still poses and then cutting between them, moving them on screen in a static fashion and doing other weird tricks. I love it. I also found it creepier than the anime, because:

(a) it's not hard to make live-action scarier than cartoons,

(b) the episodes are longer, so you're a lot further away from the safety of the end credits,

(c) it's pretty good.

I find the anti-realism interesting. The spooky stuff works. If you've ever seen the anime, this is worth checking out.

After struggling through Yamichibai Live, this is almost relaxing. Four weirdly animated minutes vs. 25 ever weirder live-action ones. They're both creepy and oppressive, but at this length I can handle that.

This one has four teenagers testing their courage in a haunted house. Bad move. One of them tries to back out, but her friend pulls her in anyway. (I'd have been upset if she'd died and he'd survived.) We're talking about the kind of horror movie teenager who assume that when their friends start disappearing in the dark, they must have hidden in order to jump out and surprise them.

So doomed. But you knew that.

I thought I knew where this was going, but then it went even more mental than I'd been expecting.

Teranishi's on a business trip to a small country town with a custom they call the "Rat's Wedding". No one here can get married until someone's died. They believe the deceased are reincarnated as the newlyweds' children... and look! There's a Rat's Wedding right now! The undertakers are standing by!

The challenge with Yamishibai has always been building up to a satisfying ending in four minutes. This episode has two. It had the one in my head, then the one it actually did.

I like this series and I've been watching it since it began, but this episode's a pretty good one. For what it's worth, Season 9 is themed around the Chinese Zodiac (e.g. this one's the Year of the Rat). Should be fun.

It's standard vanilla hentai fare. Perfectly inoffensive. Nothing horrible, creepy or non-consensual. Two episodes, four stories. Each has an enthusiastic girl who glomps on to a boy she likes and manages to get her wish.

1. A short, unpopular guy in glasses unwittingly attracts the attention of the loudest, hottest girl in school.

2. A shy bookworm turns out to be a total pervert... but she's also romantic and only does it with the story's hero because he loves her.

3. Meina is the main character's childhood friend and she's been targeting him for years. She'd tell him that her breasts had got bigger, that she wanted to be his wife and she was willing to shag him. Until now, he'd always told her that she's too young and that first she's got to complete her studies and graduate. Now, though, she's graduated.

4. A tall boy and a short girl have been dating for a year. She takes him to a hotel. They tried and failed to do it a week ago, so she wants to get it right this time.

I like Inuyasha. I even like the next-generation cast of this sequel. The lively red girl (Moroha) is fun and the other two are fine.

The actual episode, though, didn't have a reason for anything, beyond the ducklings-following-mummy one of "Inuyasha did it, so we're doing it too". The story uses two time zones. This was dramatic in Inuyasha, but here means "let me show off my phone". Inuyasha's story had tragedy and a separated-by-death love triangle. The nearest this episode gets to caring about anything is Moroha moaning that she can't collect the heads of the demons she hunts because they disintegrate or something. Uh-huh. There's a story with a beautiful girl and a jealous demon that's not bad, but I still ended up fast-forwarding it.

Apparently, all this is by design. Yashahime is deliberately fluffier and more throwaway than Inuyasha, which was tragic underneath and can be extremely powerful, especially in the manga. Rumiko Takahashi wanted this sequel to be aimed at young girls. Which is fine, but the results aren't for me.

Intriguingly, it's loosely based on real history. (Very loosely.) There really was an African warrior called Yasuke who served under Oda Nobunaga and was present at his forced suicide in 1582.

He was not, though, involved with gun-toting giant robots, magic, necromancers, zombie samurai, etc. The episode begins with a huge battle that has all of those things and made me assume that the show would be a load of shit. (I don't mind the absurd alternate-reality history, but this show does reek a bit of Netflix's assumptions about what I want to watch.)

Fortunately, the episode improves. Twenty years later, Yasuke is a big, quiet bloke who lives in the mountains and catches fish. He doesn't fight anyone. The local villagers like him. A small boy who wants to be a samurai keeps attacking him with a wooden sword in an attempt to get Yasuke to train him. This boy knocks over people's drinks in the process and can sod right off, although admittedly he's nice to that beggar and of course the world's full of small boys who'd think like that. "I want to fight in battles like the great samurai warriors before me."

Naaah, not interested. It's not really even a Japanese show, having been written in the USA and only animated in Japan. Yasuke himself is pretty cool ("a true warrior above all prays for peace"), but the show looks guaranteed to degenerate into samurai and sword fights.

I don't watch this show for the comedy, because it's not actually that funny. I watch it for study purposes. It's teaching me dialect words from Nagoya (where I lived), as well as other cultural oddities that I find interesting. This week, we have rivalry between Mie and Gifu. (Nagoya's more important than both of them, but which comes second? This gets discussed energetically.)

It's only three minutes. I learn. I like that.

It ended with "TO BE CONTINUED", but this first episode's main character doesn't return in the other two episodes. (I checked.) It's an anthology micro-series about a dream king who helps children face their problems by taking them in their sleep to the Night World. We always meet the dream king himself (an abstract talking bird/eagle entity called Yoru), but each episode guest-stars a different child.

This episode's child is Tsumugi, a girl who didn't cry when her dog died. "If I cry, Choco will really be gone."

I quite liked it. Tears have a magical effect and Yoru says reassuring things to make Tsumugi come to terms with the situation. I'd have watched the other two episodes had they also starred Tsumugi.

It's the kind of throwaway with silly art that makes you wonder whether or not it was meant to be funny. It's set during a Kemonomichi Electronics company meeting in the boardroom. Katsuko Yoshida teaches her colleagues about Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations-backed goals for member nations to attain a sustainable future. I won't watch the rest.

A boy praises you for your efforts and rubs your head, saying "yoshi yoshi". This would almost seem paternal if he weren't so young and pretty. The other videos on the official YouTube Channel all appear to star male "yoshi-yoshi"-ers too.

That said, though, he does seem nice and I could imagine some people finding this a way to feel better for 49 seconds.

It's actually quite amusing, at least until the mandatory Featured Duel in the second half (when I'd recommend you stop watching).

Our child heroes are going to a trumpet competition, for which they've put themselves through Training From Hell. Luke shows off his new trumpet-playing skills by playing a trombone. Repeatedly. Even though a trumpet isn't a trombone. No one seems to notice this.

To their shock... well, to Luke's... this isn't a trumpet competition! "'Trumpet Duel' is just a false name to fool the public!" It's a DARK RUSH DUEL TOURNAMENT!! (These are like ordinary duels, except that you can draw five cards a turn.) The boy who organised this tournament regularly has uncontrollable dancing spasms because he's so addicted to Dark Rush Duels that he has to either draw cards or boogie. This made me laugh.

We also hear his not-very-tragic backstory.

If you regard its first half as a separate ten-minute episode, that bit's actually quite fun. (If you try to watch the trading card battle, it'll send you into a coma.)

I've watched all of Yuki Yuna since it started in 2014. This is apparently a midquel for the Hero Chapter series that aired in 2017-18, but never mind that.

Most of the episode is the girls goofing off, which is a lot of fun. They do a rock band, karaoke, a survival war game and a camping trip. They're good at letting their hair down, i.e. some of them are loons. I laughed. We see no angst, tragedy or irreversible gruesome curses at all. Later in the episode, though, there's a more serious conversation or two. They're glad they've been relieved of duty and they feel bad about some of the things they did.

This doesn't last. By the end, they're back in uniform.

Surprisingly, the closing title sequence shows the girls nude (and in soft focus), even though this isn't that kind of show. They're also back in action, with weapons in hand. I'm definitely going to be trying to work out a complete rewatch order for the full Yuki Yuna saga, but for now let's start by watching this.

I've mostly stopped watching this kind of throwaway gag mini-show. It's the kind of thing that would normally be a Blu-ray extra, but broadcast on TV. I like the parent show, though, so I tried it and...

...naaaah.

The girls are in a Hero Club at school. They talk about Hero Udon Noodles. No one's fighting to save the world, but instead they just have silly conversations and comedy shouting overreactions. Frankly, I'm not convinced that I'd find this funny even if I watched it after a marathon of all three or four seasons of Yuki Yuna is a Hero.

Five pretty boys dispense advice to anyone who writes them letters. (One or two of the boys could be mistaken for girls, but I think that's specialised audience appeal.) It's empty fluff and there's no reason to watch it, but I found myself being distracted by the fact that they've been drawn in chibi style, only two heads high.

This got me doing some mathematics.

Imagine a bobble-headed man who's 6 feet tall, with his neck exactly halfway up his body. Everything above that is one big, roughly spherical head. He's a walking lollipop. That head will have a volume of about 14 cubic feet. His body, in contrast, is on average perhaps a quarter of his head's width, i.e. 0.75 feet wide with a volume of about 1.3 cubic feet.

This man's head is over ten times the weight of his body. This is normal in chibi art style.