It's good at being creepy horror, but it's also off-putting and a bit of a slog to get through. A lot of that is due to its unique visual style. "Yamishibai" is a play on "Kamishibai" (Paper Theatre), so every version of this series will have crude, minimalist visuals that look like cut-outs being moved around by hand.

YAMISHIBAI is an anthology anime of 3-minute episodes with some pretty amazing creators including Takashi Shimizu and Noboru Iguchi. They normally do feature films. I followed the series religiously for a while, but I've got a bit of a backlog these days because they've been doing a new series (sometimes two) every year since 2013 and they haven't stopped yet. That's 181 episodes last time I looked. I like the show, but it's extremely bitty and not designed for marathoning.

YAMISHIBAI (LIVE) is a live-action-ish series of 24-minute episodes... but reproducing the Yamishibai visual style. It's not just actors in front of a camera. No, it's weird animated composites of still photographs. It's got actors, yes, but I don't know if I could call that live-action. Most of its stories are just remakes of anime episodes, but there are some original bits and pieces in there too. These stories are pretty good, except perhaps for the "blink and you'll miss them" mini-stories that might only last about a minute.

The problem is that the show is unpleasant and sinister... which is the whole point of a horror series, yes, but also a bit of a problem given the longer running time. A 3-minute anime episode of Yamishibai is a laugh. You don't need endurance. 25 minutes, though, is less fun. It's perfectly doable, but you might not find yourself zooming through the episodes as fast as you'd expected. I have a theory that the bizarre visual style makes it harder to empathise with the stories. Live-action grabs you immediately. That's a real person in front of you. Theoretically, that's what we have here, but it's not. This is deliberately unconvincing photo-puppets of (perfectly good) actors. It's creating distance. It's a fascinating experiment and I'd never seen anything like it before, but I'm also not entirely sure that it works.

Theoretically, it's amazing. In practice, twelve episodes was enough and I'm not surprised it didn't get a second season. It's definitely creepy, even when you're not sure what the danger even is. Family Rules is memorable, for instance, in which everyone has to laugh, or "Ominie-san". Or perhaps the old guy in ep.7 who dislikes rude neighbours. Sometimes it's disgusting. Sometimes it's a bit bonkers, e.g. Bag Woman, which scares you with a woman with a paper shopping bag on her head. (That's actually quite a good story, about online neediness and overreactions to virtual bashing.) There's a segment in ep.5 that feels to me as if someone had a dream and transcribed it faithfully as an episode. And, occasionally, it can even be nice.

The theme music's fun too. This one's extremely odd.