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H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories

    This is a Roulette Review, an explanation of what that means can be found here. This recommendation comes from Brokeboi55.

    This was, if nothing else, a very interesting experience. Without being specifically pointed to it, I never would have expected to find an explicit adaptation of Lovecraft's work in the anime space, and especially not a claymation one from 2007. And, to Brokeboi's credit, I am something of a fan of cosmic horror, even if I find Lovecraft's works themselves to be pretty hit and miss.

    The show adapts three stories, The Picture in the House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Festival. I wasn't familiar with the original stories that any of these were based on. As previously mentioned, all of these are presented here in the form of claymation. Here, unfortunately, is where we start to hit the first snag. Creating quality claymation is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process; with the sculpting and stop-motion animation being famously labor-intensive. Here, they opted for an alternative. Most of the animation is achieved either through puppeteering the figures in real-time, or blended transitions through a handful of individual frames. These techniques tend to emphasize the reality of the miniature scale, undercutting much of the immersion. In addition, I find that a lot of the designs for the sets and characters fall short. I understand the intent to keep things stylized, to deliberately feel stilted and uncanny. But when coupled with the animation issues, I find it just hurts visual clarity and crosses from stylistic to ugly.

    When it comes to the narrative content, I suspect this suffers from many of the same issues I have with Lovecraft's writing. I actually quite enjoyed the first story, The Picture in the House. It stuck to a lot of the things this kind of horror thrives on. Maintaining an atmosphere and a sense of tension are both critical to keeping the viewer engaged in this kind of thing, and it manages both decently. It leaves much of the horror up to the viewer's imagination, following the old adage of "what the audience can imagine will always be scarier than anything you could write". It suffers from the same visual issues, but is overall pretty effective and tight, cementing its place as my favorite of the three.

    The Dunwich Horror, by contrast, seems to flaunt that same advice. The climax is centered around a long fight scene involving the titular horror, looking like a wad of black spaghetti thrashing clumsily. By contrast to the first, this also has a significant amount of narration, which does the best it can to guide the viewer through the narrative. But when the story is as compressed as this is, and half the characters are almost impossible to distinguish from each other, it ends up confused at best. 

    Last is The Festival. I'm going to be honest, I found this one mostly incomprehensible. It makes the decision to leave most of the presentation to be entirely nonverbal, with only a few sentences of narration at the very beginning to set the scene. Normally I would prefer that kind of intentional presentation, but when the visuals are as muddy as they are here, and the narrative being as vague as it is, it becomes nearly impossible to follow. 

    Overall, this seems like an interesting concept and ambitious project that couldn't live up to the goals it set. But, to be clear, there's no shame in that! Part of what makes works of art impressive is when they take risks! But when you take risks, you chance failure. In order for something to beat the odds, just as many must fall short, or else it wouldn't be against the odds. So, while I may not have enjoyed this project specifically, I would much rather more works take risks and fail, as opposed to becoming safe, cookie cutter blandness.

Score: 3/10

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