Fujaku

Anime shorts tend to get very looked over for some reason, despite most of them can be found on YouTube and they're short, so why not watch them? Perhaps this is because for every awesome short, there is another really bad one. Fortunately Yowai Mushi falls in the later category. Yowai Mushi is a short music video by Tekken, who also did another great short, Furiko. Clocking in at only four minutes, it is about the trials one man faces and how he is bullied like a weak bug throughout the story and all of the terrible things that happen to him. The message to thewhole thing is, “yes you're weak, but it's okay being weak as other people are also weak” or something along the lines of that. Due to the fact it is more or less a music video and it has little story, the main things to cover are the music and the animation. I personally love the song playing in the background during this video. It's a very relaxing tune that's sad but yet happy at the same time, and it has a good singer to it. But the animation... Well now, it was drawn in a very simple style with no colors and like what someone would draw for a comic or something, which is fine and all, I'm all for unique animation styles, but the thing is it's very choppy and you can tell each drawing apart most of the time. That could've just been part of the style and if so fine, but it bothered me a bit. Now the story. The story is very well told, if a little confusing at times due to the fact it is tough to tell what's going on (like there's this one part where the main guy is on a train, falls, and lands on a woman who accuses him of being a sex offender. It's very tough to miss him landing on the woman, meaning that it seems like people are pinning him down so the police can take him for no reason). There's also a subplot with the man's daughter in there too that didn't really blend very well. But the parts were still very well told and the man's trials are easy to relate too. The characters do develop a bit in the short time too, which is nice. Yowai Mushi Final Rating Story: Well told, but details that are important can easily be missed- 7. Characters: Developed well enough in the short time period- 8. Sound- Awesome song- 9. Animation- Simple and unique, but yet choppy- 6. What's even the point of reading a review on something four minutes long? I just should've said “just watch this” in the first paragraph, as this definitely deserves a watch. And it's short, so even if you don't like it, does it really matter? All together,I give it a 8, and it is definitely recommended.

Nezumi-Chibi

I usually love these shorts, they're usually good and short enough that you can watch them even if you don't have much time to spare. "Yowai Mushi" was unfortunately not one of the usual good ones though, in fact it was an awful waste of 4 minutes. The story is of a man that is bullied in his childhood, he is later accused of being a 'chikan' by a woman on the train and is thus labeled a criminal, his daughter starts getting bullied in school for being the daughter of a criminal. Life is going pretty badly for him (his wife stands by himthough), he kicks a poor dog but the dog forgives him. He is found guilty in the end (thank goodness) when he goes to court over the 'chikan' criminal charge and is taken away. I would not recommend this to anyone.