Junji Ito's hall-of-mirrors imagination has long been a touchstone for horror fans. Ito's most recent work from Studio Deen, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre (2023), is directed by Shinobu Tagashira (Steamboy, Hunter x Hunter). Now available on Netflix, this adaptation brings many of Ito's most unsettling manga images to animation.
Of the dozen tales in this anthology, Hanging Balloon is a surreal, unnervingly poetic nightmare that sticks like static long after the credits roll.
[Spoiler Alerts] The premise is classic Ito: teen idol Terumi Fujino takes her own life, sparking media frenzy and collective mourning. Soon, Tokyo's skyline fills with grotesquely oversized balloons, each sporting the face of a living person and a dangling noose designed for only one neck — its human twin. The rules are horrifyingly simple: the balloons stalk their counterparts until one of them succeeds. Once caught, victims are left suspended in midair, their doppelgänger balloons eerily bobbing against the gray sky. No running, no hiding, no fighting back — inevitability is the true monster here.
Shinobu Tagashira, who also helmed Junji Ito Collection (2018), approaches the material with a steady hand. The visual palette mirrors Ito's stark, unsettling pen work, with every balloon face rendered in chilling, frozen detail. Studio Deen's animation leans minimalist, with moments of stiff motion that paradoxically add to the dread; the world feels wrong, sluggish, as if suffocating under its airborne predators. Backgrounds of smog-draped cityscapes evoke familiarity; daily life trudging below as the hunted glance skyward, waiting for their fatal twin to appear.
Voice casting hits the mark. Kazuko is originally voiced by Rie Takahashi (KonoSuba). In the English version, Courtney Lin (Crash: The Animated Series) takes over. Her performance anchors the story, running the gamut from disbelief to quiet resignation. Lucien Dodge (Delicious in Dungeon) voices a grieving Shinya Shirashi.
Together, they capture the existential terror of realizing your own likeness wants you dead. The supporting cast enhances the unease, with subtle vocal tics that make the characters' descent into panic believable.
The soundscape is as vital as the visuals. Every creak of taut rope and faint whisper of balloon fabric brushing against high-rises lands with quiet menace. The near-silence of the pursuit is what unsettles most; death drifts toward you with all the ceremony of a passing breeze.
"Hanging Balloon" avoids the more obvious tricks of horror anime. No jump scares, no gratuitous splatter. Instead, the episode tightens a noose of inevitability around the viewer. It's a horror of the inescapable, as your executioner bears your face.
The story works as both a visceral nightmare and a thematic Rorschach test: fame as executioner, guilt made literal, or the crushing weight of a society obsessed with public image. Ito offers no answers, which is precisely the point.
Some purists might call the animation's still frames and stilted character movement limitations, but here they serve the tone, amplifying the dreamlike quality of the material. The rough edges are deliberate, aligning with Ito's aesthetic of unease rather than smoothing it into something safe.
"Hanging Balloon" emerges as the anthology's calling card, a faithful yet cinematic translation of Ito's singular horror sensibility. It delivers a quiet, inevitable dread that's unnervingly beautiful, distilling the master's surreal terror into a must-watch and unforgettable half-hour.