#chōchin

[briefbestiary]

Like kasa-obake, these paper lantern tsukumogami are relatively harmless object yokai.

[love1kimono]

Geisha and Attendant 1908

A Meiji period woodblock print calendar for the Month of June 1908 showing a geiko (geisha) dressed in the Genroku style, a fashion craze which was at the height of its popularity between 1905 and 1908. She is followed by an attendant who is carrying what appears to be a biwa (short-necked lute) wrapped in a furoshiki (wrapping cloth) and a teppō-chōchin (cylindrical lantern) in one hand. While they each hold a bangasa (sturdy paper umbrella) to protect them from the rain and both wear taka-ashida geta (wet weather sandals). The geiko elegantly lifts the hem of her kosode (small-sleeved kimono) to protect the expensive silk brocade.

[anxietypossumart]

Freehand friday returns

[netmors]

YOKAI Summoning Book

Stages of final work from the Smirnov School course "CG Basic".

[aniflowersartblog]

-See the pictures below the "read more" line! ^^ -

A work colouge gifted me a tiny book with blank pages last year, becouse she didn't have any use for it, and I mentioned that I found it cute. (It has sunflowers on the cover!)

I took it as an oportunity to doodle some Yokai, using only fine liner ^^

1st: Kasa Obake, 6.11.2023

2nd: Yatagarasu, 8.11.2023

I wanted to practice drawing ravens/crows, but also keep the Yokai theme. That beeing said, this has to be the most borring looking yokai out there! It's just a crow with three feet! They couldn't gibe it something cool, like a third eye, or four wings?!

3rd: Chōchin Obake, 9.11.2023

Drew this during my work places early celebration of "Sankt Martin", a lantern parade/"festival" based on a roman soldier that shared his cloak with a homeless dude, and which official is on the 11th of November. So, I drew this to keep with the lantern theme.

[doomboy911]

Theme Yokai (Chōchin-obake)

Prompt List

Creature Codex Art Challenge

Commentary

Well I already made my favorite wall yokai so I might as well double back and make my second favorite Tsukumogami I love the idea of something gaining sentience after getting enough time and I really wish there was a yokai for stuffed animals lovingly passed down from one child to the next. I like the idea so much I'm working on a feat for constructs that allow them to become awakened after living long enough. Just a neat idea. For this piece I kept it simple and used only 4 colors and while I initially used a bright white I had in the eye I settled instead for the dark reddish brown for the body.

I encourage everyone hear to search Creature Codex Year of Yokai masterpost because its full of great beasties.

Palette picked

[oriondagger]

sketched a few things on my phone before dinner

[lauritanaomystery]

August was japanese spirits time! Mystery and his new power, and yes with his tsukumogami crakle in chōchin form, bleeehehehhe!!!

Mystery in the new transformation, yep more mature? ha ha!!! Funny expressions too and with his tsukumogami "Crackle" in his kiseru form (As is known, in the world of anime pipes and kitsunes are elements that combine by obligation!) Mystery can transform his slave spirit into anything but the most typical is chōchin🏮

Shiromori here is reborn 2.0 or Shiro-little-mori��

[canmom]

Animation Night 193 - Harpier cries: 'tis time! 'tis time!

PREVIOUSLY, in the dark halls of ANIMATION NIGHT, you have born witness to such horrors as these...

Animation Night 25: HORROR, featuring Kakurenbo, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, and many episodes of Yamishibai

Animation Night 77: Once More, Halloween, featuring Blood: The Last Vampire, Seoul Station, The Wolf House, and Shoujo Tsubaki - and more Yamishibai...

Animation Night 129: Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed..., featuring Hellsing Ultimate, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, Mad God, Ujicha's Violence Voyager, and guess what? Yamishibai...

Animation Night 176: The Hedge-Pigge Whin'd, a rather scuffed production which, contra the writeup, ended up just showing the Darkstalkers OVA from 1997. And some Yamishibai of course.

And now, my friends, and now... the witching hour is soon to be upon us once more, and it is time we revelled in the darkness and terror, for tonight is hallow'een, easily the best festival in the western calendar.

Many thanks go to @glitch-critter and @muzothecat, who provided me some excellent suggestions for animated horror that I have yet to see. Not that reruns would be the end of the world, there's some excellent shit on the list above I would be immensely glad to see again.

To begin with, we have the recently-released The Birth of Kitarō: The Mystery of GeGeGe (幾多郎誕生：ゲゲゲの謎). Which provides an excellent excuse to get into the subject of Kitarou. So let's begin our dark and sordid tale... well, it's actually a pretty positive tale, but that's not really in the spirit of things.

GeGeGe no Kitarō is a truly classic manga series dating back to the 60s, created by Shigeru Mizuki. But it's actually older still: the earliest incarnation of Kitarō is in a kamishibai performance written/illus. by Masami Itō and Keiyō Tatsumi back in 1933, called Hakaba Kitarō (Kitarō of the Graveyard). It tells the story of a ghost boy called Kitarō who lives in a graveyard; like many kamishibai it was aiming at straight up horror. Here's a board from the original (photo by translator Zack Davisson, thanks wikipedia):

So, you know yōkai? You're reading this blog, so probably, but just in case, they are the various freaky spirits of Japanese folklore, from kappa and tengu to nekomata and chōchin-oiwa. And the reason why they are such a popular feature of modern popular culture (you all know what a kappa is, right?) is in large part due to this manga.

Shigeru Mizuki, born 1922, had a pretty wild life. He was drafted into the army in 1943 at age 21, and lost his left arm in a bombing the next year; during his recovery he made friends among the Tolai people of New Guinea. He came home after the war, and found work renting out an apartment building and drawing kamishibai on the side; gradually the kamishibai work took over. In 1953, his brother Sōhei moved in after being tried for war crimes (the timeline does not mention the outcome of the trial); in 1957 at age 35 he moved to drawing manga, debuting in rental manga with Rocketman.

Starting in 1960 at the behest of Mizuki's publisher, the Hakaba Kitarō manga adapted the story of the yamishibai, introducing a wider audience to ghost boy Kitarō with his floofy hair and little third eye on a stalk. It proved explosively popular (despite being at first deemed too scary for children), telling the stories of Kitarō's encounters with all kinds of yōkai. The state of English translations is a bit scattershot; some of it is available on mangadex.

In 1964, at age 42, Mizuki debuted in serialised manga in Garo magazine - a name you might find familiar, the avant-garde magazine which also published authors like Suehiro Maruo (ero-guro mangaka, the author of Shoujo Tsubaki) and Hiroshi Masamura (the guy who made the cat manga we looked into on AN188). There, he rebooted the Kitarō manga, starting once again with the story of the birth of Kitarō. Before long he jumped over to the much larger Monthly Shonen Magazine, and retooled Kitarō to be more kid-oriented. From then on it's Kitarō city - and the immense success of the manga gave him the chance to regularly return to the newly combined state of Papua New Guinea.

In 1968, Kitarō arrived in animation land, one of Toei's early projects. It quickly became one of those classic famous Toei anime, you know the type, the kind of thing that every Japanese person of a certain age would have seen on TV. Mizuki himself composed the OP, and it continued to get sequels throughout the ensuing fifty years, with the most recent being in 2018. This is an old and widely beloved anime so there is a lot of it: the 1968 series accumulated 65 episodes, the third series in 1985-88 is the longest at 115, but the others are no slouch either; even the 2018 series pulled out a mighty 97.

As such, it's... perhaps a little daunting! But...

The Birth of Kitarō is a prequel to the 2018 series... and rather than being a spooky-fun kids anime, it's intended as a genuine horror story aimed at adults, presumably adults who grew up watching Kitarō, returning to the earliest Garo-era tone of the manga. Set in the 50s, the story sees salaryman Mizuki arrive in a village in pursuit of a mysterious medicine, where he finds the village ruled by an old superstitious family. Naturally, before long, murders start happening. And a mysterious white-haired man is somehow involved...

Seems like the perfect way to get into Kitarō. I missed the chance to see this film at Annecy this year, but it's already out on nyaa, so let's jump on it.

So that's our first act. What of our second?

Junk Head is a stop-motion scifi film pretty much enitrely solo animated by Takehide Hori who, at age 40, heard about Makoto Shinkai's solo-animated film Voices of a Distant Star (AN44), and was inspired to spend the next seven years working on a stop-motion scifi epic of his own. It tells of a cyborg from a future where humans have lost the ability to reproduce, venturing into a strange underground realm full of freaky creatures that, I'm told, invite comparisons to the art of Giger, Bosch, Escher and Gorey, and the films of Švankmajer (whose Alice we watched on AN50), Gilliam, and the Quay Brothers. del Toro lauded it as a 'work of deranged brilliance'.

Which is to say this is exactly the kind of thing we like to show here on Animation Night. I can't believe I didn't hear of this film before. Sources are not exactly abundant, but I was able to find a hardsubbed 720p version with a few seeds on it, so that's what we'll be watching tonight.

Speaking of the Brothers Quay, who enjoy a remarkably in-depth and thorough wiki page, they have yet to appear on Animation Night, and it's about time we remedied that! A pair of identical twins from the Pennsylvania who moved to the UK in 1969 to study at the RCA, they got their start in illustration before making a turn to stop motion film using bits of dolls and various other materials in the vein of Švankmajer.

They are incredibly prolific as a pair, making shorts in nearly every year from 1979 to 2021 (bar a couple of hiatuses). Most of their films are without dialogue, set instead to the music of Leszek Jankowski and a great many other other composers. They are huge book nerds too, adapting authors from Lem and Kafka to Emma Hauck; honestly there's a ton to dive into here and I will for sure be returning to these guys on a future Animation Night. Tonight, however, our pick will be Street of Crocodiles (2021), a musical piece in which a puppet walks through a desolate realm of "mechanical realities and manufactured pleasures", widely celebrated as one of their best films.

Stop motion seems to be a theme tonight, huh? Somehow, stop motion is just spookier than traditional animation. That theme continues with The House, an anthology piece for Netflix depicting three different stories taking place in the same house. Animated in London, each piece brings in a different director, respectively Emme de Swaef and Marc James Roels co-directing the first, Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr the second and Mexican-British actress turned director Paloma Baeza for the third.

The stories span a few hundred years, from the 1800s to a flooded post climate change future. In each case, the house is the stage for tales of obsession and misguided ambition leading to disaster, whether it should befall anthro rats, humans or anthro cats. Widely praised for its animation and general weirdness, I'm quite excited to see what this mix has in store.

And returning of course will be Yamishibai, the wonderful long-running series of ridiculous cutout-animated creepypasta horror in the vein of old-school kamishibai boards. You know we gotta. And hey, if we're feeling in a really good mood at the end of the evening, I might bring Shoujo Tsubaki out of the vaults too. We shall see.

Animation Night 193 shall begin, with its gruesome course of animated horrors, at seventh hour.... which is to say 7pm UK time, just over four hours from the writing of this post. Be there, or be forever haunted by the ghosts of frames unseen (unless you gotta go trick or treat or something, we understand). The place? Upon the heath... of twitch.tv/canmom!

Hoooohhooohohoohooohooohohoooooooooo!

[konjaku]

蛍袋[Hotarubukuro] Campanula punctata var. punctata

蛍[Hotaru] : Firefly

袋[-bukuro|Fukuro] : Bag

It grows on the sunny edges of mountains and fields. The grass is about 40 to 70 centimeters tall, white or reddish-purple flowers about 5 centimeters long bloom in early summer, when fireflies begin to fly. It is said to be so named because children put fireflies in the flowers and played with them.

It also has an alias of 狐の提灯[Kitsune no chōchin], the lantern of the fox. https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/collections/search/edanmdm:fsg_S2003.8.3361/

It also has another alias of 釣鐘草[Tsuriganesō], the temple bell grass. This is mainly used as a general term for plants with temple bell-shaped flowers, including the genus Campanula today. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_2005-0630-0-30

[itsnotmourn]

Wait the thieves were dressed as yokai??

That- actually makes sense for TT now that I'm thinking about it, but for the longest time I thought they were dressed as an umbrella and a propane tank 💀

HAHA YES !!! and honestly, you're not completely wrong because one of them IS an umbrella!!

[ from sr pelo's newsground ]

I believe Thin Thief is a kasa-obake (umbrella ghost) and Fat Thief is a chōchin-obake (paper lantern ghost)!

[ from the unofficial spooky month wiki ]

Here, I think Pump's Mother is also a kasa-obake, but accompanied by a yukata worn the funeral way: right over left. Susie seems to be a generic oni (ogre) with a kanabō-inspired weapon, and Pump is a kappa (river child).

...and then there's Pump's Father, who doesn't seem to be dressed as anything for that Halloween. He must be a busy guy! :3c

[revelry-in-severity]

Alright, I figured it out

I don't know a thing about the upcoming event, but I'm assuming they all stay a night on whatever trip they're going on. Well, let's make the place haunted and the sekai kids all wake up in a labyrinth after they fall asleep, separated from each other. This place could even be a sekai with how some of the vocaloid songs turn out. They've had some of their character development, but let's bring back some of their older problems and make them face it. Of course, they also have to deal with the spirits chasing them around as they try to figure out what happened. I want this to be a full on Kikuo psychological horror rather than a thriller

They can eventually figure out they're not alone when they shout through the walls, but there's no way to just go straight through them, so they have to actually find their way around

Airi- Pretty simple considering she's the 2*, I've always kind of seen Airi as the guide of the group even when she was uncertain of herself, especially around Minori, except will-o-wisps are meant to lead people away from from destinations which causes her problems when they keep popping up because it seems they know the only path to go through, and she doesn't know where she is in this swamp anymore

Mafuyu- i think she would start off fairly calm considering the circumstances. She likes the quiet and almost considers not leaving immediately. Until the shadows start showing up, asking for help. Only, they sound pretty similar to some of her classmates and she becomes practically hopeless when the hand of her mother follows her between dimensions. Which leads her to believe that she'll never escape no matter how much she walks away

Shizuku- From what I looked up, the spirit next to her might be a Zashiki Warashi? Houses they guard will prosper and if the household manages to drive one away then the house will fall to ruin. Families would take take of their reception rooms so the spirit wouldn't be driven away, but Shizuku isn't exactly in a house right now which partially keeps driving the spirit away from her and bringing bad luck. The spirt would look like a normal little girl in this world and I think she would fall back on her perfect image in order to keep what she thinks is a lost girl safe, especially if the spirit does stay close afterwards

There's a discussion with Tsukasa waiting here

Tsukasa- This is the perfect devil/angel over your shoulder situation which would drive him crazy. He automatically wants to side with the prim and proper kitsune, but sometimes his instincts drive him over to the tanuki, and he's having a really hard time finding a balance. Only, they start talking about all his friends and how they would think when he leaves them behind to get out of here. Again. I know it's an umbrella spirit that represents abandoned items, but what if the sekai plushies start showing up too, wondering why he abandoned them. They're both a recent reminder and items from the past. He tries to reassure them that he didn't do so, only to be thrown off when the kitsune and fox ask who he's talking too

Who's he acting for if there's no one else around here, other than himself, to notice?

Rui-  As I don't think Rui has killed a whole bunch of people, I'm going with the anger option of the Gashadokuro. What if Rui has this built up anger, that he doesn't even realize? Anger over being feared and isolated for simply being himself. Maybe he's even angry about considering the disband of WxS. Only he never wanted or meant to be angry because the lantern spirits, the Chōchin obake, are meant for entertaining children— which is exactly what he wants to continue to do with everyone else. There's a few too many to be comfortable as he tries to run away from the Gashadokuro though

Read that the Gashadokuro could be repelled with specific charms, and what if a certain kitsune disappears from Tsukasa's side sometimes to appear next to Rui. These times just so happen to coincide with the quietness from the bones backing away, and the times where Tsukasa can get hurt or something. Really drive in how much he puts others before himself, or Rui could see him as a lucky charm that continues to save him. Could be both

@emuwu, @2-kakimiko-1 Is this enough of a jrpg/au start? :)

[swarmoftumbleweeds]

Another one of my trainer OCs! And the last one, for now. This time from Pokémon Legends: Arceus. If I was doing a character breakdown like I did for my other trainers, here's how I would do it:

Name: Python

Region: Hisui

Favourite Type: Ghost

Starter: Hisuian Typhlosion

And then his team breakdown would be:

Yūrei (♀️ Hisuian Zoroark, Docile, Wingball)

Chōchin (♂️ Hisuian Typhlosion, Serious, Pokéball)

Naginata (♂️ Hisuian Lilligant, Hasty, Featherball)

Kunoichi (♀️ Sneasler, Quirky, Leadenball)

Jinrō (♀️ Ursaluna, Quiet, Heavyball)

Kendama (⚡ Hisuian Electrode, Brave, Greatball)

As for his story, I know canonically the trainer in Legends: Arceus is a time-traveler from modern day Sinnoh, but I like thinking of my trainer as being from Hisui from the get-go.

I also headcanon Python as being the ancient ancestor of Delphi (my Shining Pearl trainer). I just feel like there's room for a really cool story where Delphi discovered her great-great-several-more-times-great grandfather's old journals, meets his ghost, learns about the plotline of Legends: Arceus. Who knows, maybe she even inherits his Zoroark.

[yokaizuna-sumo]

Here's a preview of a helper yōkai that will be implemented in the game with the power-up rework. Keep an eye out for the Chōchin Obake if you want a buff!

「 Demo / Twitter / Discord 」

[stuckinthewrongworld]

Thank you @the-east-art for updating Nikkomon's In-Training level for me! I'll have to update my poster now. Meet Chouchimon. Named after chōchin lanterns.

[saffronmidnightparade]

There goes Valerie's takoyaki! "What the- a giant pokemon?!" Internally, she is cursing her acrylics. She can't use her capture styler with them. Too late to be mad at that, she has to act!

And her faithful rotom is ready to fight! "Styler, let's go! Shadow ball!"

[1]

Styler leaps out of their pokeball ready to fight.... And then also gets distracted by the flying food and myriad things they could possibly zip into.

In fact that paper lantern on the strings looking REAL Cozy, they're gonna go jump in that and play around- Look, Valerie! They're a Chōchin obake!

[3/10]