Review of Ghost Stories

This review is based on the English dub, which is infamous for adding a lot of child-inappropriate humor to the kid's series. It does increase the enjoyment, but it doesn't transform this into a masterpiece. The story is fully episodic, with a new ghost each episode. Each episode mostly follows the same pattern of: random background characters encounter ghost and scream; scene cuts away and presumably something bad happened to them; the main characters either seek out the ghost, or the ghost endangers one of the characters, and the rest come to their aid; the heroes look up how to deal with the ghost in mom'sdiary, which conveniently has solutions for most of the ghosts. Occasionally, cat steps in to help. Ghost is sealed away just as soon as one or more characters are about to be doomed. The nature of each ghost is different and adds some variety to the story.

The main criticism I have is that the solutions for most episodes mostly comes down to the same thing, reciting some words from the book. The anime Mononoke had a way more interesting solution.

The five kids all share the protagonist role, with characters switching off the role of damsel in distress in each episode.

The anime does include some fan-service, despite the story being written for children. I guess this is just Japan being Japan.

The art and sound are not bad considering the age, but they are definitely very dated and not as smooth as anything modern. There is a lot of running sequences where it cycles through 2 or 3 frames, but that's kind of par for a TV program. The OT and ET are catchy despite not sounding that good.