This is what an unfinished sentence feels like as animation. Twenty-six episodes were planned, two got made, and then the money vanished, so what you're watching is a sequel that never got to air, shelved for ten years and finally dumped onto a laserdisc box in a run of 2,000 units that evaporated. It moves slow and quiet instead of loud, which is exactly right for Bem, Bela and Belo, three monsters doing good deeds nobody thanks them for while waiting on a wish to become human that the show is never going to grant. Topcraft handled the animation after the original producers scattered, the same shop whose staff walked out the door and helped build Ghibli, and you can feel that craft in how carefully the shadows are laid down. Fans hunt this because it's slept on and because it's incomplete, and the incompleteness is the point. Two episodes, no ending, still can't shake it.

Youkai Ningen Bem: Part II is a two-episode horror OVA that started out as a planned sequel to Youkai Ningen Bem. In 1982 the follow-up was meant to become a 26-episode television series, and because the original producers had disbanded, Topcraft took over the animation. Only two episodes were finished before the project was cancelled, and they never aired. Ten years later they reached the public in a LaserDisc box set limited to 2,000 copies, and every one of them sold.