Posts tagged samurai in January 2006

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Shinobi: Heart Under Blade

If Trinity Blood was an example of an anime where they took a great idea and wasted it, Shinobi is the live-action version of the same sort of mistake. It is a period ninja-fantasy adventure with a game cast, based...

Otogi-Zoshi

Otogi-Zoshi is a great and bold experiment that works—a story that spans hundreds of years of history, that freely ties together drama, mythology and fantasy into a unified whole, and above all is grand fun to watch. It’s the complete...

The Hidden Blade

The Hidden Blade is not about a secret sword technique that saves a hero in the face of terrible evil. If anything, it is exactly the opposite: it gives us a samurai, Munezo (Masatoshi Nagase) who has never drawn a...

The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan (Yasushi Inoue)

I can think of two things that most immediately piqued my interest in Japan: their movies and their popular fiction. My first “Akira” was Kurosawa, not the Akira of Neo-Tokyo, so when I finally did come to anime and manga—the...

Goyokin

Goyokin is the best samurai film I’ve seen yet that was made more or less exclusively for Japan and not intended for a foreign audience. I’ve written before how the DVD format and a general broadening of awareness about samurai...

Harakiri (Seppuku)

The first shot of Harakiri is not of a human face but an empty suit of ancestral armor—a perfect visual metaphor for the emptiness and inhumanity of the codes of honor upheld by feudal Japan’s ruling classes. The camera moves...

See previous posts tagged samurai from January 2005

See future posts tagged samurai from January 2007