Serdar | Genji Press

The more I watched Azumi, the less I wanted from it. Yes, this is the sort of movie where excess and overkill are the name of the game, but if they had pared it down, they might have found a better movie inside this one.  At more than one point I wanted to play amateur editor with the fast-forward button on my DVD player, so I can only imagine how interminable it must have been in theaters.  “Interminable” isn’t an adjective you want to use about a movie which is non-stop girlie ninja action.

Azumi is an adaptation of a long-running manga (25 volumes) about a young female ninja or kunoichi (teen idol Aya Ueto), operating in secret during the first years of Japan’s unification. Her skill with her weapons is unparalleled, but being a ruthless assassin doesn’t come as naturally as she’d like to believe, and before long her heart and her mission will collide. This setup provides us with many opportunities to have Azumi and her fellow ninja strut their stuff: beheadings, throat-slittings, and leaping across tree- and roof-tops in various wire-fu formations.

There’s two ways to look at Shogun’s Samurai: it’s either a clever reinvention of history for the sake of drama, or a shameless excursion into total fantasy. The fact that most Western audiences won’t know the way history’s being so drastically mixed around (shilling for mutilated) is a boon, not a hindrance: they’ll see it through relatively unclouded eyes.

I knew enough about the history behind the events in Shogun’s Samurai to be amused by the changes, but I’m not close enough to them to be outraged. Perhaps that makes me the ideal audience for it: I liked it fine for what it was — stylish but also intelligent pulp fantasy — without grousing about what it should have been.

Samurai is based on a popular novel that drew on the intrigues behind the throne around the time of the third Tokugawa Shogun (the mid-1600s). Japan was finally unified, and the Shogun, the military ruler of the country, had to be someone willing to do anything to keep the peace. Iemitsu (Hiroki Matsukata), the underdog for the throne, is nobody’s idea of a ruler: he stammers and has an ugly wine-colored birthmark covering most of his face (shades of I, Claudius). Small wonder he’s out of favor with even his own father. The royal fencing instructor, Yagyū Tajima (Kinnosuke Nakamura, a samurai-movie regular), decides to take matters into his own hands: he has Iemitsu’s father poisoned, then moves to have the misfit installed on the throne.

Witch Hunter Robin is the kind of show I always feel the most ambivalent about: one which has the seeds of greatness in it, but seems arbitrarily hidebound by its style and approach. For a good deal of its running time, Robin is so low-key and so flat-affect that it’s a miracle anything happens at all. Then in the last few episodes, the tension that’s been humming beneath the surface of the show rears up all at once, and I found myself unexpectedly moved and involved. I just wish it had come sooner. This is not a bad show, but it is a frustrating one, and many people are likely to get turned off real fast if they don’t know how it works ahead of time.

Here we have a show with a great premise, a great-looking gallery of characters, and a great animation style — but which is dialed down so far that most audiences are going to breeze right past it. Once I accepted the fact that the show wasn’t going to try and punch things up artificially, it worked well, albeit on its own quiet terms. For whatever reason, the creators chose this approach, and while it would be easy for me to lambast them for doing so, I’m betting it would be more worth my while to try and interpret what they did and why.