What we have of Ninja Resurrection opens a door just wide enough to give us a tantalizing peek at something good-to-excellent — and then slams that door in our faces forever. The two episodes produced for this mini-series, clocking in at a total of eighty minutes, are all we’ll ever get: like many other direct-to-video animated productions made in the Nineties in Japan, it fell under the axe of the bubble economy, and the remaining episodes for the series were never assembled. If they had followed in the vein of the first two, we might have had one of the better projects of its kind.
Resurrection is actually one of many adaptations of the same source material: Futaro Yamada’s novel Makai Tenshô, first rendered as a raucous live-action movie in 1981 by Kinji (Battle Royale) Fukasaku and starring Sonny Chiba — then remade in 2003 in a more technically-impressive but somehow less enjoyable version. This version — or at least what we have of it — is an exercise in violent, stylish excess in the vein of Fukasaku’s movie; if anything, it’s even more uninhibited, since anime conventions let you thumb your nose at such beggarly concerns as gravity and historical continuity. The look-and-feel of the show is strongly reminiscent of Giant Robo, down to the character designs, and if they hadn’t been interrupted I suspect the finished product would have been about as impressive.
The bad guy: The resurrected Christian martyr Amakusa Shiro and his
armies of the undead. The good guy: the legendary ninja hero Yagyu Jubei.
The original story was a dark fantasy that extrapolated on the life of an actual historical figure — the teenaged Christian martyr Amakusa Shiro, killed in the Shimabara rebellion along with thousands of others who had rallied with him. After his death, he arose from the dead and sealed a deal with the forces of the underworld to allow him to take revenge on those who had wronged him, and he did so by creating an army out of other undead figures from Japanese history — legendary swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, for instance. The only one standing in his way: the equally legendary ninja leader Yagyu Jubei (who seems mostly to have been elevated to the status of a ninja by dint of hard details about his life being difficult to come by).
The first of the two episodes of Resurrection deals with the death of Shiro and his followers — something that was only touched on briefly in the two other incarnations of this story. It’s a far more lurid and disturbing fight, with black magic and sorcery thrown into the fray — and there’s also an element to the story that doesn’t appear in the other two adaptations, wherein Shiro’s zeal (and otherworldly wrath) is shown to be a useful tool by a man-behind-the-throne figure. Then, in the more sedate second episode, we follow Jubei back to his clan’s home village, where the supporting characters are brought on (including two very cute female ninjas that would have been reason alone to continue watching!). Jubei is definitely the center of gravity for the story, though: here, he even has the same gruff but ultimately fatherly affection for his people that I got from Chiba’s performance in the live-action versions.
Despite some great fight-candy and a cute supporting cast, it's hard to
recommend something that consists of no more than two abortive episodes.
And then, after a bit of pyrotechnic build-up to the next installment, the series ends. It’s an incredibly depressing letdown after all the buildup we’ve been given, and in my case I felt it doubly hard because I had some vague idea of where the story was meant to go. But no follow-up has ever been produced, and now a full decade or more after the fact, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever get one in this particular form. If there ever is another animated Makai Tenshô — and I would dearly love for such a thing to be realized — at this point it’s going to have to be done entirely from scratch. What we have here, sadly, is nothing more than notes towards such a thing.
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