Once again, I’m fighting the urge to collapse into complete blathering fandom. Basilisk is as grand and glorious an anime as anyone could ask for, violent and beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. I love most any show that taps into Japan’s feudal past (read: ninja and samurai), and they generally have a good track record: Hakkenden, Requiem from the Darkness, Shura no Toki, Otogi-Zoshi. Basilisk sits comfortably among the very best of the bunch.

The show also works a roots lesson in popular Japanese culture, sort of. The source material is Masaki Segawa’s manga of the same name, but that in turn is an adaptation of Futaro Yamada’s 1959 novel The Kouga Ninja Scrolls. Yamada pretty much created the mythology of the ninja in fiction as we know it right now, paving the way for everything from Buichi Terasawa’s Kabuto to (what else?) Naruto itself. They could have just slavishly followed the plot of the book, which would have worked decently well since the original novel’s two tons of fun all by itself. But the creators of the anime used the original material as a springboard to add backstory and characterization, and turned what could have been a merely fun show into an outstanding one.