Inuyasha the Movie 3: Swords of an Honorable Ruler Review

The prologue is the best thing the writer Katsuyuki Sumisawa and the director Toshiya Shinohara put into any of the four films. Inuyasha's father, already mortally wounded, cuts through an army of samurai to reach his human wife Izayoi as she gives birth, revives her with Tenseiga after Takemaru of Setsuna, the samurai who loves her, has stabbed her, and stays in the burning mansion to fight him. Rumiko Takahashi designed the father's human form for the film, and Akio Ōtsuka voices him with the right weariness. Rebecca Bundy of ANN valued the film for exactly this, material the series never shows.

The story proper turns that family history into the plot. So'unga surfaces at Kagome's shrine, seizes Inuyasha's arm and later resurrects Takemaru with an army of the dead, and the only way to stop it is for Inuyasha and Sesshomaru to combine their attacks. Much of the running time is the brothers refusing to, and Sunrise makes the refusal spectacular: fluid sword fights, an undead army and a gate to the netherworld.

The weakness is Sesshomaru himself, cold and nearly inexpressive, so the team-up the film builds toward lands as sentiment rather than drama; Carl Kimlinger of ANN wrote that the uplift curdles into cheese. It is still the one film of the four that gives the series something it needed. Namie Amuro's theme song, Four Seasons, plays over the credits.