Ninja Scroll Review

Kawajiri's samurai film became the template for a decade of Western anime fandom, and it still holds up as action. Jubei Kibagami, a mercenary swordsman, is poisoned by the government spy Dakuan and blackmailed into hunting the Eight Devils of Kimon, a ninja team with supernatural powers working to bring down the Tokugawa shogunate. Each Devil is one grotesque power made flesh, and each fight is staged as a problem Jubei has to solve with a blade and his head.

It is also very violent and, in its treatment of Kagero, the poisoned kunoichi whose touch kills, often ugly in ways the film never examines. The story is a straight line and the characters are types. What earns the B is the craft: the swordplay reads at speed, the Devils' powers are animated with real invention, and the film won the Citizen's Award at the 1993 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival. The Wachowskis cited it as an influence on The Matrix, and Kawajiri went on to contribute to The Animatrix. In the 1990s it sat beside Akira and Ghost in the Shell as the anime people outside Japan actually watched.