Ninja Scroll (1993)

[karageko]

So I reached the halfway point of New Aim for the Ace (the 1978-1979 TV series remake) and I thought "Hmm, I should take a movie off my eternally long backlog". So in keeping with the theme of high school shoujo flowers and butterflies, I ended up watching Ninja Scroll yesterday.



Prior to watching, these were the things I knew:
1) Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri
2) One of the titles almost always brought up when the late 80s to mid 90s perception of anime being hyperviolent gore and sex is mentioned

Being that it was directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, I had my expectations pretty much entirely fulfilled. Both the cool (hyperviolent gore) and the uhh not cool (sexual violence) aspects. After watching this I actually took a look to see what other Kawaijiri directed titles I saw before watching Ninja Scroll. It goes like this, with the year I first watched them:
Goku: Midnight Eye - 2012, Goku II: Midnight Eye - 2012, Cyber City Oedo 808 - 2013, Wicked City - 2013, Demon City Shinjuku - 2014.

I actually expected the not cool content in Ninja Scroll to be worse than it was. If you pay attention to the list above, you'll be able to figure out why. Yeeeeeeeaaaahhh... I knew exactly what I was getting into so I have no one to blame other than myself.

Back to the cool. Holy crap that was some of the best 90+ minutes of extreme animated violence I've seen in a while. I forgot just how much blood can gush out of human bodies . I finished watching Fist of the North Star (TV) in high school so it had been quite a while since I saw blood to that degree, and this time the blood wasn't white!

Alright to stop myself from saying probably what everyone else has already been saying for the last two decades about this, what I'd really be interested is to hear what your personal stories are about this film. In particular, how you first found out about it, its effect on the anime fandom circles you were a part of, or any other kind of story you had about it in the older fandom days. I searched through this forum to find prior discussion about this and there were only a few hints as to the fandom impact so it's something that I'd love to be enlightened more about. If this was something you hated when it was the big deal thing I'd also like to know about that as well.

[llj]

I first watched this when I was still in high school, with a bunch of friends. I admired it on a technical level, but I preferred the sci-fi anime at the time. Believe it or not, in those days, I preferred the Armitage III movie which we watched with Ninja Scroll as a double bill.

Nowadays, I fully recognize that Ninja Scroll is the superior film (I still do like Armitage III though, both the OVAs and the movie!) and on another level, it represents a period of garishly over-the top anime that probably doesn't exist anymore. The thing is, Ninja Scroll is in its own way a fairly artful film as well, with scenes of great visual poetry and design. It hits that sweet spot of "Is it art or is it trash? Or both?" in a way that nobody attempts anymore.

I believe Kawajiri is one of the great anime directors, or at least anime stylists. If he's not exactly an anime director equivalent of an Orson Welles or Akira Kurosawa, he's still at least a De Palma or Carpenter. Because he tended to do movies with trashy, violent, sexually crass and garish content, he tends to be underrated a bit by fans today. But he had a great understanding of mood, atmosphere and design.

Kawajiri also contributed to that brief movement in anime where they pushed the visual designs more towards "hyper-realism". Which of course is a myth as all his films are actually extremely stylized visually, but that belief that they are more "realistic" refers moreso to the extreme attention to detail and anatomically classical human proportions, and more uses of rotoscoping in some cases (although I don't believe Kawajiri's films really relied as much on rotoscoping except for the odd scene here and there, many other anime examples of the "hyper-realist" anime movement did, such as Megazone 23 part 2)

I think Kawajiri was always more influenced by live action films than most other anime directors (I'm pretty sure you could have a field day with how often he references John Carpenter and Dario Argento), and he tried to bridge a certain kind of aesthetic between anime and live action by adopting live action-style camera angles, lighting, editing and that infamous film snob term-- "mise en scene". All while still maintaining the traditional "floaty" physics and "anything goes" nature of the anime world.

[llj]

An additional thought: I think most people found out about this because it was one of the more widely distributed anime films out there. Manga Entertainment had a strong presence in rental stores, and chances are most Blockbusters had at least ONE copy of it.

I think Ninja Scroll symbolized, at the time, an alternative for testosterone-addled teenaged boys who still liked cartoons but were rebelling against the Disney cartoon aesthetic which in the 90s were experiencing their most successful decade since the golden years of when Walt was still kicking around. That formula--happy endings, songs, "safe" stories for everyone--was something that always invited a certain sub-cultural backlash. So Ninja Scroll took everything that was anti-Disney (Blood! Sex! Unhappy Endings! "Confusing" un-straightforward storytelling!" and became THAT anime you'd show to someone who wanted the opposite of Disney, something that, to a typical 90s teenaged boy was....transgressive.

[karageko]

It hits that sweet spot of "Is it art or is it trash? Or both?" in a way that nobody attempts anymore.

This actually describes very well what I was thinking of during the first half of the movie; I couldn't actually figure out if I was enjoying it ironically or not but being the big AWO fan I am I didn't bother trying that hard to make the distinction and just enjoyed the spectacle.

[davemerrill]

If there were three anime titles that college students knew about in the 90s, those titles were Akira, Ninja Scroll, and Legend Of The Overfiend, in terms of films you could throw into a dorm's community room TV and draw a crowd with.

In terms of Kawajiri, I think I like Wicked City/Beast City the most out of all his works; it's perfectly 80s in its color choices and character designs, and it strikes the perfect balance between cool, creepy and sexy that a good exploitation film needs to hit.

[Char Aznable]

As much as I love Kawajiri's Cyber City Oedo, I have to admit, Ninja Scroll is my favorite work of his. The hyperviolent, sexy, off-the-wall insanity/exploitation of Ninja Scroll has always made it one of my favorite '90s era anime films. It's also one I never get tired of watching. His work on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was phenomenal too. I know Oshii is often hailed as one of the top anime directors of the '90s, but I'll take Kawajiri's "worst" over Oshii's "best" any day of the week.

[llj]

I like both Oshii and Kawajiri, but they are very different filmmakers with different aims. It's like Andrei Tarkovsky vs Dario Argento. You can like Argento better, but Tarkovsky is a great filmmaker in his own right--it's just that he's got a different goal than just straight entertainment.

Love him or hate him, Oshii is one of the most aggressively individualistic anime filmmakers around. You watch his movies and you know he knows how to bring the "boom" anytime he wants to; he just doesn't want to all the time. We need more anime mavericks like him nowadays. We could use more Kawajiris nowadays too. There seems to be way too many Ghibli wannabes these days when it comes to anime movies, even though a lot of them are good at it.