Yôtôden

After reading more than my fair share of reviews for a vast number of different movies I have noticed a certain trend, people judge to harshly on what the expected to see. I figure if you go into a movie open-minded not expecting anything certain than you will have better feelings towards it then if you try and watch but have pre-created standards you want it to reach.

Since I try not to be hypocritical I watched this movie with a very clean slate and open-mind, and was very much pleased. Since it is not a mainstream title or award winning for that matter I did not know quite what to expect, but in all truth I enjoyed it a good deal more than Ninja Scroll. Lovely animation, deep story, and the always joyful ninja hack-n-slashing combined extremely well to one of my personal favorite animes ever made.

I am not promising that you will enjoy it, but just give it a chance and you may come out with a pleasant surprise.

• "Before speaking, be sure of what you will say will be more beautiful than the silence" - Chinese proverb

After having spent a lot of my youth watching such movies, I found this one very easy to follow in both the unedited and cut versions, (Although the story has much more to hold it together in the unedited version. Unlike Ninja Scroll this movie hit a much more serious note and i think that's where it hit me. The animation while grainy is very original, and I just love the way artists in that year stressed shadows to show different emotions. I think the story is perfect. The beginning of the movie really hits hard and as the movie progresses you get the feeling that you're going along in this adventure with the characters. As they meet, become allies and find out the their greatest strengths, a lot of heart was put into this.

This movie stinks majorly. The only reason I gave it a 3 was because the graphics were semi charming. It's total disregard for a plot and the lack of even insubstantial surface character development made it seem like just a bunch of nice drawings. This is by far THE worse anime that came out of Japan. I can't believe they actually put their names on this garbage. What a rip off selling this thing for $20. If you haven't seen this don't bother. If you have, I pity you.

It's perfectly ok that people dies in an animation, but there are just way too many death in this one. Start from the very beginning, the story is all around battles, fights, death, and revenge. It goes on and on for entire one and a half hour. It was interesting at the beginning, but I grew very tire after before the show was half way through. Unlike other animations, this one is lack of humor. There are not many interactions between the characters either. The good thing about it is the sword fight scene looks pretty good and the characters look nice.

Well OK, I've seen Wrath of the Ninja.

It isn't something that I would recommend to people who aren't seriously into japanese fighting movies. This is a sort of japanese fighting ninja movie, with a complex plot. It's about these 3 old ninja schools that had these 3 "Swords of Sorcery". I saw the subtitled version (NOT recommended by the way, it's easy to miss something) and I didn't really keep up with it all. It had some good scenes tough, but in general, it wasn't much to my liking.