Anime First Impressions: Blade of the Immortal / Soapbox: The Manga was Better

This is kind of rare for me, but I've decided to do a "knee-jerk reaction" post detailing my first impressions of the new "Blade of the Immortal" anime. If you don't read manga on a regular basis or you only read Naruto and the other stuff that comes out of Shonen Jump, you may not have heard of Blade of the Immortal. Written and drawn by Hiroaki Samura, the series is still ongoing in Japan (as far as I know) and for years the English adaptation has been done by Dark Horse comics. The story is set sometime during the height of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan and starts by following two main characters: Manji and Rin. Manji is a former samurai who killed his lord after realizing that he had killed, on his lord's order, a group of innocent farmers who had intended to report the lord's corruption to the shogunate. Sometime after that, his body became host to colony of "blood worms" that instantly regenerate any wounds he receives, to the point of regenerating serious head wounds and re-attaching severed limbs. In order to atone for his murder of 100 good men and finally be allowed to die, he resolves to murder 1000 evil men. Rin is a young girl whose father runs a small sword dojo. After her father and mother are brutally murdered by Anotsu Kagehisa and his Itto-ryu, she swears vengeance and, following someone's recommendation, hires Manji as her bodyguard. It's a little more complicated than that, but I'll leave it to you to read the series and see for yourself.

Now the first episode of the new anime series covers the events of the first chapter of the manga, which runs about 40 pages. Not a whole lot of material to cover, just Manji's basic introduction, explanation of the blood worms, and why he's decided to kill 1000 evil men. The first episode covers everything that happens in the manga, but it somehow ends up feeling kind of disjointed. The beginning of the episode adds an entirely new scene that shows Manji killing the peasants and then killing his lord. Actually it shows a samurai killing some peasants, and then a silhoutte from outside of someone being beheaded inside a feudal lord's house. The manga covers this through simple exposition right before a fight and the anime does the same because the brief sequence at the beginning conveys no real information so it ends up feeling kind of superfluous. Additionally, the episode spends a few minutes showing Rin and then hinting at what happens to her family, and even shows Anotsu talking with a representative of the government about having his dojo officially endorsed. The only reason I know this is from having read the manga because no context is given for either of these little sequences and no proper introduction is even given for the characters in them, so it feels a bit like a shoe-horned cameo. Since this stuff takes up time though, the rest of the events in the episode end up feeling kind of rushed and the transitions a bit disjointed.

One of the most striking things about the manga, and one of the things I've both loved and hated about it, has been the artwork. His characters forego the huge eyes present in most manga and anime in favor of more realistic proportions (although the relative size of the iris is still highly variable depending on emotion and situation) and all of the artwork has an almost, sketchy quality to it. Obviously the sketchiness wouldn't translate very well to animation, but the character designs so far seem fairly faithful to their source. Manji seems to differ the most, being a bit beefier than his manga counterpart and having a slightly stronger jaw-line (I'm not sure how I feel about either change yet). Let me move onto personality so long as I'm griping about Manji. This stems from some kind of personalized image of what Manji acts and sounds like, but the character protrayed in the show didn't quite fit the bill for me. I don't know how much Dark Horse may have strayed from the tone of the original script in their translation, but their version of Manji always struck me as a bit more laid-back, or at the very least more cynical and sarcastic. The anime's Manji seems more despondent, more remorseful of his situation. Not necessarily a bad thing I suppose, but I kind of liked the cocky, smart-ass edge that Manji seems to have in the translated manga. For example, when he's complaining about being immortal one of the first things he mentions is how sloppy his sword skills are getting since he knows his opponent can't kill him. I guess in general between Manji's attitude and some minor scenes that the anime chooses to omit, the manga had a slightly more light-hearted feel despite the violence and serious subject matter.

Speaking of violence, let's now move onto the fights. The animation quality of the series seems to be fairly high so the one or two fight scenes shown in this episode look fairly good. It even seems to emulate the big full page or double page spread finishers of the manga. In those finishers, the loser is shown coming apart (literally) in some way, with their arms falling off or their head chopped into some strange pattern, with the winner striking some kind of "just-finished-a-technique" type pose against a beautiful background of flowers or something. When Manji goes in for the finishing blow in the big fight of the episode, a series of shots showing different wallpaper/kimono style backgrounds flashes through to represent each time Manji strikes. Obviously the series tones down the most graphic violence, so although you see cuts appearing on the guy's face, you don't see it fly apart at those seams. An understandable concession, but it looked cooler in the manga. :-p

Which brings me to my final point: the music. According to ANN, the music is written by Kou Ohtani, who has also done the music for series like Haibane Renmei and games like Shadow of the Colossus. An excellent composer who's capable of writing some moving and haunting stuff, but the music in this episode just felt kind of mismatched. Granted, the audio on the fansub that I was watching wasn't great, so that may skew my opinion towards the negative, but it seemed like there was always some music playing, even when a scene might have been better served by silence, and that especially during the fight or action scenes the attempt to try and ratchet up the tension and the energy just falls a little flat.

Ok, so I've spent the last who-knows-how-many words ragging on this series based on one episode, exactly the kind of behavior that I usually refrain from. But once in awhile every fan is allowed to gripe about all the things he perceives to have gone wrong with some adaptation of a beloved franchise, whether it's Trekkies moaning about the newest Star Trek series, book fans griping about the latest movie adaptation, or Star Wars fans bitching about the prequels. And don't get me wrong, I'm still going to watch this series and now that I've seen the first episode, I'll try to adjust my expectations so I can watch it and judge it on its own merits instead of constantly comparing it to the source material. But I do really enjoy this series and just this once I had to indulge in this impulse. And for the record, the manga usually is better than its anime counterpart. :-p

-ZK