Hacker Cinema
Ninja Scroll
獣兵衛忍風帖
1993 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Jubei is a masterless ninja who travels the land alone, lending his services to those with gold—or a worthy cause. His fearsome abilities have served him well, but a plot to overthrow the government threatens to end his wandering ways—and possibly his life.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
I watched Redline recently. The animation is worth seeing but the "story" is paper-thin.
Ergo Proxy I just didn't get.
Psycho Pass I really enjoyed; good depth of story and exploration of the pros and cons.
GitS series is probably my favourite anime, and very high up in my favourite anything.
Berserk is good, and descends into Evangelion-level insanity as it progresses.
Ninja Scroll is forever a classic. Worth a re-watch every 5-10 years. I'm due.
Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll features two interlaced of sex scenes, each involving men who are large and hulking and men who are smaller. But one man is clothed in the robes of minor officialdom and has appropriately dressed hair while the other is semi-naked and bald. The two scenes, while both in dim night-time light, are depicted in different colors and the scenes are composed in contrasting ways. One of these acts is legitimate (the one involving the official) in the sense that it accords with social standards. The other is clearly rape. The film reveals both to be impure and the social order to be corrupt.
Growing up, i was a lot like you. The stories, artwork and animation in a lot of those darker, more adult animes blew my mind. I remember the first time I saw Akira, like you when I was probably way too young, My mind just couldn't even really grasp what i was watching. I'd never seen anything like that before. I ended up somehow watching a dubbed version of ninja scroll that came on TV some time after that and i was pretty hooked.
I find though, I can't get into newer anime, or a lot of newer animation in general these days. I really miss the old style of animation and artwork, both western and Japanese. Every series or movie had its own unique style, some of the artwork was so fantastic and just mind blowing. Some of the landscapes and scenery created in older animation could take you to some of the most amazing or terrifying or strange places you couldn't even imagine.
I find a lot of animation to look generic and overproduced these days and in general, the format's become fairly formulaic and nothing really stands out as special in the ways a lot of those older animes did. Don't get me wrong, i have seen some fantastic modern animation. I was speaking more in general.
I keep hoping that we'll have this Renaissance of artists who want to go back to the traditional ways just to break this new mold animation seems to have gotten itself stuck in.
I suppose anyone can say "Your argument is coming from your bubble" without saying much else. It's not a great argument. But I think I'd like to hear why you think your read on the situation is better than mine.
Here's why I think I've got a good read on this: I'm in my 40s and I have friends, family and acquaintances from all walks of life. I specifically live my life so that I don't have a bubble or a lot of dependencies. I just hang out a lot online and I'm reporting what I see.
My 10 year old niece loves anime and video games. I have some friends in their 20s and 30s who love anime and video games. I hang out on Twitch, Reddit or 9gag and almost exclusively peruse these sites using the "popular" firehose - I always see lots and lots of references to anime, video games and comic-book movies. Actual comics/comic-books do not come up quite as often - but cos-play does.
I don't really like anime. I enjoyed some classics when I younger - titles such as Akira, Ninja Scroll and uhhh Blood: The Last Vampire. I play one video game: Rocket League. Other than that, I'm not what you'd call a "gamer".
On Twitch though, I definitely see high school kids with tons of viewers playing all sorts of games and talking about anime.
What's your experience?
For darker stuff pretty much any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiaki_Kawajiri film will be good. Ninja Scroll is very violent but worth a watch for the animation at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film) is a good 80s compilation.
Otomo has another nice anthology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_(1995_film)
From Oshii related work - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin-Roh:_The_Wolf_Brigade is fantastic (but slow moving except for a few places)
I always appreciate that Hulu has its Criterion collection section.
And I very recently signed up for Seeso for $4 a month because I was craving some Monty Python's Flying Circus. I don't plan on keeping it long term, maybe just a month, to get it out of my system.
And then I still end up digging through shitty cheap roku channels occasionally to find stuff. Mostly just schlock, but I saw, for example, niche titles like Millennium Actress, Ninja Scroll, and Ghost in the Shell 2 on free services.
The idea of one streaming service that has it all is dead, but it kind of reminds me of DVD bundles at Walmart. 10 Sci Fi movies for $10, and one of them will be Existenz and the rest will be straight to TV or DVD.