Ninja Scroll the Series - Volume 1: Dragon Stone

I’d love to be a ninja.

When I was a kid ninjas were some sort of mythical killing machine that were the best of the best ever and could sneak up on you and kill you with your Yogo spoon before you even knew you’d opened the tub. Then they’d steal away, back into the schoolyard like some invisible wraith sent to exact payment for a crime perpetuated in your last life.

Or, you could be a ninja in the style of a Ronin, a masterless samurai, wandering the land fighting for justice and the little guy like some sort of feudal conglomerate of The A-Team. Hanging upside down in a tree and poking people in the back of the neck before disappearing into the foliage as if you’d never been there, bewildered girls looking about in confusion while you snickered to yourself in the branches above.

Heh heh, neat.

"Sometimes I wish my ninja senses weren’t quite so keen..."

Jubei Kibagami is like that. He’s this ninja dude who is way fast and deadly and practically unbeatable. All he really wants though is to find himself a shady glen and get some decent sleep, but trouble seems to come looking for him and he rarely gets that delicious daytime nap the rest of us enjoy huddled beneath our desks each day. Oh well. Here Jubei, fresh from his victory in Ninja Scroll the Movie is just minding his own business when two warring clans decimate The Light Maiden’s village. She manages to escape, but not before Jubei is given the Dragon Stone with the express wishes of a dying warrior to return it to her. So begins the series with plenty of kickarse fighting animation, nice renderings and even a witty line or two thrown in for good luck.

Whereas the movie was rather more serious, this series seems to find a more humourous vein and applies that well to the moments between action adventures. There are also many more monsters and biomechanically enhanced demons and cool stuff like that, lending a futuristic, yet fantastical air that creates a clever hybrid between the past and the future. It’s great fun and fans of the film (I know you’re out there, wearing black Speedo’s over your black pyjamas) will greatly enjoy the ongoing adventures of Jubei and his motley band of collected friends as they fight their way across country.

Four episodes are included here with a fair swag of extras. The episodes go a little like this:

• Episode One: Tragedy in the Hidden Village
  Shigura, the Light Maiden, has her village destroyed by the warring Hiruko and Kimon ninja clans who search for the Dragon Stone. She escapes, with Jubei being given the Dragon Stone to return to her.
• Episode Two: Departure
  The Light Maiden, tired and footsore, meets the light-fingered thief Tsabuto and an old priest who stay with her to protect her. Meanwhile, Jubei, in his quest to find Shigura, meets adversity.
• Episode Three: Forbidden Love
  Jubei and the Light Maiden are finally united and he returns the Dragon Stone to her while enemies gather all around.
• Episode Four: Broken Stone
  Tsaburo attempts to steal the stone, but as Jubei recovers it, he loses it to the Kimon. However, he manages to dissect the stone, keeping half for himself and Shigura.

Jubei would be proud his story looks so good. This is rendered so much better than cheap shows like Pokemon while being made on a similarly small budget. So many flying gouts of blood also alert us to the fact this is no kid’s show. Colours are awesome within the show and there is never a moment when clarity of picture is missing. Although delivered in 4:3, the picture looks as good as it could be and has been laid out for that size screen ratio. Everything else is perfect and very attractive.

Not some Dolby Digital stereo deal this time around! In an incredible manner, we are granted Dolby 5.1 surround here and it sounds pretty cool. Myriad clangs and clashing of metal run around the room during fight scenes and the sounds of the forest are present here too. Dialogue is well spoken in the English version and very easily understood, although the subtitles differ greatly from what is said in English. This occurs frequently in animé and is normal. It is just the difference in language finding its feet. Overall both versions tell the same story it would appear, so there’s nothing to worry about.

Music here is really great and well suited to the series, however there is one repeater riff that gets used a lot which starts to get on the nerves after a while. This is a chirpy pan-flute general theme and does sound cool, but not 75 times in a row. And it reminds me of that stupid Bad Boys song they do on COPS. There are also some heavier metal moments with the music running behind hardcore action scenes, but this struggles to make itself heard and even sounds quite tinny at times.

A bit of a bunch here that are worth a look for the avid animé junké with a storyboard to feature comparison working as a multi-angle featurette. Four scenes with three angles of dual, single storyboard or single final render. Each runs around the minute to a minute and a half mark and are pretty cool.

Two separate interviews with the musical composers follow and these run concurrently for 16:37 in total. Interesting, but inevitably fairly empty unless you are extremely hardcore and must learn every nitpicking bit about everything.

A rather cool featurette follows for anyone unfamiliar with the way art is created in the literal Creating the Cover Art. This runs for 7:54 and does exactly what it says it does. We watch the artist make the cover you hold in your hot little ninja-like hand. Neat.

The usual inclusion of an art gallery at first appears to be the run of the mill, but soon becomes a bit better than average with more than just the usual model sheets within. Included in this collection of 20 images are fully rendered backgrounds and illustrations that far outweigh the usual crapper efforts.

Some soft-edged and blurry original trailers follow and these are run together as one piece. All up, 7:41 with the last :31 being a trailer for the soundtrack, remarkably enough. Worth a look but no real lasting value in these fuzzy transfers.

More follow in the Madman Propaganda bit with trailers for Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Initial D and Bio-Hunter.

Some unusual additions to a more regular line-up here add some weight to the overall value and will entertain fans for at least a little while.

Having been a recent convert to animé itself and watching Ninja Scroll for the first time just weeks before watching this, I was impressed with the ongoing commitment to the character of Jubei and his fleshing out as the series progresses. This is a little more fun than the film, but certainly no less bloody with those extreme high-volume floods of gushing claret exploding from necks or torsos. Neat.

Adult people who still have that little kid burning ants with a magnifying glass inside them will no doubt thrill to this (as I did) and it’s well worth checking out for the overall series and the illuminating extras.