Review: Blood – The Last Vampire

“A great adaptation of a solid anime.”

I have to admit… Live Action Animes tend to scare me a bit. They have such potential for utter failure that it’s really hard for them to do otherwise. The type of imagery and visuals that a lot of animes are full of just won’t come across on-screen the same way. Fights that are intense and epic in ink may seem overdone on camera; or worse, rendered in poorly executed CG.

Review: Cowboy Bebop

“Cowboy Bebop – the work that will become a genre in itself.”

Recently my wife and I watched Shinichirō Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop. I convinced her to watch it after stating it was directed by the same man as Samurai Champloo, which is an anime we both loved. (No review for that one yet, it has been a while since I watched it.) So on my days off, we watched several episodes at a time until we finally finished the series.

The anime follows Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter (called a “cowboy”) who is a former member of the Red Dragon Syndicate. As Shinichirō did with Samurai Champloo, the focus is more on the characters rather than any sort of ongoing plot. The crew aboard the Bebop consists of the owner and former ISSP Jet Black, a mysterious woman who can’t remember her past known as Faye Valentine, a data dog known as Ein, and a red-haired girl known as Ed. Each episode sees our crew either chasing the next bounty, scraping for money, or revisiting their past.

Review: Samurai 7

Akira Kurosawa’s classic movie, Seven Samurai, retold as a stunning and cleverly written anime.

The premise of the story is roughly the same as the classic. A farming village is being raided by bandits, so they hire ronin samurai to defend them. The bandits in the anime are samurai who have forsaken their honor and turned themselves into machines during the last war. The plot is well written and flows well, involving character development in most of the main characters and several supporting ones. I don’t want to give everything away, but keep your eye on Ukyo.. He’s much more cunning than he looks.

Each samurai interacts with the farmers in different ways. As you learn more about their pasts, you are able to relate and understand their feelings and reasons for helping the farmers, which vary from having come from a farming community to trying to cleanse the blood on their hands by doing good deeds. The farmers can only pay the samurai in rice, so the battle is taken up strictly for personal reasons.