Blade of the Immortal – 11

Short Synopsis: Rin vs. Kawakami part II
Highlights: Excellent fight.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s episodes like this one that convince me that Bee-Train can still make good fights when they want to; especially when backed up by such an excellent manga as this one. I’m beginning to see why they chose such a strange manga-series to adapt this time, because it’s of course perfect to experiment with in terms of artistic direction. The fights in this series aren’t impressive because of their animation-quality (which in fact still rather sucks), but because it turns simple fights like this one into pieces of art.

I must say that it must have taken a lot of guts to make such an excellent manga into a sort-of experimental anime like this. But on the other hand you have to wonder why for ten years nobody had stepped up to adapt it before Bee-Train did. I mean, I’ve seen comments about this series that it would have been best when in the hands of the Madhouse animation studio. And while I sort-of agree with it, I do think that if Madhouse really wanted to adapt this series, they would have done so already.

In any case, the use of music was typical Bee-Train in this episode, and yet it wasn’t like most of their other series. The whole episode had a huge contrast between silence and fast-paced music. It’s been like this for nearly the entire series so far: there are silent moments at very strange parts of the fights, and it definitely has an interesting effect. But then again, Bee-Train has always been known to play up-beat music at very strange scenes as well, so I guess that it was only a matter of time before they would go the opposite.

And regarding the story, it continues its thought-provoking look at revenge, and I really liked how Rin was about to create a kid, just like her by robbing him of his parent. Even though she changed her mind about killing a father like him. She solved it in a pretty interesting way, by pretending that she had killed Manji afterwards for the guy, so that he wouldn’t become like her.