Category: Other:

Sword of the Stranger is Bones’ first attempt at an original movie (as in not based on an already existing series). Masahiro Ando, who had no prior experience with directing an entire anime and instead seems to specialize in animation and character-designs, was given the director’s seat and the screenplay was done by the director of the third Patlabor Movie. That’s not really the best cast you’d expect from Bones’ repertoire, but still, Sword of the Stranger is a worthy movie.

Don’t expect too much from the story, though. It features an uberpowerful ex-samurai with a sad past who got tired of killing who meets up with a young boy with an equally sad past. The main villain is another uberpowerful guy who’s looking for a challenge that only this ex-samurai can give him. Yawn, yawn, nothing we haven’t seen before. The reasons why you want to watch this movie is because of the animation, the cultural reference, and most importantly the bond that develops between said ex-samurai and boy.

Most of the time in this movie is not actually spent on the fights, but on showing how these two, with totally different personalities come to understand each other amidst their arguing. The two of them are dynamic and a joy to watch throughout the movie. The plot basically only serves to get and keep the two of them together, and even though it’s nothing special, it knows how to not get in the way of the development of these two for a large part of the movie.

I think that the big problem with this movie is that it would have made a great family-movie if it wasn’t for the huge amounts of gore in it. Gore can be a tricky thing. It’s great to intensify your scenes (Shigurui, anyone?), but at the same time you do alienate those who can’t stand it. I can really imagine that kids would have loved the innocent moments of this series, if it weren’t for the umpth guy who got an arrow blown through his entire face, with all the graphic details of a movie-budget.

Still, if you don’t mind the gore, I can’t really think of a reason not to watch this movie. It’s the genuine moments that really were the most enjoyable, plus some pretty impressive sword-fights. Bones could have done a lot worse (just take a look at Gonzo’s first attempt at a movie). The music is also really solid. You wouldn’t guess that it comes from the same composer who did Eureka7 and Heroic Age, and yet it complements the movie perfectly.

Yes, you’ve read that rating right. I didn’t expect this series to be this good when I started watching it, nearly two years ago now, but Power Puff Girls Z has been a large source of laughs for me whenever it appeared. There’s a good reason why the original length was increased from 39 to 52 episodes, because this series that basically awaited scepsis from nearly everyone turned out to be quite addictive.

If you’ve seen the original Power Puff Girls, then there are a few things you should know: Power Puff Girls Z completely went with its own style. This is a good thing, as in this way it fixed a lot of the mistakes that the original series made. On the bad side, because of these changes it’ll be really easy to see this as a series that only little kids can enjoy.

One of the biggest problems with this series is that it takes a really long time to get used to the bizarre sense of humour that this series has. If there’s any point in the series where you find yourself thinking: “oh god, they can’t go for something that stupid”, it will. This leads to an angry sushi-monster that assaults people who don’t eat the sushi he likes, and monsters in the form of a pen and an eraser who have trouble to understand each other’s feelings.

Fear not, though. Those were just some of the worst examples, and this series especially starts shining once it hits its second half. You just have to love the disco-fever-episode, or the manga-artist one. This series is so incredibly silly at times, but that’s what makes it so much fun. It really doesn’t care about being liked by everyone, and because of that it’s able to come up with these extreme cases.

That, however, isn’t the only reason why I’ve been looking forward for every new episode for the past year. In the original Power Puff Girls, we never really knew where the monsters that were terrorizing Townsville came from and why they wanted to destroy that particular town in the first place, or in what kind of trouble that town must have been before Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup arrived. But Power Puff Girls Z is different. Everything is really explained here. It may seem a bit far-fetched at times, especially at the beginning, but because the first episodes put so much effort into a conclusion, this series actually managed to close off with a pretty good finale, whereas most other comedies are just way too lazy to try and come up with a good ending.

This is also one series that knows how to deliver a good fight. The minor ones aren’t that special, but especially the fights against the big enemies are really fun to watch. You’d think that whenever you’d stand against a very strong enemy, the drama may take over a bit too much, but especially the fights against Him (the major bad guy of this series) are epic, yet hilarious to watch.

I used to watch the original Power Puff Girls a lot, but looking back, it made the mistake of taking itself way too seriously at times. An angry Buttercup or an angsty Blossom can only remain interesting for a very short while, and the original series went way too far in that. Power Puff Girls Z therefore was really refreshing in its light-hearted nature (do not miss the few times at which this series gets to poke fun at its predecessor). It may be a bit childish at times (okay, make that REALLY childish at times), but when it shines, this series really shines like no other comedy. Added to that comes what’s probably the best cheesy J-Pop soundtrack I’ve heard in an anime, the fact that this really is a series that didn’t play all its trumps in the beginning, and you’ve got a very enjoyable comedy-series.

Adapting a manga. From the outside, it looks so simple: you just have to take a page and animate it accordingly. Yet practice has shown that a lot of series have trouble with this. Sometimes entire pages are omitted completely, or the writers think they’re talented and insert some boring inconsequential fillers. A great example of this is Hatenkou Yuugi. Oh, how I wanted to praise this series, but it’s an extreme example of how you can screw up manga-adaptations.

The manga had huge potential, but in the end the only thing that didn’t end up completely botched was the dialogue. It’s deep and detailed, but you can’t really praise the anime staff for it. They only literally copied the dialogue from the manga and inserted it. It’s just a matter of simple copying and pasting, and letting your voice-actors do the rest.

And really, it feels like the creators all went through a major divorce at the same time when making this series, because all other aspects are downright lazy. This series is a string of badly explained plot-twists. Heck, we never know why the third main character ends up travelling with the other two characters in the first place, characters like to god-mode themselves out of any problems and any substance outside of the dialogue has been completely removed.

To top that, the creators apparently found out very late that they only had 10 episodes to work with. The result is a very amusing but downright disastrous final episode that thunders through revelations at a speed of Mach 5 in order to be able to finish on time, and it still remains an ending that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I hope that future directors will use this series as an example of how not to adapt a manga, because it’s such a shame that another story with potential had to be ruined. This series remained enjoyable because of its short length and dialogue, but it could have become so much more.