Musashi – The Dream of the Last Samurai Review – 57,5/100

Mamoru Oshii… what exactly did you have in mind when you thought up the premise for this movie? What was the point? What did you want to prove? For God’s sake: why?!

I was actually looking forward to an anime documentary of Miyamoto Musashi’s life. Especially with the staff behind it. I’m a big fan of historical stories, and also of anime that put a heavy emphasis on dialogue, which is amongst Oshii’s trademarks. But this was just… too much. This movie is just… unbelievable. It’s seventy minutes of incoherent rambling that never seems to stop. As an anime, it fails. As a documentary… it fails as well. And as an experimental work… well it is unique, but this just didn’t work.

Ultimately, this movie has become “Musashi’s best fights animated, while some badly animated narrator gives a lecture about warfare”. And when I say badly, I mean that the animation for this guy is utterly terrible. There are so many things wrong with him, and he should never have been animated. The 3D CG he is animated in looks horrible, and the overall animation of this guy screams cheapness. He also has this strange female assistant who keeps making unfunny slapstick joke after unfunny slapstick joke in the background. These two distract way too much of what’s really important in this movie: Musashi himself.

Speaking of distracting… the dialogue also gets distracted by a ton of unrelated things. An example is one of the narrator’s seemingly endless monologues about warfare in Medieval Europe and Asia’s mainland. The topics he discusses are varied, but the dialogue itself is also so boring that I stopped caring about it it halfway through the movie, as it failed to give any characterization to Musashi himself, who really does nothing but fight as he’s shown on the screen.

Aside from the ugly CG, there also are a ton of live-action shots, and pretty much the only images where some effort has been put in is the shots of Musashi. Which basically amounts to 10% of the total airtime. And yes, this is coming from Production IG, Mamoru Oshii and the director of Otogizoshi. The music is pretty much the same: it’s catchy and nicely composed whenever Musashi is in the image. When he’s not, however, the music starts playing random classical tunes that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed, and were probably just chosen because they lack any licensing issues.

It’s also a joke how this show was advertised: “After years of movie hagiographies and mythification, the great Mamoru Oshii has seen to promoting this funny and profuse documentary that combines the most diverse animation techniques with historical rigor and rokyoku sung narrative.”. Mamoru Oshii originally thought of the premise; it’s no wonder he would promote his own creations. It talks down on all of the Musashi films and adaptations. It’s not funny. The animation is in no way diverse: it just has three styles: ugly CG, live-action backgrounds and traditional animation. Studio 4C could out-animate this movie to the moon and back in terms of diversity. And the “Rokyoku sung narrative” has been done by a ton of other series already, defeating the purpose of this experimental movie.

I hesitate in using the word ‘pretentious’, because I often see it misused by people for ‘a show with a ton of complex dialogue’. But I actually believe that this movie comes pretty damn close to it. It treats itself like it’s the best adaptation of Musashi out there, while the dialogue looks more like endless rambling rather than contributing to the characterization or actual storytelling.