Black Lion

Original Title: 黒の獅子
Romanized: Kuro no Shishi
Literal:

Plot Synopsis

In the 16th Century, the evil warlord Oda Nobunaga is involved in a bid to conquer all of Japan. But he is no normal warlord--thanks to a little help from time-traveling aliens and the ninja-hating invincible cybernetic samurai Jinnai, he and his mechanized army are unstoppable. Enter the young ninja Shishimaru. The sole survivor of a battle where his girlfriend and comrades are killed by Jinnai, he is left to seek vengeance on his unkillable nemesis, and if that wasn't hard enough he's ordered to cooperate with a group of formerly enemy ninja to do it. Life is tough.

Quick Review

Rating: 1.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2005-01-24

Black Lion is bad anime: Preposterous, gory, and ugly to boot. The story consists of excuses for why there are tanks and cyborg samurai running around the Edo period and watching the main characters' repeated attempts to destroy the immortal Jinnai using the brilliant strategy "If killing him didn't work this time, we've got to kill him harder next time!" Its biggest draw past the utter wrongness of the premise is the never-ending shower of messy chunks that Jinnai reduces pretty much everybody he comes across to. Fortunately, thanks to the creative insanity of Go Nagai, master of cheese, sleaze, and gratuitous violence, Black Lion is so bad it can actually be a lot of fun to watch.

It's splatterfest punctuated by one nonsensical plot twist after another from start to finish, but that magic Nagai touch makes it over-the-top and whacked-out enough to be worth laughing at with a bunch of friends if that's your thing. If it's not... well, you've been warned.

US DVD Review

ADV's hybrid DVD has acceptable English and Japanese soundtracks, an accurate-enough English subtitle track, and a respectably smooth video transfer, considering the age and grain of the film. The closest thing to any bonus material, however, is ADV's Black Lion trailer.

Content Guide

Gore, gore, and more gore. It'd rank 16-up, but is barely even serious enough to qualify for that.

Violence: 4 - Blood, chunks, and flying limbs galore, all in exquisite detail, but too over-the-top to be all that serious.

Nudity: 1 - Nothing of note.

Sex/Mature Themes: 0 - Essentially nada.

Language: 3 - A fair amount of swearing in the dub.

Notes and Trivia

Two small notes: Nobunaga Oda is the perpetual whipping-boy of any story set in Japan's past in need of a nasty villain, but this has to be the most extreme take on him yet. And, for no apparent reason, ADV chose to incorrectly Romanize Jinnai's name as "Ginnai" (which by standard practice would be pronounced with a hard "G" sound instead of the correct soft "J" sound).

Black Lion is one of the many, many anime based on a comic by Go Nagai (the comic origin explains the set-up for a longer series). Nagai is the mind behind dubious classics like Kekko Kamen (the naked superheroine), Violence Jack (the name says it all), and the ever-popular Cutey Honey... the series that started the disappearing clothes transformation sequence.

The full, although rarely used, original title of the video is "Jiku Sengokushi Kuro no Shishi - Jinnai Hen" (時元戦国史 黒の獅士 陣内篇)--"Dimensional Civil War Chronicle Black Lion - Jinnai Chapter."

Availability

Available on one hybrid DVD; was also available on subtitled and dubbed VHS.

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