Wrath of the Ninja: The Yotoden Movie Anime Review

Reader Review

• Reviewer: Animonster
• Review Date: 2001-11-01 (updated 2001-11-01)
• 2 stars out of 5 (?)

Wrath of the Ninja: the Yotoden movie was the first thing I ever saw where Oda Nobunaga was the bad guy. Ever since, there have been plenty of things like that, and even more anime about ninjas who go off to fight demons. If you're a die hard fan of Ninja Scroll, you might want to see this. The story is definitely not original. It borrows too much from anime tradition. Myself, I'm not a big fan of superviolent blood infested anime. On another story note, the subtitle "The Yotoden Movie" comes from the fact that this is based off a three part OAV called Yotoden: Chronicle of the Warlord Period. In a move almost as stupid as those made by American TV networks trying to edit Hokuto no Ken for five year olds, they hacked the story portions out of the OAV, slapped it on a DVD, and called it Wrath of the Ninja.

The story may not be original, but at least the Yotoden OAV had one. This hacked DVD has the parts of the movie that involved both fountains of blood and story, but anything to do with the story that didn't involve fountains of blood was hacked. Most of the story goes completely unexplained. To make things worse, the idiots stopped producing subtitled VHS OAV with the complete story. Unfortunately, this was the first US Manga Corps release I saw, and subsequent release's terrible dubbing did nothing to make me think better of them. Which brings me to the sound. The subtitled version has okay acting and the voices fit the characters quite well, especially the oboro ninja's freakish high voices. The three main characters also had good voices in the sub. The dub was terrible. Voices were flat and emotionless, oftentimes not fitting the characters at all. The oboro ninja's great freakish high voices from the sub were changed to men who sounded like they were begging for money on the streets. The background music fit the movie, but most of it didn't catch my ear at all. The ending song sounds like it should be in a ball room or something. The translation from sub to dub was fairly faithful. I only speak two words of Japanese, though I'd like to learn more, so I can't speak for the translation from Japanese to English.

The animation was actually pretty good IMO, even though it was made circa 1989. The textures look realistic. Backgrounds were rather dull, but everything moving was quite fluidly and realistically animated. Even blood was well animated. The characters are a little questionable. Ayame and Sakon have definite personalities, and even a little romance (Ayame is a girl, in case ya didn't know. Ayame is a girl's name) but the problem lies in the other characters. Ryoga in particular has no personality whatsoever, and every side character was around long enough to say a few words and then they were dead. So many people died that after a while I got confused whether I was watching an anime or some kind of demented documentary about how they kill cows in slaughterhouses. In the end, it seemed that everyone within the entire country of Japan was dead except Ayame. The character designs were pretty good, with everyone having a unique look. The oboro ninja especially were well designed. In one scene, it looks like one of the oboro ninja is gearing up for a tentacle rape scene like in some hentai anime. Luckily, this is only suggested, not shown.

I really can't think of anything more to say. If you want extreme amounts of blood not hindered by a story, I'd say get it. If you like a dash of story and a little less blood, get something like Cyber City Oedo 808 or something.

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