Anime Movie Review - Sword of the Stranger

When I heard that BONES had actually done a movie, I was like, how on earth did I miss this? And after watching it, I must say, did I miss the hype for this movie or something? Because I hardly heard anything about it, but as a wise man would put it: Sword of the Stranger is nothing short of a masterpiece.

So here’s a quick review.

Everyone knows that BONES has awesome animation. In this movie, BONES gives us pretty much awesome -everything-. In terms of production value they pulled out all the stops and took no prisoners. Character design is great and realistic for the most part, as well as their accompanying movement oftentimes being so fluid it’s surreal.

Not to mention the brilliant background scenery that is on a constant high throughout the movie. Very rarely is something truly static unless it’s supposed to be so. With the accompanying music score being of the classical Japanese drums and strings, it all adds up to something special.

Lots of blood and gore though. It’d have been a great family movie otherwise, I guess.

Obviously the above picture is not a representation of the movie as a whole. We see limbs and stuff flying like a couple minutes into the movie.

Story is fairly simple stuff. Kid has a bounty on head for reasons revealed later, he meets amnesiac samurai whom he manages to convince to look after him, epic adventures and hijinks commence. And the kid isn’t terribly annoying. I’m serious. The dog is just epic awesome.

But I love the character development going on between the two. Wish we could have seen more from the rest of the cast, but being an hour and fifty minutes long (Including the credits) would put a damper on that, I surmise.

So what did I think of the movie? I liked it a good deal. It was pretty, and the simple plot had quite a lot of nuances to it to make it something special. Plus, the action scenes are simply the main highlight of the movie, and there’s plenty of it.

My rating: 98 Samurai out of 131 approve of this movie. We shall have the naysayers incarcerated shortly.