Swordgirls of BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL

I’ve loved Hiroaki Samura’s out-of-the-box manga Blade of the Immortal for it’s entire loooong run, but the latest volume (still coming out in trades from Dark Horse) starts a new storyline featuring some masked goons rather familiar to fans of vintage shinobi-cinema and tokusatsu TV…

In addition to these thoroughly disposable suppa, the new story features two young info-gathering kunoichi, and the armed-’n-armored daughter of doomed government official. The series has been swordswoman heavy since day one, and Samura loves painting up his girls for eye-catching covers. These are my faves:

This series is all about exotic costuming, beauty in combat, and surreal weaponry. It can be challenging to read, especially some of the key action pages (depending on how good or bad the repro is from the Japanese originals), but it is definitely worth sticking with. Some of the grotesque places this book has gone in the past two years has been shocking.

Blade of the Immortal is enjoying some renewed fan interest due to the just-release anime adaptations, and an art book of the creator’s illustrations is being translated and released here in June. There’s a nice review of this must-own volume, in its original Japanese form, here.

Completely off topic, but… damn!

Had this image for a long time, with no real home for it, so I’ve decided to stretch the envelope a bit.

No ninja-nutritional-value here whatsoever, but hey, she is a girl with swords…

SAMURAI SPY – Quick Close-Ups

Wrapping up our 4-part look at the visual qualities of Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke

Evidenced by the previous entries in this series, director Masahiro Shinoda and cinematographer Masao Kosugi were out to baffle the viewer visually as much as their lead character Sarutobi Sasuke was confounded by the intrigue around him.

But in the middle of all the conflicting actor movements, confusing geometry and misleading framing, frequent quick-cut close-ups and extreme close-ups are contrastingly stark. They are brilliantly photographed, crisp and clear. Their conventionality makes them striking in the foggy visual environs of the rest of the film.

Many tools and weapons attributed to shinobi are multi-functional. A grappling hook can also serve as a disarming capture line, perfectly illustrated here.

Ninja live and die by the shuriken. The prop master in SS chose some pretty deadly looking blades!

An example of close-up intercut with resulting actions. Sasuke hurls a pile of shuriken at enemy samurai with devastating efficiency.

This sequence actually illustrates many of the themes we've looked at this week - off-kilter character placement, movement vs. framing, etc.

Superb lost limb cutaways during night fights. Not an easy thing to capture correctly.

SS is somewhat lean on gadgetry, but when an exotic tool of the trade appears, it's something you've never seen in any other movie. I absolutely LOVE this hybrid axe / trenching tool / dagger / cudgel thingy!

And I'm pretty sure this is the only big-screen use of a truly bizarre implement called a KONPEI - a chain slid though a tube handle with a weight on one end and a spiked ring on the other.

Fitting to end a look at one of, if not the, weirdest ninja movies ever made with shots of one of the damned strangest weapons ever. (Read all about it and others in Serge Mol’s excellent Classical Weaponry of Japan)

I’m no professor in the art of filmmaking, and I’m probably butchering some of the visual vocabulary I learned in college, but what I’ve tried to get across this week is how rarified the air is around Samurai Spy. Adventurous and experimental as hell, there’s nothing else quite like it during the 60’s craze. It may be above the rest of the genre, but it also still pays off with the basics we all look for in a vintage ninja film.

If nothing else, it gives visuals like the above consistently. You just can’t take your eyes off this flick.

See it… just to see it.

Buy the highly recommended Criterion DVD at VN’s Amazon store.

SAMURAI SPY – Theatrical Combat Posing

The 3rd of a 4-part look at the visual qualities of Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke

Without knowing even the decade they’re from, you can date ninja films from the way the actors and stuntmen move and pose. In the 50’s, movie wizards mimicked traditional paintings and gestured like kabuki actors. In the 80’s Sonny Chiba had his JAC folk posing like superheroes. The 2000s saw digitally assisted non-martial artists take over lead roles, so the filmmakers were always trying to hide the lack of physicality of pop stars or teen idols.

The redefined shinobi of the 60’s Japanese craze were coached by legit martial practitioners like Masaaki Hatsumi, with emphasis on credibility. The posing was right out of secret scrolls, they moved like commandos and did arcane spy tricks no one had seen before. From Raizo Ishikawa on the big screen to Maki Fuyukichi on TV, there was definitely a visual vocabulary used by the ninja stars of the day.

BUT… as we’ve established the last two days, Shinoda just had to do things differently, and Samurai Spy features some truly odd character posing and combat staging in some of the wierdest framing set-ups ever.

Sasuke, cornered like a rat, surrounded by aggressive enemies, strikes these defiant hero poses. There is, however, a certain quality of fear behind the bravado. He's stiff, uneasy, vulnerable, and remarkably under-armed for the full-scale battle he's entered.

Tanba's Sakon is a total contrast. He's a shifty spy with a lot to hide, but he hides in plain sight - from the white robes to these decidedly un-ninja-like, Musashi-esque twin sword poses. His is an equally false bravado, maybe brought on by overconfidence.

This duel is as stiff and ritualized as kabuki theater. There is no flow, each move is isolated, stopped on a beat, and followed by an overly dramatic gesture in return. A primitive fight amidst an amazingly advanced and complex film that always leaves you guessing...

From the way Sasuke holds his katana to the placement of crucial characters way to the sides of uncluttered frames, everything in SS is different from its contemporaries. The more I scrutinize this film, the more I’m thinking it might be the weirdest ninja movie ever made.

Tomorrow: Often flashing so fast they barely register, we look at some absolutely gorgeous cutaway close-ups, and one of the strangest ninja weapons ever put on screen.

Buy the highly recommended Criterion DVD at VN’s Amazon store.

SAMURAI SPY – Use of Shadow (and Light) to Obscure Characters

The 2nd of a 4-part look at the visual qualities of Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke

Last time we established the agenda of director Masahiro Shinoda and cinematographer Masao Kosugi to mirror the confusion and conflict of Sasuke with an equal amount of visual disruption for the viewer. From the opening frames, characters are obscured from what in a more conventional film would be normal view. Shadows are nothing new in post Shinobi-no-mono films, but Samurai Spy uses sunlight and mist just as often.

The first scenes in which we see Sasuke, he's nervously wandering a misty cane field, knowing he's being followed, but also realizing he can't see ten feet in front of him either.

Later, an uneasy cease-fire with Sakon, where motivations and morals are obscured by the same reeds. It's a long scene, and the bright cane is constantly (and deliberately) interfering in the composition.

When we do pull out of the frustrating reeds, its to overly wide and distant shots like this. The very distance obscures...

But, this wouldn't be a ninja movie without shadows. They use contrast and chiaroscuro so effectively here, even the white-robed Sakon is thrown into menacing shadow.

Even the conventional use of shadow - during invasions, escapes, hiding, etc. is on a level above the rival films of the time. Just amazing.

But then you get shots like this, which in anyone else's movie is a huge mistake. It's a full-on fight scene, you know who's who, but they chose to hide Sasuke's face. Almost like engaging in the combat is obscuring his very identity from himself.

Overhead shots also obscure the faces - and thus the emotions - of characters. I really love how this shot in a courtyard has a similar texture to the shark skin of the title card.

There is so much mist in daylight at film's end, I can actually picture the climax without revealing any spoilers!

Poor Sasuke… who is friend, who is enemy? Is he doing right or wrong? Is there even a right or wrong to be found? There are no easy answers, regardless of the lighting conditions.

Tomorrow: – some of the weirdest theatrical combat posing and framing ever.

Buy the highly recommended Criterion DVD at VN’s Amazon store.

SAMURAI SPY – Geometry and Lines in Composition

The 1st of a 4-part look at the visual qualities of Masahiro Shinoda’s Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke

A diagonal cut over a square grid, the interrupting movement of the spy actually reinforces the fact he's somewhere he doesn't belong.

It doesn’t take long to realize that director Masahiro Shinoda and cinematographer Masao Kosugi were up to something different in Samurai Spy. Different for a ninja movie, or any movie really. The use of lines to point the eye of the viewer is fundamental movie making, but here, the lines are often pointing away from the central character or action of the scene. Other times they crash into each other or cross at weird points. The geometry provides visual clues that pay off with lies, broken rules of compositional physics designed to confuse the viewer as much as the political and moral intrigue of the plot is confusing Sasuke himself.

Sasuke faces Sakon for the first time. The angles are like borders or fences to cross, in addition to the distance, before they can fight. It's a batle that shouldn't even really happen at this point, and it ends with a surprising explosion of upward movement that breaks the gridlines of the bridge. Bridges play an important part later as well.

In the liner notes of Criterion’s DVD, Alain Silver, author of the indispensable The Samurai Film, refers to the visual craft of SS as a “graphic scheme” with “angular and conflicting lines of force,” and those lines clutter frames, confuse the viewer, and ultimately support an underlying theme of the movie – nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. You can’t even trust the photography…

Capture lines pull the main character in every direction, just like the plot.

A stoic and rather geometric pose defies the arrows pelting the grid lines of the door behind Sasuke. As it plays out on screen, this whole escape sequence is just tense as all hell.

Samurai Spy ends with a lot of action atop elevated foot bridges. Sakon and Sasuke first meet on a suspension rope bridge, with the martial arts action (stunning slow-motion leaps) defying the horizontal confining lines of the architecture on which they fight. Their final meeting is on a seemingly endless linear walkway. An easy metaphor would have been for the final battle to take place at this bridge’s end, but fighting in the middle of this long expanse makes the symbollic timing of their skirmish just as unpredictable (and like a real life conflict, illogical) as the rest of the film.

It all comes down to dramatic theatrical fight poses (discussion of these coming day 3) interrupting the grid lines of tilled land and constructed bridge. Astounding planning went into these fights that, while nothing to write home about in the raw martial arts department, convey real tension and high drama via composition instead.

Tomorrow: both shadows AND light serve to obscure characters and add mystery.

Buy the highly recommended Criterion DVD at VN’s Amazon store.

A visual breakdown of SAMURAI SPY (intro)

It was the Summer of 1984, the height and heat of the American craze. Revenge of the Ninja was running on HBO, Ninja III: The Domination was about to hit theaters, Spanish-dubbed episodes of Lone Wolf and Cub ran on late-night Galavision. We thought we were sated.

Then, this little gem hit newsstands:

Jessica Amanda Salmonson's articles showed us a frustratingly limited glimpse of the source waters of our American ninja craze. SAMURAI SPY was prominently pictured.

I bought the very copy pictured here of Inside Kung-Fu’s special issue The Master Ninja: Warrior of the Night because like all shinobi-obsessed teens at the time, you bought ANYTHING ninja-related, and magazines by the ream. This one had more than the usual Hayes techniques and weapons fetish, though, it had four articles on film. The one that just KILLED us was “Challenge of the Ninja Films.”

Six pages of myths made real – like photo proof of the Loch Ness Monster to a cryptozoologist – we stared dumbfounded at actual evidence of Japanese ninja films. GOOD ninja films, serious, artistically superior, historically credible ninja films. Ninja films we had no chance of seeing. It was wondrous and torturous at the same time. Shinobi-no-Mono? Watari? What were these fantastic alien entities whose very notion was as baffling as the monolith was to the monkey-men of 2001: A Space Odyssey?!?!?

OK, I gotta reign myself in here…

The short of it: 15-year old Keith was rather tormented by the fact that a Samurai Spy was out there, and the U.N. wasn’t passing a global resolution to put it in his hands immediately. That’s why decades later, 36-year old Keith was all over the Criterion DVD release of said Samurai Spy like a fly on shit. FINALLY!

I just adore this title card. The background is a macro-photo of a sword hilt covered in shark or ray skin.

The film's star KOJI TAKAHASHI has as striking a face and profile as any other visual in the film. Criterion's DVD release has the typically superb packaging design.

So now, four and a half years after the 2005 Masahiro Shinoda retrospecticve box set raised the ceiling for me on how artistically adventurous a ninja movie could be, I’m delighted to actually express some editorial adoration. The 1965 redefining of the often visited Sarutobi Sasuke character is a film that while certainly released in the fervor of the 60’s Japanese craze, was on a level above much of its competition. Maybe too far above for some.

Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke is not an easy film to process. Brilliant to some, failure to others. Most ninja fans see it on the highest end of the shinobi scale, while many chambara or general Japanese cinemaphiles see it on the lower end of the Shinoda/samurai scale.

TETSURO TANBA is masterful as the villain in the white monks robes.

Me, after all these years, I was probably going to love SS no matter what. But repeated viewings over the last four years have cemented it as a personal fave, mainly for it’s visual quality. It is with a little intimidation that I now present some of those qualities. This is an important film to me, with a long history, so I wanted VN’s exploration of it to be something special.

So I’ll approach this a lot differently that other articles here. I’m going to break down Shinoda’s striking visuals into four categories apparent throughout the film;

- Geometry and Lines in Composition

- Use of Shadow (and Light) to Obscure Characters

- Theatrical Combat Posing

- Dramatic Use of Quick Close-Ups

Samurai Spy is a much-reviewed film, but I haven’t seen anyone really break-down its visual language. I hope I do it justice.

SAMURAI SPY features some great use of slow motion during combat. The staging is innovative as hell, fights here don't look like anything else in shinobi cinema.

Couple of nifty innovative transitions, too, however the real underlying strength of SS is...

...the cinematography of MASAO KOSUGI. Even the everyday street scenes display a phenomenal command of light and shadow, and depth of field.

Part 1 of 4 starts tomorrow. In the meantime:

Buy the superb Criterion DVD from Amazon.

Read an erudite chihuahua’s review of both this film and other versions of Sasuke at a sight we often recommend, The Weird Wild Realm, which in a neato piece of universal convergence, is supervised by none other than the writer of that very same 1984 article!

Color campaigns for B&W classics

When discussing 60’s B&W ninja flicks, the Shinobi-no-Mono series is THE genre-defining series. The movie posters, however, relied on strong reds, greens and blues to catch the consumers’ eye, and are some of the only color reference for the props and costumes involved. Here’s a few examples of nice color art for a grim and gritty B&W property.

As always, we HIGHLY recommend owning this seminal series, four of which are available in superb US editions in an affordable box set from Animeigo.

THIRD NINJA is first rate

More pretty B&W shinobi action today, courtesy of Toshikazu Kouno’s 1964 Toei actioner Daisan no Ninja (The Third Ninja).

Brief synopsis (anything longer would be spoiler-heavy): Two competing ninja, one an obedient servant, the other an upstart looking for a job, are given the task of hunting down Takeda Shingen’s deadliest assassin Chidoken. The winner becomes #1 Resident Suppa, the loser gets the axe. Along the way, the tenuous duo encounter a third ninja with a grudge against their target, and the game is on. Commando-style invasions of booby-trapped houses and ninja-on-ninja weapons fights ensue, with a couple of surprise reveals making for a truly dramatic (and blood soaked) end.

TN is definitely in that 'credible' vein of films, taking the history and techniques seriously - seen right away in this precarious crossing between a nightingale floor and a blade-rigged ceiling.

Subtle differences in black dyes make for a simple and effective way to keep track of which ninja is which.

Sato Kei and Satomi Kotaro have the same target, but with only one head to claim and death to the loser in this competiton, there's little cooperation in the pursuit.

That's Koji Nanbara as the third wheel. I love how each of the shinobi tie their hoods differently. Kudos to the costumer here...

Misako Watanabe stars as Kotaro's fate-crossed love interest, another exploration of the familiar 'ninja aren't allowed emotions' deal.

The middle of the film has some great sequences in tall reeds, among several fantastic in-studio 'exteriors.'

And there's some ambitious wire work too. Nifty when it works, but often distracting when it doesn't. Might be the film's one weakness.

A brief glimpse at Kotaro's arsenal. Those saw-blade shuriken are pretty ridiculous...

But this combination spear-head / climbing device is devastating in the hands of Chidoken. Kotaro is pinned to a tree as...

...his target swings down on him like a bird of prey. Great action scene!

Alas there's no way I can show more caps of the climax without major spoilers, but rest assured it all looks this good. Awesome photography throughout TN.

The denoument consists of this stunning shot, and...

...this over-the-top final image of Satomi Kotaro's sword struck through the kanji for "Nin." THIRD NINJA is also an exploration of the 'can I escape this life in the shadows' concept.

I really dig The Third Ninja. It doesn’t miss a trick of the genre: cat burglar skills, shuriken fights, close-quarter short-sword duels, disguises, traps, it’s ALL here. Grim, gritty, gory – it’s a tough tale and there are some truly wretched characters on both sides of the morally ambiguous goings-on.

Again, GREAT photography at times here. This is certainly on the short list of movies that prove B&W to be the superior artistic vehicle for shinobi cinema. The Hajime Kaburagi score is great too, lots of haunting harmonica work to support the noir-ish visuals and somber themes.

Read Paghat’s superb review at the Weird Wild Realm!

Buy it at Kurotokagi.

Coming soon…

Falling behind where I wanted to be with various B&W Japanese film posts, but GREAT stuff to come! Here’s a preview of the post-a-day topic for next week in the meantime:

And yes, there will be more various stuff this week. Stay tuned shinobifiles…