Anime Meta-Review
Kojiro no Fuma
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Title Info
- seen: 1-4
- type: unknown
- grade: flawed
- genre: magic_war
- made: unknown
- Review created: A while ago, i'll revise it eventually.
- mod: none
While older anime styles may look a bit strange a good story can still come through strongly. It's sort of a shame they didn't bother to write one for this anime, as this is Magical Warrior in its purest form. The anime starts with a warrior of the Fuma clan, thought dead, killing 4 ninja from the `Holy Warrior' school (with a wooden sword no less) and then joining their competition, the `white peacock academy'. Of course this quickly fades into irrelevance as it is determined that the `Holy Warrior' school is dominated by the Yasha Ninja clan, who gather their strength. The Fuma clan also gather and from then we are treated to a progression of encounters where stupid and illogical ninja powers are used to kill each other. Indeed both sides suffer multiple fatalities, although in true ninja fashion all this means to them is there is one less warrior to fight the enemy. Add to this that they all seem to like posing and bragging, as well as being tactically stupid, and the Ninja `cool' quickly dissipates. This is cardboard cut-out territory, with shallow characters existing simply to act as the holders of some ninja powers or another mark on the bodycount board.
The creators certainly tried to get ambience, but all I got was a sense of tedium and a wish that they would all die so that normal people could get on with their life. The animation is older, as mentioned, which is most obvious when they try to represent `powers'. One character has a `ice storm' type attack, which more or less looks like a bunch of white circles drawn over the screen and is almost laughable. If you like super-powered ninja's going for it, and don't mind older animation, then this might be enjoyable, but that's an awful narrow niche. This anime made the error of forgetting that fighting anime makes no sense if you don't particularly care for either side, or any person. Super-mega-minus points for everyone using wooden swords (if not using an even stupider weapon) when they are actually trying to deliver fatal wounds.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:20 WST 2009