Jubei meets up with Tessai again later as Tessai is now looking for revenge. Jubei escapes with Kagero, who returns to her clan and reports back the tragic results of their mission. Right? No, he can’t, and Tessai instantly takes a small needle to the eye.
He just so happens to be resting in the same abandoned hut Tessai chooses to rape Kegaro in, and immediately makes an enemy by deftly assessing a weakness of Tessai’s stone skin and using it to his advantage. This is where Jubei and the “larger picture” merge.
This proves to be a plus when Tessai kidnaps and tongue rapes her. Anyone one who kisses or has sex with her will die immediately. She’s been doing this so long and is so good at it her body itself has become poisonous. Not only does she have the fighting skill of a ninja but she’s also a food taster for the head of her clan, which means she tests food for poison. The only survivor of this massacre is ninja chick, Kagero. He’s a hulking brute who can transform his skin into stone and uses a massive double-bladed sword that can be thrown and will return like a boomerang. A team of ninjas is sent in to investigate the town but they are all wiped out before they even get there by one of the Devils of Kimone called, Tessai. The local officials quarantine the town, which is exactly what they want, but something smells fishy. It all starts when these eight ‘Devils Of Kimone’ (pronounced kee-mone) at the command of their master, Lord Gemma Himuro, poison the water of Shimoda village, killing every person in it in an effort to make it look like a plague has ravaged the area. Now the long answer: Ninja Scroll is about vagabond/ninja-for-hire, Jubei Kibagami as he gets unwillingly mixed up in some seriously bad mojo this is side of feudal Japan. Yeah, the character and action animation are that mind blowing. So, for the uninitiated, what’s Ninja Scroll about? The short answer: unadulterated awesomeness on a level your brain might not be able to fully grasp the first time around. What I might presume is their initial release pulled in a good chunk of change, so here they are cashing in on it again, which I’m glad they did, and if you’re a slipcase lover you’ll be glad they did, too.Ī SHOT OF VAGABOND/NINJA-FOR-HIRE, JUBEI KIBAGAMI, IN HIS BATTLE WITH ‘DEVIL OF KIMONE’ TESSAI. I never bought their 2012 version (money issues) but the best I tell comparing the back cover art from Amazon is that they’re exactly the same. I’ll be honest I don’t know why Section 23 decided to re-release it. I look at slipcovers as an unconscious homage to the VHS days VHS cases were basically cardboard created boxes, so now we have their 21st century counterparts wrapped lovingly around the DVD case. I know there are people who don’t like slipcovers, but I’m not one of them. The only differences this time out is you get a slipcover with some very cool variant cover art and that the poster art is used this time on the DVD and blu-ray covers underneath. The version I’m currently reviewing here is a re-release by Section 23/Sentai Filmworks of their own 2012 release.
This movie has been re-released 4 times as far as I can tell over the years. Most of these I’ve re-bought in the intervening years, but when it came out in a 10 th anniversary edition DVD in 2003 I don’t know why but I never acquired it. I traded in all my anime, comedies and action flicks. Unfortunately, in the mid-2000s I had to get rid of it when money was tight. All I remember now is one day having the VHS, and having it until it first hit DVD in the late 90s. I have no direct memory of getting that VHS, but I assure you I did eventually buy it, though I seem to think that destined purchase didn’t actually occur until many years later. It just didn’t roll through my mind casually destined to be chucked somewhere deep and dark where it would eventually become forgotten altogether, no, when I saw the name of this movie, my mind branded it into every corner and onto every firing synapse it could.Īmazon states it hit VHS in June of ’95, which must be around the time I saw it on MTV. I finally noticed during one of the snippets the name of the movie- Ninja Scroll. Were they planning on airing it? I never had any idea. I couldn’t understand why they were showing it either. I can’t remember if MTV was airing an anime movie, or series, or what, but they kept showing snippets of Scroll before and after the commercial breaks, and the moment I set eyes on it my jaw dropped. For me it was during a marathon of The Maxx in 1995. Trust me, if you’re an anime lover, you never forget the first time you saw Ninja Scroll. And you bet this qualifies as a memory movie for me. It’s up there with Vampire Hunter D (1985), Akira (1988) and Ghost In The Shell (1995), just to name three. Ninja Scroll is one of those movies that have reached anime classic status.