Samurai X: The Motion Picture ADV 90 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 03/27/2001

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It seems like a vast majority of my really good memories of anime come from times when I watched them with Joel. Gun samurai, Magic Knight Rayearth while guarding cars in the parking lot of a Korean church were just a few that we've shared. With that in mind, let me tell you a brief one. The particular story in question takes place during the notorious "three years ago". Joel and myself were watching this very movie, Samurai X: The Motion Picture (as it goes by in America) during a train ride up to New York to soak in the premeire of Akira. I can't understand why New York gets all the good anime movie premeires when Philly is a perfectly booming and well populated metropolis. That's beside the point though, I'm trying to tell you a story and you won't let me talk. Back on track, I don't want to get all meta-physical on you or anything, but there's something weird and somewhat disconcerting about watching a movie about a train ride ON a train ride. Honestly, though, the movie isn't about a train ride, that's just how it starts. But, sadly enough, that's just about the most interesting thing that happened to me and my compadre Senor Blanco during the course of Samurai X: The Motion Picture. It's surprising that neither myself nor Joel could find very much to love about this piece, especially considering the amount of Samurai-love that Joel harbors in his heart of hearts, but I don't create these facts... I just present them.

Samurai X: The Motion Picture (which I've found I have a certain affinity for typing the name of over and over) is the story of yet another rebel group fighting against yet another corrupt government/government agent sabotauged by yet another spy/inside man. I mean, really, it's just not that I've seen this plot before, it's that it was the basis of the damn OVAs! And at least those didn't repeat the same Adobe Premeire Lens Flare animation five or six times. I have a serious problem when something or someone bites off something else, but when it happens to be a show biting off its predecessor I just don't know what to do. I get confused and, like so many other emtions, when I get confused I just end up getting angry. You might remember my ire towards the second Tenchi movie, this is much worse. Why? Well, because they don't even take the effort to attempt to present a new story to us. This is the exact same as the OVAs, Kenshin meets and befriends someone and soon finds out that he'd cold-heartedly slain a person near and dear to their heart. Last time it was a fiance, this time its a brother but what's the difference? If I make a movie I'm going to make one where the main character falls in love with the woman whose cat he's slain, and the sequel will be exactly the same save for the replacement of a cat with a dog. Why? Because apparently nobody cares when you don't change anything at all EVER.

 

In fact, the only really notable difference in the two stories is that we're privy to a very important bit of information here. Westerners are a group of drunken foreigns, most of whom are sailors. Yes it's totally weird! But true! I didn't live in the Meiji era, so I can't talk like I know, but I would imagine that there was at least one British guy in the country of Japan that didn't wear a bandana or wave broken bottles at everyone. Oh yeah, and everything is totally spiced up by the lovely brand of slapstick comedy involving massive head trauma that only the cast of Kenshin can provide to us. If you're looking something with a similar amount of beatings to your average harem anime AND swords, look no further! But for those of you that don't immediately get aroused at the sound of that (god bless all of you, god bless you and keep you) the story goes a little something like this: Kenshin finds out he killed his new best friend's loved one, then gets really upset, then decides that he's just not going to say anything and hope everything works out in the end. Add in the surly British soldiers and the standard Kenshin troupe of comic relief and you've got something that's pratically indiscernable from what's come before it, aside from drawn out battles involving screaming maches that seem more suitable to something of Toriyama or Go Nagai calibre.

I've never really been a Kenshin fan, but I feel like this is really pushing the envelope. I'm just going about repeating myself over and over about how very repetetive this is (the spirit of hypocrisy fosters itself deep within me). But let's say that I'm just being sly and proving a point and not that I find it hard to talk about this movie when I said everything that needs to be said about the basic premise of the story about nine months ago. You know, when I wrote up my lovely 'reviews' about prior Kenshin action. So who cares then? Why should I want to watch this? Especially since ADV has released the original Samurai X (or Rurouni Kenshin OVas, if you prefer) in a bundle that probably wouldn't set you back much more than this replica would. I'm not sure if Samurai X: The Motion Picture was recieved well by the anime community considering it came on the scene nearly four years ago and the only 'anime community' I'm even peripherally in touch with anymore is the good folks at the animejump forums, but that's never stopped me before! I think it's safe to assume that out there somewhere there's a large clutch of people who revere this as their animated deity. I am not one of them, praise Jesus.