Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc Blu-ray Review
Rashômon Kenshin.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 22, 2013
The title of Akira Kurosawa's legendary film
Rashômon has become synonymous with the supposed unknowability of "the truth", but it's also become
shorthand for the notion of revisiting the same story from different points of view. In Kurosawa's formulation, the
viewer is presented a number of different versions of the same story and is left to puzzle which—if any—of them most
resembles what actually happened. In clumsier hands, this same gambit can seem decidedly less like Art and more like,
well, Gimmick. Fairly recently a gaggle of Japanese filmmakers returned to
Rashomon and came up with a pretty
lame revisiting of the same core story,
Tajomaru: Avenging Blade. But even American filmmakers have approached this same idea in
such less than stellar fare as
Vantage
Point.
Vantage Point might have seemed to have had less of a formidable shadow to pull itself out
from under than did
Tajomaru: Avenging Blade (which was fated going in to be compared—unfavorably—to
Rashômon), but this film suffered from a glut of information coming late in the film that actually sought to depict
"objectively" what had been shown previously from various "subjective" perspectives, a perhaps fatal mistake in a film
that sets itself up to deliberately skew the audience's apprehension of what's going on and whom to trust. Now some
might question the need for this frankly convoluted concept to be applied, intentionally or unintentionally, to the
relatively less intellectually demanding world of anime (yes, a gross generalization, but you get the idea), but that is
exactly what has happened in
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc. And in fact this "reboot" suffers from much the
same problem that afflicted
Tajomaru: Avenging Blade, since it is revisiting one of the most fondly remembered
storylines from the original
Rurouni Kenshin anime series. This supposedly "new, improved" version also bears
a certain resemblance to
Vantage Point in that a
ton of information is crammed into it, sometimes
seemingly willy-nilly, giving the project a sort of stuffed, yet strangely redacted, feel, like a
Reader's Digest
version of Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace.
Rurouni Kenshin can be a pretty opaque franchise to jump into headlong, if for no other reason that it is
absolutely
stuffed to the gills with various names for some characters (including its lead) as well as a glut of terms that get
bandied
about with little if any explanation or, especially in this set of two "episodes", context. The lead character is Himura
Kenshin, a onetime assassin who now wanders the countryside attempting to atone for his past life by offering
protection
to those in need (in this particular aspect, the series is quite reminiscent of a male version of Balsa in
Moribito: Guardian of
the
Spirit). One of the interesting things about
Rurouni Kenshin is how it quite artfully blends real life
historical characters with fictional ones, though in this particular set, the fictional elements tend to outweigh the "real
life"
ones.
The main bad guy in this particular arc might in fact be mistaken for a bad
mummy. Shishio Makoto shares
several salient characteristics with Himura Kenshin, not the least of which is a past life as an assassin. In fact Shishio
often calls Himura his "brother", an appellation which Himura doesn't take very kindly to, though Shishio at least has
the wherewithal to accurately describe them as more or less opposite sides of the same coin. The most compelling
thing about Shishio, and the one which makes him so unforgettable from a purely visual standpoint, is the fact that the
character has been horribly burned over almost all of his body, and so he is swaddled in bandages that in fact make him
look gruesomely mummy-esque. Shishio is also prone to giving portentous speeches that have a certain Darwinian, or
even an outright Nietzschean, quality, bemoaning the stupidity of the weak and how they're fated to be ruled, if not
destroyed, by those with more power. (Lest those who don't pay attention to ratings start watching this with young children around,
there's one fairly graphic scene of Shishio involved in the "act of love".)
The third main character in this so-called Kyoto Arc is the young teenage girl Misao. Misao chases after Himura in a
forest, demanding to see Aoshi, her mentor in the martial arts and a man for whom she has perhaps more than merely
a "professional" interest in. As should come as no great surprise, Misao and Himura start as relative enemies, but soon
forge an uneasy if ultimately solid alliance. There are a gaggle of minor characters that fill out the two parts of this set,
but this trio provides the main focus for the vast bulk of the action, and in fact the main showdown is of course centered
squarely on the long standing rivalry between Shishio and Himura.
The main problem with
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc boils down to one very basic but ultimately telling
question:
why? Why revisit a storyline that was already told more fully (and some might argue
much
more effectively) in the so-called second season of the show (there were no actual "seasons" in the original broadcast
of
Rurouni Kenshin, but the Kyoto Arc took place in the second glut of episodes). And what exactly did the
creative staff think they were accomplishing by
supposedly shifting the focus to Misao's point of view.
"Supposedly" is another operative word here, for the gambit is not only highly questionable, it's also highly debatable,
since the point of view still tends to veer fairly regularly to both Himura and Shishio (in fact there are isolated moments
when these characters are nowhere near Misao and yet still occupy the frame and the main storytelling). In fact, it's
kind of like a Japanese
Rashômon nesting doll.
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc Blu-ray, Video Quality
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p
transfer in 1.78:1. I had seen a
lot of complaints on various anime forums from longtime
Rurouni Kenshin
fans about the animation style of the two supposed "features" (really more like extended episodes masquerading as OVAs) in this set, but I
have
to wonder if they were watching something that I certainly wasn't. While there's no debating the fact the style here is
somewhat different from the main
Rurouni Kenshin series, it's quite lustrously beautiful quite a bit of the time and it
pops especially well in this high definition presentation. Colors are bold and extremely well saturated, line detail is as sharp
as a tack, and best of all there's a lot of well done dimensionality that adds some incredible depth to quite a few
sequences. This has a somewhat lither, more "modern", appearance than the main
Rurouni Kenshin outing, which
may account for at least some of the complaints, but when taken on its own merits, this release offers some really nice
looking animation.
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
Rurouni Kenshin: New Kyoto Arc is a project that probably never needed to be done in the first place. The Kyoto Arc is fondly
remembered by longtime
Rurouni Kenshin fans, and those are the people one would think this new offering is geared toward, and yet
those fans are going to be disappointed by the exclusion of vast swaths of material as well as a kind of haphazard handling of even general plot
developments. The one place I personally will take issue with the many complaints I've read about the
New Kyoto Arc is with regard to
the animation. Yes, it's different from the original
Rurouni Kenshin, but that doesn't automatically mean it's
bad, and in fact I
personally think it's quite beautiful a lot of the time. It looks undeniably great on this new Blu-ray. This really doesn't warrant an outright
recommendation since the main content is so much better explored in the original anime, but curious fans or rabid completists may well want to
check this out anyway.
