Ninja Slayer From Animation

Episode 1

What hath Sho Kosugi wrought?!

American mass media of the early 1980s had a fascination with ninjas and ninjitsu, and Kosugi, an actor and martial artist, was often at the center of that fascination. Be it as Lee van Cleef's TV adversary in The Master, shadowy bad guy Hasegawa in Cannon Films' classic Enter the Ninja, or even a vengeance-seeking antihero in the film Pray for Death, Kosugi was one of the first—and easily the most recognizable—to take up the katana, shuriken, and snappy black outfit and really sell the idea of ninjas to the American public.

Of course, the real-life ninja of Japan amounted to a couple of big farming clans who got really good at guerilla warfare and espionage during the Warring States era. Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt's book Ninja Attack! is a great primer on what the real life ninja of the Koga and Iga clans were like. Watch enough anime, and you'll get a taste of that tradition—but that's not what Studio Trigger are going for with this series. Instead, they're using the great and proud tradition of the schlocky American ninja movie, an absurd cultural appropriation, and appropriating it right back. Here we experience the story of Fujikido Kenji, whose wife and kids were killed by ninja. Because of this, by his sword, all ninja must die! He wants revenge, you see. Just like Sho Kosugi in Cannon Films' Revenge of the Ninja, which is a movie about a ninja who wants revenge.

Ninja Slayer's background is a little deeper than the gang at Trigger having a “hey, wouldn't it be funny if we…” style conversation, though. Amazingly enough, the idea was originally a series of joke tweets, Japanese “translations” of schlocky ninja stories by a pair of purported American authors. Tweets led TO Books, books led to manga adaptations (one of which is coming soon from Vertical), and it all ends up onscreen here.

The show's conceit makes sense, of course. Just like the trailer voiceover for Enter the Ninja tells us, “Only a ninja… can stop a ninja!” and that's definitely the case here. In Ninja Slayer, the shuriken is the deadly symbol of good guy ninjas. Ninjas eat a lot of sushi to survive, and are weirdly polite to each other, because the goofy, halting Japanese spoken in American ninja movies frequently uses the wrong keigo, or politeness level. Kenji starts his slaying—the elapsed time between the show's opening moment and the first ninja slaying is about three and a half minutes—by dispatching a robot ninja with a giant stovepipe helmet, before beheading a different ninja with a single mighty chop.

One one hand, Ninja Slayer is a clear and obvious successor to Inferno Cop, Trigger's debut work that ran on YouTube as part of the Anime Bancho program block. Inferno Cop was willfully and marvelously dumb, and animated with a spellbinding minimum of effort; the show's animation was so flat that it was like watching an old 2D platform video game, to the extent that the show itself referenced it. Ninja Slayer frequently employs this style to humorous effect, but on the other hand, the show occasionally breaks out into a splendid, frantic, kinetic, Yoshinori Kanada-style action scene, where Kenji leaps and charges and rocks the hell out of the camera. It's fun to watch, but pretty jarring.

There are a few other fine points to this first episode. The musical intro and outros are both excellent—I'm particularly fond of Boom Boom Satellites' opening theme, “Back in Black.” The show's sense of humor is unrelenting and weird, making good and repeated use of awkward pauses, bizarre dialogue, and fights against bad guys with names like Naraku Ninja. At the same time, the show's hammy script and jagged pacing might throw new viewers off, if they aren't sufficiently spooked by the color palette, which looks like it leapt right off of a Trapper-Keeper from 1989. I have a feeling that fare like Ninja Slayer is an acquired taste-- a taste that you will only acquire if you seek the secrets of the ninja!

Peculiar cross-cultural experiments like this almost always excite me, and this is no exception. I'm pretty pumped for the remaining 25 installments of this action-packed ninja epic, and hopeful that Kenji will continue to slay ninjas. In Japan, where Ninja Slayer runs on Nico Nico, the show is padded out by several minutes of live-action footage featuring skits, interviews, and a girl posing in a bikini. Normally I'd be all for including everything, but I really don't think we're missing much here. In any case, I look forward to Kenji doing some more slaying. After all, a ninja cannot escape his destiny!

Rating: B+

Ninja Slayer From Animation is currently streaming on Funimation.