Saw Sword of the Stranger, a very pretty anime about a nameless man with a sword (so cool!) protecting a little boy who is some kind of Chosen One. Against them are a troupe of villainous Chinese warriors who have guns and take drugs to numb their pain (what decadence! Boo! Hiss!) Also involved are the Japanese officials who only get in the way (this film was made in 2007). All of that is just window-dressing however. The real reason for the film is the fight scenes.
The film is beautifully drawn and animated. Each gout of blood is individualized and drawn true-to-life. Each broken arm realistically dangles from its sockets. At one point, a guy's hand cuts cut nearly in half and the other half dangles from his stump, like two halves of a sausage, held together by the skin. The non-fighting scenes are done fairly well. I never felt a character was behaving unrealistically, and I never got lost in the plot, even thought the plot gets quite knotty at parts. But when we fight, we get swooning orchestras, keening wood flutes, and visual metaphors. The fights don't totally overwhelm the picture but I feel the film started out as a series of fights and a plot was invented post facto to hang them all together.
The macguffin which the boy is the Chosen One for grants immortality and so there's some nice philosophical jabbing back and forth about who really wants to live forever and what they would do with all that time. This is nice juxtaposition with the fights which are all to-the-death (naturally.) The film is very violent, but mostly pretty. It was a sort of over-indulgent film, packed with overwrought emotions and badass posturing. I thought it was kind of silly, but of course I did. A very pretty film.
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