Rurouni Kenshin (2 out of 4)
Simply Put: A lavishly painted eggshell filled with air.
I feel like beginning this review with a disclaimer. I used to love this show to pieces. Of the shows I watched during the heyday of Toonami, Rurouni Kenshin was my absolute favorite. I learned how to program a VCR just so I could re-watch episodes later. The manga was the first and last I ever collected from start to finish. I even remember a school field trip to New York City in the seventh grade during which I ducked into some shitty China Town toy store and bought an overpriced, plastic Aoshi Shinomori figurine. I read the fan fiction. I memorized the name of every move, and ravenously consumed each episode of its televised run, missing only one because of a time slot change. At the time it seemed like a perfect, inspirational show worth every ounce of love and fascination I heaped upon it.
Funny, the things we think and do in youth.
In reviewing it now, I am torn between trying to relive that love and being harsher, as I inevitably must be in a reevaluation, because the truth is that the show has some deep problems that can’t easily be ignored by an older, more logical mind. I know that it is an internationally beloved and popular classic of the anime world, and despite the good things about the show, its high production values and its occasionally poignant moments, I feel I would be doing a disservice to myself and the show if I allowed my review to get bogged down in fond memories. I’ve loved very few anime as much as I did this one, and it is on that note that I thank Rurouni Kenshin for being just the right amount of literary spark at a time in my life when it served me best.
While I can’t say that I wouldn’t have ended up in the same place without you, you were an undeniable part of my blossoming love for stories. I will never forget you, and with that I go forward to tear you down.
That sounded pretty dramatic, and in all honesty the show really isn’t that bad if you don’t think about it too hard. It’s educational in places (in a good way), and some of the plot directions start to approach greatness. But I digress. The first problem is the execution of the concept. We meet Kenshin, a swordsman who wandered around Japan for ten years after the Meiji Revolution tore down the Tokugawa Shogunate and ushered in an unprecedented era of openness in Japanese foreign policy, in which western culture began to find its way into the domestic sphere. Kenshin was one of the best soldiers of the rebel forces, starting out as a young assassin before converting to a foot soldier. His personal philosophy at the time the show takes place is a bit confusing, which is important considering that much of the drama stems from it. He frequently states that his goal is to protect innocent people, and to live peacefully. In service of this goal he carries a reverse bladed sword, effectively the most convoluted nightstick of all time. Here’s the thing though. Despite the dominant, outside edge of the blade being dull, there’s still a blade on the inside curve.
Think about that for a second. If this man, Kenshin, is all about protecting people and never killing again, then why does he wield a weapon that still has the power to kill, not to mention horribly bludgeon, his opponent? Indeed, he comes quite close to using that blade on an opponent early on in the show. Sure his training in the deadly arts is specific to the sword, so it makes sense that he would be most effective with that weapon, but doesn’t the mere fact of him having it in the first place seem strange when placed against the proposed logic and mentality of the character? How are we supposed to take him seriously? And for that matter, why fight at all anymore? Wouldn’t the very practice of fighting and engaging an opponent in violence seem abhorrent and oppositional to the goal of finding peace, both personal and external? The problem here is they’re trying to get a violent presentation to coexist with a message of peace. It’s another power fantasy, and it just doesn’t fly.
Kenshin is a peaceful man, and yet he uses a move on some scrub that sprays rocks and dirt with enough force to leave him covered in bruises. He’s a peaceful man, yet he hits a dude in the throat hard enough to crush his windpipe. He’s a peaceful man, yet he specifically aims to destroy a man’s thumb in order to permanently incapacitate his sword arm. He is not compelled to do any of these things; they are of his own strategic volition. If that’s what he’s supposed to be like when he’s peaceful, then we can only wonder what he’s like when he’s violent.
But wait! As it turns out, we do get to see what he’s like when he’s violent. This is conveniently expressed in the form of some weird alter ego state which, when unleashed, suddenly compels him to lose control and talk like a sociopath. It is only when he enters this state that everyone else suddenly realizes all bets are off, as though his violent streak from before meant nothing at all. It’s one of the most breathtakingly clumsy attempts at building a character psychology that I’ve ever seen. In this violent state he almost splits a man’s head in two. He strikes a man across the face so hard that he breaks his jaw. He hits a man in the shoulder with enough blunt force to crush the ligaments, effectively paralyzing his arm. This is disturbingly aggressive behavior, and we’re somehow supposed to understand it as separate from Kenshin’s normal self because he’s in Battousai mode or whatever.
One of the most ridiculous scenes takes place right after the fight between Kenshin and Saito gets halted by Okubo. Kenshin is still talking in his mean battle voice or whatever, and upon realizing it, he PUNCHES HIMSELF IN THE FACE, which somehow returns him to his doofy goofy self. Wait, what? It doesn’t stop there. The other characters see him do this and they’re all appropriately confused, just like the audience, but then Kaoru hears him talking in his nice guy voice and shouts “KENSHIN YOUR BACK TO NORMAL TRALALALALA!!!” before getting all up in his grill. We’re supposed to laugh at the scene, but I’m sorry, are you out of your mind? This man just survived one of the most aggressive and violent fights in the whole show, and your going to run up to him like he didn’t just try to murder somebody? Are you crazy? And then the gang tries to seriously, earnestly insist to Okubo afterward that Kenshin isn’t a violent assassin anymore, and that he’s left that life behind him. HELLO? Did you twits not see the brutal fight that JUST happened FIVE FUCKING MINUTES AGO?
What we’re working with here is a world almost completely divorced from even a bare minimum of psychological reality, despite the obvious efforts to the contrary. Despite all the show’s serious moral bluster, it’s tense presentation, and it’s protagonist’s preachy talk about non-violence, the words and the actions of the man in question just don’t stack up against one another. It is under the banner of this non-reality that we must disregard anything the show tries to tell its audience. It cannot be trusted.
None of this would be so bad if the show weren’t so earnest about moralizing and psychologically evaluating its characters. It desperately wants the inner plight of its hero, his desire to live a peaceful life, to resonate with the audience, to make them feel indignant at those ruffians who would wish him and his makeshift family harm. We are supposed to sympathize with his struggle to avoid the violence in his heart. The show just doesn’t know enough to have a chance of succeeding at this. How can I respect villains who make themselves such easy targets, both in action and in personality? How can I like heroes who don’t ever fear or question Kenshin’s violent outbursts, and in fact even seem to accept it? How can I respect Saito’s moral ambiguity when the only guys he kills are basic scumbag villains? How is it that nearly all of Kenshin’s fighting friends use blunt or non-lethal weapons that conveniently allow them to avoid taking life in battle and emerge victorious just like Kenshin does? All the pieces are just too conveniently placed to avoid engaging anything difficult in the story. It’s violence for the child’s palate.
When Kenshin’s opponents are violent, it’s because they were born that way. When Kenshin or a good guy is violent, it’s a national emergency that we don’t dwell upon, forgetting it as quickly as possible. Okay.
I wanted to see Saito kill someone in the Kamiya Dojo when he snuck in dressed like a police officer. I wanted to see Sano really abandon Kenshin and friends and get arrested for his attempted coup with Katsu. I wanted Kenshin’s buddies to talk about him badly behind his back. I wanted to see Kenshin deal with an alcohol problem and lose his temper over something petty. Or hell, at anything for that matter. I wanted Kaoru to know that Kenshin was risking his life by trying to learn the ultimate attack. I wanted to see Aoshi take Okina’s life in the shack, and the young (and obnoxious and annoying) Misao’s love for him shattered afterward. That’s the blood I wanted to see. Make your characters suffer. Go all the way. Don’t have your little circle of good guys and your little circle of bad guys chip away at each other with flashy moves until someone gets knocked out. Even if it looks cool, you’re not pushing the issues of your chosen concept. It’s like playing Tee Ball with balled up newspaper. Its soft and boring.
(I actually seem to recall a good number of supplemental materials in which the original author, Nobuhiro Watsuki, described his surprise at the popularity of certain characters with the female readership. I wonder if his surprise was genuine, as implied in his notes, or whether it was surprise at the fact that his and his editor’s calculated moves to hook the female readership actually worked. I’ve written before about the industry of appealing to both boys and girls, and you can see the male and female elements battling in this show. It’s quite cynical. When Kenshin and friends insult Saito behind his back and he “responds” from a distance with a statement that the Shinsengumi, the sword corp he belonged to, should be feared and hated in the present time, it’s like hearing a male teen voice respond to a female teen voice. Saito is an outwardly violent character who would most easily appeal to boys, and in the minds of creators trying to capture young, heterosexual male and female voices in their script, Saito captures the male voice in that moment by flippantly dismissing the collective female distaste conveyed in the haughty insults of Kenshin’s friends. Same thing with their surprise when they find out he’s married. Heck, now that I think about, pretty much all of the comedy bits in the show are done from a prototypical feminine perspective. This advanced level of manipulation is missing from Watsuki’s decidedly more stupid and boyish project, Buso Renkin, which leads me to believe that his editor had more to do with the wide appeal of Rurouni Kenshin than anything Watsuki thought up on his own).
Let’s talk about the second season now, supposedly the best part. Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie. What’s so amazing about it is how it builds anticipation. I was afraid of Kurtz miles before Willard and his boat buddies ever set foot into that compound in the jungle, and this without ever laying eyes on him. The note of fear in the voices of the higher ups who command his assassination, Willard’s mystifying investigations into his targets history, the increasingly psychotic dangers of the deep Cambodian jungle, and the fear that something hidden out there wants you dead and can strike at any moment; all these things are masterfully woven into a tense ride south down the river towards hell.
The Shishio storyline is not Apocalypse Now. It has a similar idea, but it commits enough errors to only bear a passing resemblance. We see what Shishio looks like too soon, for one thing. His cabal of circus freaks is too flashy and flamboyant, not hidden enough to be taken as a serious threat. A group of plainclothes assassins hidden among the levels of Kyoto society would have been far more interesting and sensible. Instead we get a transvestite with a double entendre for a weapon, a man with bat wings, and a literal giant. Why should I take it seriously when I can laugh my ass off instead? Shishio’s supposedly widespread spy network isn’t used enough. And most importantly, Shishio’s opponents are too invulnerable to make us afraid for their lives. Okina fights off the assassins who try to kill him in his sleep like they’re nothing. The fear of death just isn’t there.
The Shishio storyline also gets bogged down in subplots. The sudden death of Yumi, the hasty back stories of the circus freaks, and Sojiro’s encounter with a suddenly philosophical Senkaku are all examples of half-assed dead weight that distracts from the main show of Kenshin hunting down Shishio. Of these subplots, I felt like the only one that really added anything significant was the sequence where Kenshin learned the ultimate move from Hiko. The encounter with someone who manages, in some capacity, to criticize and undermine Kenshin’s character, even if it isn’t as pointed as I would have liked it to be, felt like the most fully realized dramatic character movement in the whole arc.
There was a really interesting opportunity in the Shishio storyline, even with the flaws I mentioned previous. I would have been very interested to see Kenshin essentially forced to relive his assassin days in Kyoto, fending off Shishio’s men in the streets and alleyways as nightmarish flashbacks keep returning, eventually culminating to the point where he can’t tell the difference between the past and the present anymore. Instead we get a video game, where each enemy acts as a level boss leading up to the final encounter. They had a chance at something meaningful but they took a lazy route.
(And another thing. When the dudes who were supposed to kill Shishio after the Boshin war had him knocked out cold on the ground, why didn’t they just stab him or cut off his head? Or better yet, why not shoot him with the gun they used to knock him out? Why would they go to the trouble of setting him on fire? Why wouldn’t they go with the more guaranteed execution method? Were symbolic deaths that important to them?)
The third season is insane, plunging the show into farce that’s completely antithetical to its earlier ambitions, so I’m not going to talk about its content. Instead I’m going to move on and talk about the sterling qualities of the show that make it worthwhile after all these years. The backgrounds and scene lighting are lavish and absolutely stunning, first of all. One salivates at the possibilities of what better written stories could do on such a budget, but that’s only after being floored by the show’s visual coherence. The various city streets and interior shots are sumptuous yet possessive of a lived-in quality, explored from various camera angles and vantage points by director Kazuhiro Furuhashi’s roaming eye and given chronological weight by an expressive array of lighting. Even the digital streaks of shadows and colored light that stretch across large corner sections fit appropriately, becoming sunlight or a piece of obscuring darkness in scene. The repeated locations, like the Kamiya Dojo and the Akabeko restaurant, become recognizable landmarks that counterbalance the trips to one shot locations like Yutaro’s mansion and the pirate’s island. Furuhashi throws in some tricks as well, such as a first person camera when Saito is walking toward Kenshin (a trick he would later repeat in Le Chevalier De’on), the flush when Kenshin uses his ultimate move, and even a few choice shots done in letterbox widescreen.
(The character designs are a different story, however. They run through a gamut of noticeable alterations in proportion and feature placement over the course of the show. Cheeks bubble in and out like balloons, and eyes morph from gelatinous spheres to being sharp as knives).
Indeed, most of the shows memorable moments are thanks to its production. The scene where Kenshin leaves Kaoru to go to Kyoto, for example, is schmaltzy in context, but the earnestness of the presentation, the soft green glow of the fireflies and the pale moonlight, give it an undeniable charm. The encroaching dusk that penetrates the dojo when Saito attacks Kenshin gives the scene a higher level of intensity, as do the shadows of the library where Kenshin fights Aoshi for the second time. The entire journey through Shishio’s lair is extravagant, with the soft, celestial light inside the room where Kenshin fights Sojiro serving as a particular treat, providing the sensation of surfacing after walking through so many dark rooms. The fog when Kenshin first meets Kaoru, or the later rainfall during which he learns the ultimate attack from Hiko, affect the environment convincingly, leaving puddles and giving everything a “wet” color tone.
One of my favorite moments in the show, and one exemplary of the production carrying the load, is when Aoshi and Kenshin are fighting in the library at the end of episode 50, and Kenshin just finishes delivering a sermon to his opponent. The sermon was boring as hell, and it doesn’t earn the direction that follows. Aoshi is so floored by Kenshin’s words that he can’t move or speak, held in place by the gravity of the truth that he’s just realized. I put it that way because that’s what the scene succeeds in making it look like just happened. The camera gets Aoshi from three angles, cutting in time with the music. Then the music slows down, leaving a string instrument of some kind to play a lone note over the following seconds. Aoshi stands in the center of the shot, facing the camera. Kenshin stands in front of him in the foreground, and Sanosuke stands behind him in the background. As the music plays, the foreground and background slide in opposite directions, pulling away from Aoshi in the center. The visual language here isolates him, as does the single instrument in the score, and the view of the camera, staring straight into his heart, is damning. Our eyes are behind Kenshin, put in the position of supporting his castigation of Aoshi. It’s a striking shot, communicating the intended emotions better than the actual script.
This impressive visual effort that lasts for much of the show’s run before it gets inexplicably replaced somewhere in the third season by some of the ugliest digital coloring I’ve ever seen. This goes beyond the plasticine sheen of similarly suffering shows caught at the beginning of that transition from hand drawn to digital, and includes such lowlights as the final episode, which features an animated Kenshin and Kaoru digitally traversing a shot of a real live beach with grainy, pixelated footage. The animation itself takes a nose dive as well, to the point where the previously limber and smooth camera and character movement is replaced with creaking shortcuts. Watching the rise and fall of the animation quality in this show is a microcosm of TV animation’s transition from hand drawn to digital.
In addition to the mostly strong visuals, Furuhashi also directs the action very well. He has a good eye for where to put the camera during a fight, letting the sometimes dizzying video game speed of the characters dictate the camera movement. It flows seamlessly from fast to slow. When Kenshin and a foe are standing still and staring each other down, for example, the camera might look at the sky or the trees before floating above the combatants and looking down on them, as if to suggest that the heavens themselves have turned to watch. He knows how long to hold a stare down before kicking things off as well, lingering just long enough for musical tension to pop like a starting gun, launching the fighters at one another. Once they start moving the camera goes ballistic, teleporting close to and far from the action, travelling in circles around the fight for closeups and body shots, and delivering a sense of speed that makes other anime fights seem slow and lumbering by comparison. It’s a very athletic camera, so to speak.
While the action itself is exciting to watch, it’s almost ruined by that annoying tendency of anime to insert shots of characters talking or having calm discussion while a battle rages on in front of them. The peanut gallery feels particularly inappropriate in this show because of how fast the action is. It’s extremely wonky visual language when a spectator takes five or six seconds to explain or react to something that just happened in two or three (See Evangelion for an example of a show that handles this well).
The musical score by Noriyuki Asakura is an odd creature, going beyond leitmotif to the point where most of the character themes have two or three extra versions for any possible emotional turn or event in the show. Its overproduced in my opinion, but there are some nice tracks in the first season that flit between the sentimental and vaudevillian, a mix that well fits the weird, variety-show hodge podge of plots and characters in that section. When Kenshin fights in the first season, there is almost no doubt in the viewer’s mind that he’s going to win, just going on how jaunty the fight music sounds. This tone captures the video game spirit of the show, or it’s more honest moments, in my opinion. This is forgotten in the second season, replaced by a new set of tracks that succeed in being overtly mysterious and haunting, accentuating the visual design, even while the writing fails to match up. It’s not a bad soundtrack, and there are some nice melodies, but its acutely reflective of the overall character of the show it’s being used for, and it suffers the same identity crisis in application as a result.
So what else is there to talk about, really? I guess I could talk about the manga, but the thing I remember most about it is the change in the art style from that early nineties cutesy look to an overproduced style that’s sharp and blocky enough to look like it was honed in an armory. I really hated the way the story played out in the end. The whole corpse doll and kidnapping plots struck me as contrived, and the agony of Kenshin’s depression, by that point, rang hollow and false. The whole endgame felt cheap and dirty to me, with all the popular characters reappearing, and a bunch of big, gassy fights whose showiness undermined whatever dramatic force was intended. I could almost see the command list beneath each character. Quarter circle forward, strong punch. It made me mad, because I thought the authors had finally taken a risk by killing Kaoru. That caught me off guard, because it never occurred to me they would kill off a character they considered appealing to any part of their audience. I was extremely curious to see where they would go after that, but being naive and unlearned in the ways of corporate story telling, I felt like I’d been swindled once they revealed she was still alive. God damn, that was some bullshit.
It is in this light that I find myself feeling ambivalent about the newly announced Rurouni Kenshin anime project. Whether it’s going to be a remake of already adapted material, or an adaptation of the revenge story line, I don’t see much hope for it to do anything interesting when it is bound to such poorly executed source material. That’s not to say it’s impossible, though. The two OVA’s produced by Studio Deen (reviews forthcoming), took parts of the story line and tried to recreate from the ground up the serious, psychological war tale that the TV series and original manga had pretended but failed to be. They come a lot closer to succeeding too. But who knows? Maybe this’ll be the iteration we’ve all been waiting for, the one that blows the lid off our collective conception of post war narratives from here till the end of time.
Because here’s the thing. You might think this is crazy after all the trash talking I just did, but I do believe that there are true and frightening things lurking within the heart of the Rurouni Kenshin story. They’re just waiting to be uncovered, to have all the bullshit removed, to have the Japanese anime surgically removed from the rest of it. There is darkness in being hated and feared, in being hounded by your past, and Kenshin Himura is a character whom I still believe can show us something real about being a soldier. That is only if, however, he is pried free from the fingers of his handlers and given a chance to do so.
-Fiero
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