Bandai Entertainment and the animation studio Bones have teamed up to offer audiences one of the more rousing samurai epics in recent memory.  This is the first time helming of a full-length movie for director Masahiro Ando, but you certainly wouldn’t know it—Sword of the Stranger sports some the best direction in an anime feature I’ve seen in a while.  With a background that includes stints as an animator or storyboard artist on properties such as Fullmetal Alchemist, Ghost in the Shell, and Cowboy Bebop, Ando is certainly well prepared to combine arresting visuals and grand action sequences, but the way that he has married those elements to the typical features of a jidaigeki is quite impressive.

He and screenwriter Fumihiko Takayama also do a nice job of juggling a large cast of characters, all the while cloaking the proceedings with mystery and revealing motives and character history bit by bit.  This strategy helps somewhat to obscure the fact that the essential plot is extremely familiar, involving the stuff of countless Hollywood action-fantasy outings and even Saturday morining cartoons:  there’s a potion (forgive me—an “elixir”) that will grant immortality, and the bad guys of course must sacrifice someone good to make it work, so then we’ve got your basic race-against-time/innocent-in-peril structure at work.

What makes Sword of the Stranger’s treatment of this premise more intriguing than most others is that the core villains are Chinese—with much of the dialogue in Mandarin—which sets up some interesting cultural clashes as well as contrasts in fighting styles.  I say “core villains” because certainly enough the baddies are Japanese as well.  Is the plot, then, which involves Ming emissaries creating a fortress on Japanese soil, a metaphor for China’s growing dominance in the region today and the subsequent eclipse of Japan’s economic/political might?  Maybe.  Mitigating against such an interpretation is the fact that two of the key prinicipals are gaijin (or gweilo, take your pick), suggesting that this Sengoku-set drama is foreshadowing the nineteenth century “opening” of East Asia to Western imperialism.  Again, maybe.  The creative talents at Bones could have just figured that dropping a six-foot blonde warrior into the middle of all the blood-spraying mayhem would provide a neat visual accent.

The good guys, for their part, are likable even if their thematic trappings are likewise familiar to us.  The teaming of a master swordsman and a pint-sized kid places Sword of the Stranger somewhere on the spectrum between Lone Wolf and Cub and Dororo.  Similarly, the hero’s lack of a name (in Japanese he’s called “Nanashi”), is also not particularly original, but again Sword of the Stranger adroitly avoids the outright cliché:  our protagonist’s backstory is especially heavy and memorable—one might even be tempted to call it shocking.  Probably most importantly, the characters effectively serve their primary purpose throughout—they keep the action coming.

With fight scenes that play out as a cross between traditional chambara and wire-work HK movies from the ‘90s, Sword of the Stranger’s set pieces are not staged in ways that would immediately call a standard anime to mind.  That’s because the choreography is spectacular without being fantastical, with the end result that the action is rendered more realistic and satisfying.  Ando and his team also handle the moments of stillness and quiet effectively, although I feel that in a small handful of scenes the figures are a bit too static.  Still, the painterly backgrounds are often gorgeous and the musical score is so stirring that I sat through all the closing credits simply so I could hear every last drop of it.  In short, this is a first-rate production on almost every level.

In L.A. Sword of the Stranger is screening with Japanese audio and English subtitles.  In the New York version, which is the one I saw, the dubbing is fine for the most part, particularly Aidan Drummond as young Kotaro.  My one gripe with the work of the English language cast is that sometimes the secondary characters sound a little too milquetoast; I don’t have a problem with the flattened, Midwest infections, but when these get further blanderized it’s as if these are suburban guys chatting over their hedges rather than dealing with matters of bloody intrigue.  With either version, though, you’re not apt to go wrong if you’re an anime or jidaigeki fan, let alone both.