Sword of the Stranger (2009)

Thanks for the memories!

Better Late Then Never

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This is Masahiro Ando's first and only animated feature . The movie is great with good sword fights with tons of blood. The animation is stunning and voice & acting are very good. The music is outstanding especially in the beginning fight of tittles . The colors, music, story, effects and sword fights are top class. This animation made me look for more action animations. This movie has deep characterization. Exceptional music, astounding cinematography. This is the greatest Samurai animation that i ever seen. I felt ending fight could have been better. A must-watch movie for anime and action movie lovers . this is time-less classic .

OK, sorry, but one of the main characters here is Doge, so I just had to make the title like that. (If you don't know what Doge is, Google "Doge meme".) The movie itself is quite good, by the way. It has a lot of nice action scenes, and a lot - and I mean A LOT - of blood. It is not like "Berserk", of course, but it almost comes pretty close. The animation is excellent and the voice acting is very good. The music is somewhat weird, but also very nice.The writing is serviceable. If it were as good as everything else, I would give the movie a rating of ten out of ten. It is, still, pretty nice, but at certain points the viewer gets drowned in exposition and info-dumping. It is not that annoying, of course, but it could be done better.Anyway, all in all, the movie is very good. It could be perfect, though. Still, I recommend it.

Chinese agents come to Japan hunting a boy. They are well prepared, have a lot of money and seem to be indomitable in battle, especially one of them, who is a blue eyed blonde. The boy is clueless, rude and his only companion and friend is a dog. When they meet a mysterious samurai, he reluctantly agrees to help them escape pursuit.Well drawn, cool action scenes reminiscent of Ninja Scroll, credible characters, doing things for reasons that one can believe, rather than the classic "I will protect something, hear me roar!", and an interesting story with roots in a real event.It lasts for one hour forty minutes and I warmly recommend it. It has some issues at the end when some of the characters are just ridiculously overpowered, but overall it was really cool.

For those of you familiar with Chambara (samurai) movies, Sword of the Stranger, is the anime equivalent. Story line is typical Samurai storyline, wandering samurai helps out a kid and gets caught up in a plot by foreigners and "bad" samurai. without giving the plot line away I will say that if you are familiar with chambara movies and enjoy the stories/genre you will enjoy this movie. Technically wise, this movie is very well animated. Traditional hand drawn cel work mixed with some CG. It is beautiful to look at and the fighting scenes are amongst the best I have seen in anime or in real life action. A beautifully crafted movie that needs to be seen just on the technical aspects alone.