Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Not sure how many of you are anime fans, but if you are and have seen Blade of the Immortal (if not you should, edo period samurai) will want to check this trailer out. Gotta love good Japanese live action anime flicks.

I don't watch as much anime as I would like, and I haven't heard about the original material for this movie, but the trailer seems the kind of thing I could enjoy.

I'm wondering just how wide a release this movie is getting. Would like to see a chanbara film on the big screen. Could kick myself for missing the Kenshin movies!

if it gets a release in the states it will be small

You can bet the release will be small unless it makes a gigantic splash in the festival circuits - and even then, it won't be huge. Even though it has the advertisement value of being Takashi Miike's 100th film (holy crap), he's not a widely known enough name for that to do much for a wider release.

With a little luck I'm seeing it during the soon to come Copenhagen PIX festival myself. Though I do need to also watch/read the original material.

Yeah watch the anime, its great. i just dled it again and started rewatching it.

The manga this is based on was published by Dark Horse, and I started reading it around the same time as UY in the late 90s (Stan and Sergio Aragones actually did pinups for it, but my google-fu has failed to turn up images of them). It's a really cool manga, and this movie looks like a very faithful adaptation, Takashi Miike was definitely the right director to faithfully recreate the insane gory parts of the manga.

Oh man I had no idea that Stan and Sergio did pinups for it! I have to see those! I loved the anime and had to rewatch it after seeing the trailer.

I began collecting Blade of the Immortal when it first came out from Dark Horse. Somewhere along it's run I stopped, for whatever reason I can't recall.

I am looking forward to watching the movie.

I watched this on Blu-Ray a few days ago and enjoyed it a lot. I would put it up there with the 70s Lone Wolf and Cub movies as one of the best manga to live-action adaptions (although the unique style of the artwork from the Blade of the Immortal manga obviously doesn't translate to live-action). Very faithful to the earlier parts of the manga visually and story-wise, I haven't read the whole manga yet (but I want to when all of the omnibus editions from Dark Horse come out, probably sometime next year), so I can't say how faithfully it handles the later parts (I imagine lots of it probably gets cut though). I did like that it has a reasonably satisfying ending and doesn't just end on a big "To be Continued" and leave us hanging for a sequel that may or may not get made. I would highly recommend it to everyone here.

Not for children.