Dagger of Kamui

1985. Movie. 132 min. Historical adventure. org Tetsu Yano (novel). dir Rintaro. scr Mori Masaki. -bc

Dagger of Kamui is a genuine animated epic, crafted with a distinct artistic edge, about a boy from a ninja clan and his search for the secret of his past, which takes him across the ocean on a treasure hunt and back to Japan for the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in the late 1860s.

In Japan circa 1860, a young boy finds his foster mother murdered and is accused of the crime by the villagers, forcing him to flee to the protection of a powerful monk, Tenkai, who has an ulterior motive. Jiro, the boy, is trained in the ninja arts and then sent north on a mission to a village of the Ainu people (Japan’s aboriginals), where he meets his birth mother, who gives him a keepsake containing a secret that various parties are after. Realizing Tenkai’s role in the breakup of his own family and the murder of his father, Jiro heads out on his own, beginning a long journey that takes him to Russia and across the Pacific to America, including a stop in a Nevada frontier town. Along the way he picks up various companions, including Sam, a black American sailor; Oyuki, a lethal female ninja warrior; Julie, a French girl turned Indian princess; and a wolf pup who grows into a powerful pet and ally. Jiro’s family secret leads to a treasure hunt on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California, and ultimately back to Japan where his new wealth finances his clan’s participation in the final battles of the Tokugawa era in 1868–69, a shift which brought Japan out of the feudal era of self-imposed isolation into the modern thrust of the Meiji era.

Director Rintaro gives free reign here to all his experimental impulses, primarily his need to get into the heads of his heroes and show the world as they experience it. There are frequent flashbacks and pieces of memory, often bathed in different colors, and hallucinatory, dreamlike images when the hero is ill or wounded. Backgrounds are sometimes painted in a realistic fashion, sometimes in traditional charcoal-painting style, and sometimes in an abstract manner.

For a film about ninjas in the 1860s, there are quite a number of unusual settings, ranging from the Ainu village in northern Japan, which resembles an American Indian village, to an actual American Indian camp in the Nevada sequence, demonstrating the similarities found among indigenous groups thousands of miles apart. At the end we see re-creations of key battles in Japan that sealed the fate of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The character design deliberately recalls that of manga artist Sanpei Shirato, who wrote and drew the Legend of Kamui manga series and whose works were adapted into two ninja-themed anime TV series in the 1960s, Ninpu Kamui Gaiden and Sasuke. The faces here are squarer and flatter, with wider eyes, than was the norm for 1980s anime design. The movements of the characters—rigid poses in swift, almost weightless motion—match those of the characters in the Kamui TV series. One scene clearly meant as an homage shows a three-way horizontal split screen, a technique commonly used in the same show.

Dagger of Kamui offers the kind of ambitious historical scope not often attempted in theatrical animation. It delves deep into the past, with its journey to a village of Ainu, Japan’s aboriginal people, while also broaching the issues of the Tokugawa shogunate’s turbulent final years, the transition to the Meiji era, and Japan’s entrance onto the world stage. The movie is done in a style that aims more at artistry than violent swordplay entertainment. Every frame is so steeped in delicately crafted imagery, much of it based on traditional art, that the film becomes a work of true Japanese animated art, alongside Vampire Princess Miyu and The Tale of Genji, two other works deeply influenced by the traditional Japanese arts.

Yet for all of the film’s stylization, it’s also an exciting adventure film, laden with knife-, sword-, and gunfights, martial arts maneuvers, and a host of dangers for the hero and his companions, including an avalanche, a raging fire or two, an attempted rape, a shootout at high noon in the dusty street of a Western town, and a fierce battle between opposing armies equipped with cannon and naval guns. Had this been filmed in live-action on the proper scale, it would have been a huge multimillion-dollar blockbuster.

The film’s ostensible theme is one of Japanese unity, bringing together disparate aspects of the country’s past, weeding out corrupt elements and establishing a nation’s rightful place in the world. Interestingly, all this is accomplished by a scale of multicultural collaboration that is quite rare in anime and Japanese pop culture in general. Jiro has an Ainu mother and a Japanese father. He learns traditional Japanese ninja skills but embarks on a journey that involves the cooperation of a European ship captain (Captain Drasnic—a Yugoslavian name), a black American sailor who happens to be a slave, a French girl and the Native Americans who have raised her, and a reporter he meets in Nevada who would later become America’s most famous (and most popular) 19th-century author. In the end, it’s all about family, union and reunion, and reclaiming one’s birthright.

The film’s structure recalls that of Rintaro’s earlier feature, Harmagedon (1983), in which the hero also began his training in Japan, went to America on a specific mission and then returned to Japan to finish it, all with help from a multinational, multiracial band of companions.

Based on a novel by Tetsu Yano, an internationally known author and founding member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan, who translated a multitude of Western science fiction works into Japanese, including the books of Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers). The director, Rintaro (aka Taro Rin), got his start as a director by working with Osamu Tezuka on such series as the original Astro Boy and went on to direct the Galaxy Express 999 movies, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Harmagedon, Spirit Warrior, and X: The Movie, among many others.

American viewers will be pleasantly surprised at the insertion into the narrative of a famous American literary figure who serves as an ally of Jiro in the Nevada sequence.

Dagger had a significant influence on Ninja Scroll (1993), directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, who is a key animator here. There are many stylized elements and dreamlike images, although filtered through Kawajiri’s somewhat darker sensibility. Oyuki, a female ninja in Dagger who starts out as Jiro’s enemy but becomes his lover, clearly foreshadows Kagero, the lethal poison expert in Ninja Scroll, who also falls in love with the hero (Jubei).

violence There is standard swordplay violence, but the blood spurts are depicted by almost-neon streaks of red—too stylized to be considered particularly gory.