The 10th Anniversary Special Edition of Ninja Scroll shows why it established Yoshiaki Kawajiri as an anime star.

Ninja Scroll --10th Anniversary Special Edition
Theatrical feature, 1993. Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri. 94 minutes. Price & format: DVD quadrilingual (English, French, Japanese, Spanish) $34.95. Distributor: Manga Entertainment.

Wicked City was Kawajiri's first feature to become popular in America, but it was his Ninja Scroll (which won the Citizen's Award at the February 1993 Yubari International Fantasy/Adventure Film Festival; theatrical release on June 5, 1993), which brought his own name and that of his Madhouse studio to the attention of the fans. Ever since Ninja Scroll's American video release (June 20, 1995), it has been a favorite with the age 17+ fans for its excellent blend of fast-paced fantasy action, extreme violence and eroticism in an intelligently sophisticated plot -- all Kawajiri hallmarks.

Ninja Scroll (Jubei Ninpucho -- literally Jubei Ninja Wind Chronicle) is in the tradition of 19th century popular novels of the early 17th century, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was just becoming established, noble lords still schemed for power and had private armies of ninja, and ninja masters were believed to have raised the arts of spying to supernatural levels. When all the peasants in a village are discovered dead, local Lord Mochizuki sends his Koga clan ninja retainers to investigate. They are slaughtered (except for the beautiful Kagero) by Tessai, one of the "Eight Devils of Kimon," mystic killers who each have a deadly power -- the huge Tessai can turn his body into invulnerable stone.

Tessai is raping Kagero when they are accidentally interrupted by Jubei Kibagami, a wandering ninja who is considered weird because he only fights for moral causes, not money. Jubei does not rescue Kagero as much as he kills Tessai while fighting to remain alive himself, but the result is that the two are forced to work together to escape the remaining seven Devils, each of whom must be fought in a spectacular set-piece battle. A developing romance is hampered by the fact that Kagero has been forced to test poisons for so long that her body has become fatal to any normal man who embraces her. Dakuan, a ninja working for the Shogunate, reveals that the Devils of Kimon have been hired by the "Shogunate of the Dark," loyalists of the previous regime who hope to return to power.

Dakuan tries to force Jubei to work as his assistant, while Kagero's patron abandons her in fear of being crushed in the conflict between Japan's most powerful warlords. Jubei despises them all (except Kagero) as corrupt, honorless power manipulators, but he has his own reasons to want to kill the leader of the Eight Devils, a personal enemy who can resurrect himself from the dead.

Ninja Scroll was one of the earliest U.S. anime DVD releases (May 19, 1998). This 10th Anniversary Special Edition DVD has been remastered and adds French and Spanish language tracks to the usual Japanese and English. The additional features include a half-hour video interview with director/writer Kawajiri, who says that Ninja Scroll has been more popular with American audiences than with Japanese. A couple of questions about Madhouse's recent production of sequences in The Animatrix make the subtle point that Ninja Scroll is almost certainly one of the anime titles which led to Kawajiri's selection as an Animatrix director/writer by the Wachowski Brothers.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).