User Reviews

I have this little known anime a shot after seeing a clip of it on YouTube. It's an average movie with excellent animation. It's hard to class this movies genre, but I think the closest it would be to is simply a drama movie. It had action, a fair bit of gore in some action sequences, and oddly enough a lack of it in others. The story itself is basically a fairy tale. There really isn't a love story here, more of a fantasy with some gender bender strokes in it.

Our protagonist is a young teenage female that likes to do very masculine things like hunting and even dresses as a man to avoid attention sometimes. There are periods of the story that drag on a little bit too much, but it can be overlooked with some decent animation and colouring. If you enjoy Japanese anime and fantasy themes you just might enjoy this film. It was made in 2012 and this comment I am writing is in 2019 and is literally the third comment/review on this film in IMDB which should tell you just how invisible and unknown this anime is to the world. Just making it here to my review you should be patting yourself on the back for having found an extremely rare and very overlooked film!

Like I mentioned above this is just an average film that some anime fans might consider better than average I suppose. If you have an extra couple of hours to spare and enjoy rare anime fantasy genre then this one is for you, the rest of you may not enjoy this one so much...so be forewarned. I give this film a 6/10 with points for animation, excellent voice work, decent sound and an old fashioned 90's feel to this 2012 anime movie.

It's about a young girl who was raised by her grandfather in a remote mountain area. All she knows about life is hunting. After her grandfather dies, her ne'er-do-well brother invites her to come to Edo to live with him. The story of the film is set in the latter part of the 19th century. That's when the novel by Kyokutei Bakin was written. The original novel was set around the year 1490. Anyway, the imagery of the film draws heavily on Tokugawa Period woodcuts and the Kabuki theater. The art work is very high quality. It is occasionally easy to get confused because there are a lot of references that are understandable only if you have a strong knowledge of Japanese culture of that period. When the girl comes to Edo she meets a young man who is a fuse. That's pronounced foo-say. A fuse is a sort of were-dog. The girl, named Hamaji, gets caught up in a conflict between caring about the young man and hunting him to collect the bounty. As I said, the art work is extraordinary and the backgrounds are jam-packed with slice-of-life images of the common life of that period.

As long as animation goes, this movie is fantastic. The colours, landscapes and style in general is quite mesmerizing, which is why I decided to watch it (it didn't disappoint in this respect). I think it portrays a pintoresque and lively view of the busy capital of medieval Japan.

The characters are lovable, but some of their interactions and decisions -especially during the last half of the movie- seem rushed and undeveloped. The pace is off, regularly I found myself bored, wondering how much time was left. The storytelling was lacking some order and structure- as much as I enjoy the espontaneity of seamingly unstructured stories, there is need for some kind of line to follow to make the mysteries and plot twists more appealing.

Despite these flaws, this movie deserves more attention. I'm sure the fans of studio Ghibli will love it, so I highly recommend it to all of you Ghibli fans out there!

This movie is great if you are into fantasy japanese style. It has everything likeable: principal character, moving story, mix of reality and fantasy, folklore, action, love, sadness. A must see.