Kogan is very unpredictable and while he has brief moments of clarity, and he also brief moments of wanting to do horrible things to women. It is also about the eccentricities of the Dojo’s six-fingered master Kogan, who is very old but still incredibly powerful but yet is teetering on the edge of senility. The plot is set in a very grim Edo-era Japan, and is based around the Kogan Ryuu Dojo where a man named Irako Seigen challenges the Dojo members seeking to learn their hidden technique. Shigurui is an anime based on a manga, based on a novel, so there’s a lot of background reading to do if you really want.
Shigurui isn’t quite that brilliant unfortunately, but it’s still pretty darned good. The show is a seinen historical drama by animation studio Madhouse, and genius director Hirotsugu Hamasaki who’s last work was the brilliant Texhnolyze (a show so great that it actually sickens me to think that almost no-one has seen it). When you get down to it, Shigurui is largely a discourse on the devastating effect a Katana can have on the human body. Actually, I’m not sure if I can pin exactly who the target demographic of the show is. No, not teens, real adults with jobs and stuff.
So why don’t people watch it? Probably because it’s about as penetrable as a steel reinforced mountain, but also because because unlike most of anime it seems to actually be aimed at adults. What does that say about me? A good way of measuring how many people have seen a show is by how many people have bothered rating it on animenewsnetwork, in this case a mere 51 people. The music's not from the anime.No-one has seen Shigurui. I give it 3/5 stars, it would have garnered a 4 if the ending was there.Ī little disclaimer for the Youtube video below. The only short coming is the lack of a proper ending. This anime has good artwork, pace and fight scenes. At the end of episode 12, we are left with the scene where Fujiki and Seigen Irako prepare to face each other one last time. While watching the series, the potential for a great ending grew with each episode I watched.
Fight scenes are typically short, focusing on sword techniques rather than the number of corpses piled up. The general look of the anime is largely done in lighter colours, very much like water painting, with fight scenes more vividly coloured because of the blood. The artwork of Shigurui is filled with scenes of symbolic imagery, the pace is slow, but not draggy. It's a moving and thrilling tale of how fate has intertwined the two swordsman, both disciples of the same sword master, competing for the right to his legacy and his daughter. The anime depicts the circumstances that lead to the showdown using flashbacks mixing with storytelling. You know on the spot they are out for each others' blood. One end stands Gennosuke Fujiki with only one arm, the other dragging his feet along is Seigen Irako who's a blind cripple.
The story starts with two samurais in a final showdown at a sword tournament. Shigurui also contains quite a lot of graphically explicit scenes of nudity - no outright hentai though. Unlike other hack and slash anime, the characters in Shigurui spill actual guts when (pardon the pun) gutted, you can see the actual intestines and brains splat. It's by far one of the most graphically violent anime I have watched to date. Shigurui is not for anyone with a weak stomach.
SHIGURUI MANGA PLOT SERIES
There are no news if the rest of the series will be made into animation. The first 32 chapters of the manga series contribute to the plot here. Shigurui (シグルイ, Death Frenzy) is a Japanese animation based on the manga series written and illustrated by Takayuki Yamaguchi.