After a strong opener, “Ninja Kamui” drops off so hard in quality that it will inevitably be taught in animation and writing classes on how not to develop a modern anime.
The first episode sets up an intriguing premise.
In the series’ fictional America, lone individuals are being brutally assassinated by a group of mysterious assassins for an unknown reason.
Eventually, the group fixes their eye on Joe Logan, a white man living on a farm with his wife, Sara, and young son, Kyle.
On the night after celebrating the boy’s birthday, Logan wakes up in the middle of the night and is attacked by several assassins in his home.
Though he briefly fends off the attackers, Sara and Kyle are violently murdered.
The group then overpowers Kyle and murders him as well, or so they think.
The group is then revealed to be ninjas from Japan tasked with assassinating former members who fled the clan.
Considered a betrayal, they are marked for death.
Logan, who is revived in the hospital, removes the face-altering device he was using to remain undetected and assumes his original identity as Higan, one of the clan’s most promising ninjas.
His wife, whose real name is Mari, was also a ninja who defected with him.
Fueled by the hatred and grief of watching his family be butchered, Higan begins plotting his revenge against the clan and its leader, Yamaji.
Upon finding out that Higan is alive, Yamaji tasks Zai, a former close friend of Higan and Mari, to hunt him down.
All of this occurs in “Ninja Kamui’s” first episode, and in the next 12 episodes, show creator Park Sunghoo turns his creation into an absolute disaster.
Shedding its style Up to the fifth episode, “Ninja Kamui” is relatively watchable.
The first two episodes feature a lot of good action, particularly emphasizing the hand-to-hand combat between Higan and the ninjas fighting him.
There are quite a few scenes that employ something called “sakuga animation,” which is highly detailed hand-drawn art to bring out explosive action elements or facial expressions, which for “Ninja Kamui” comes from Higan’s facial reactions and whenever he uses his secret ninja skills.
The exact moment this stops is in the fifth episode, and the hand-drawn action begins to be replaced by 3D CGI.
Then the action—all the hand-to-hand combat and the ninja stuff—is completely abandoned in the sixth episode.
This is the episode where “Ninja Kamui” begins its transformation into literal garbage by introducing cyborgs.
Soundtrack to its funeral Before we take on “Ninja Kamui’s” detrimental obsession with cyborgs, this needs to be said: the music is quite bad.
Typically, for Japanese works of live or animated fiction, especially if they involve samurai or ninjas, there is an expectation that the music will reflect Japanese sounds in line with what is being shown on the screen.
In “Ninja Kamui,” the only sounds that accompany it are pop-rock ballads.
The action sequences or quiet moments in the show could have benefited from a score that features musical arrangements of Japanese instruments like shamisen and koto strings, shakuhachi flute melodies, and taiko drums.
Instead of traditional Japanese music, “Ninja Kamui” blasts generic, out-of-place rock music.
Cyborg Kamui To introduce the cyborgs, the story takes a hard pivot.
“Ninja Kamui” goes from being a story about a husband and father fighting against his former ninja clan to not only that but also that the ninja clan is planning to take over the world using cyborgs.
Not feeling like the turkey has been stuffed enough, Park then introduces a secondary villain, the founder and CEO of Auza, Joseph Evans.
A multibillion-dollar tech company, Auza, is responsible for the creation of the cyborgs, which Evans supplies to Yamaji’s ninja clan, as he too hopes to take over the world.
The small, personal stakes involving Higan’s revenge have now escalated into a nonsensical taking over the world plot, which is further obfuscated by having too many villains, characters, character motivations, and subplots.
If Park took out the cyborgs and Auza, “Ninja Kamui” would be a truly lean, mean fighting machine, but sadly, that is not the case, and that choice ruins even the series finale.
For the final two episodes of the series, “Ninja Kamui” is almost entirely CGI.
The final episode has several back-to-back fight scenes, where Higan fights Yamaji, Higan fights Yamaji and Zai, and then Higan and Zai fight Yamaji.
All of the sequences were poorly animated with CGI, to the point that the fights looked like they were streaming YouTube videos with a poor internet connection.
There are a lot of new anime out there, and the ratio of good to bad has remained the same for the past few years. “Ninja Kamui” is not going to tilt the scale completely into the negative, but it sure is the worst in recent times.
