Shigurui: Death Frenzy

On a bleached out courtyard at Sunpu Castle, two men disfigured by a life of perpetual violence face off to bring sweet destruction to the other man. Shigurui: Death Frenzy then takes the viewer back to the beginning of the story in order to explain this moment. It is blood, guts, and brutality.

Shigurui: Death Frenzy is interesting to watch, but not as cool as samurai swords sound in that it isn’t Samurai Champloo or Kenshin. This is an unromantic presentation of swordsman and samurai as scumbags and not as the badass/cool scumbag of Afro Samurai.

Swordsmanship as far as it is presented in Shigurui is very much a means to dealing damage, which the perfection of is a means toward more effective damage dealing. While this is fairly obvious from a logical perspective, it’s something that gets danced around when swordsmanship becomes romanticized as an art form and means toward self perfection as it is in many stories. Shigurui downplays the romance of the swordsman who grows as a result of self-sacrifice and dedication. Instead, Shigurui takes that away. Change and character evolution isn’t the result of internal inertia and dedicated training, but external force. Damage.

Damage is the vehicle of change in Shigurui. Everything that happens is born from damage. Character evolution begins with damage. And nothing good comes from it. Nobody in the story seems to have the internal inertia to overcome and stand up to that external force, which is why, at least to me, none of the characters are particularly engaging. They’re products of external pressure, rather than internal fortitude, which is antithetical for lead characters in fiction. It’s a story without heroes (or anti-heroes).

The absence of a hero makes me wonder about the intentions of the author. Does this serve to ratchet up the violence or is there a cultural critique in here? Not being Japanese, I have no idea, but I guess I’m just hoping there is to have some point to all of it (since if it isn’t entertaining and cool like, it better be something deeper and worth slogging through if it isn’t funny-fun-fun). A person doesn’t have to be intimately aware of Japanese culture to have heard of the internal criticism of the do as you’re told, conform, follow, don’t stand up culture, to create the wonder if there is some of that going on here.

For me, the focus on damage as grotesque art dulls the brutality (or maybe it was Higurashi that numbed me to brutality) of the blood, guts, and sliced through flesh, split eyeballs, and spilled intestines, which seems to be a favorite of the show, having intestines fall out and splatter to the floor — is this a pun on the lack of intestinal fortitude of individual people that allows insanity to win? At times, the gore crosses into gratuitous, while at others it’s descriptive, the damage revealing sensibility. The “Death Frenzy” bit is a little misleading to me as Shigurui is more deliberate than frenzied. It’s a picture of violence begetting violence. Violence bleeding into more violence. Violence birthing further iterations of violence as the path of least resistance. What makes the violence easy for me to observe, surprisingly since I consider myself a little squeamish, is how everyone in that world accepts and expects violence as normal. It’s not a shock to these people. They take and deal it very matter of fact, though with much pleasure.

What really held my interest in Shigurui is the cinematography of it. This atmosphere created by Madhouse and series director, Hirotsugu Hamazaki, is gorgeous (see ghostlightning’s post on Shigurui’s atmosphere). The stifled hideousness of this world grinds to the bone. Even the overworked anime cicada does more than its usual bit to create a heavy oppressive atmosphere. At times it feels like I’m flipping through a photo album, such is the way time gets stopped and a thousand words worth tell during some transition scenes.

In the end, I’m not entirely sure what to make of Shigurui. Is this just trashy ultra-violence dressed up by Madhouse to masquerade as something more than a splatfest? Given the production values and cinematography it’s easy to hand wave the question away. Part of the problem is the story is only half told when the twelve episode series is done. Is there really a point? If not, I could think of a number of anime that are a lot more entertaining to watch. Still, if you like to be provoked, even if it’s a red herring, Shigurui could lull you into believing there’s more to it. The quality of production and direction inspires trust.

English Dub Notes

The Chris Bevins directed dub takes the low key approach. Nobody really stands out, but that seems by design, since the characters themselves seem less important than the setting. There’s a lot of restraint in the performances. The dub track has the advantage of going through Funimation’s sound engineers, which is usually a good thing. Given the atmospheric nature of Shigurui, the sound shaping done adds a lot to the feeling of immersion.

Random Note

One random thing that distracted me was one of the background tracks that plays in a number of scenes. It sounds so close to something in Dead Poet’s Society, that Dead Poet’s Society just kept popping in my head every time this track was played in Shigurui. This specific piece of soundtrack is striking since the end results are the same in both Dead Poet’s Society and Shigurui.