English Dub Season Review: Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls Season 1

There's good anime, there's bad anime, there's a whole lot of ugly in the middle...

And then there's Ouka Ninja Scrolls.

A sequel to the warmly received but quickly forgotten 2003 anime and manga, "Basilisk: The Kouga Ninja Scrolls", Ouka Ninja Scrolls was a show that I can't imagine anyone really asked for. It comes so far after the original series aired that the adaptation of its sequel is probably the attempt of some shrewd anime executive to bring back a somewhat recognizable property to get that quick nostalgia dollar. This practice isn't unheard of in both western and eastern markets, but its usually marked by an obvious lack of quality in the sequel property. Ouka Ninja Scrolls follows this tradition of mediocrity in lock step, achieving a level of terribleness that I had thought not possible in the current anime market. This is an ancient kind of terrible, previously considered lost to the dark days of 4kids dubs and late night Toonami viewing, where creative integrity in an anime was a dubious prospect at best.

The plot of Ouka revolves around the two offspring, Hachirou and Hibiki, of the two main characters of the first series, who are now dead and gone. Hachirou and Hibiki are the inheritors of two eye magics; Hachirou can use his magical pupils to make people kill themselves, while Hibiki can use hers to pacify people who want to kill her. These two younguns are heirs to the Kouga and Iga clans respectively, ninja clans known for having magical powers who have historically been at war with each other, though they're trying to put that all behind them now. They're accompanied by a small group of fellow youngling ninjas who look to Hachirou and Hibiki for guidance and also have special powers of their own. Guidance they will certainly need, for as they grow older, a Buddhist monk named Joujin and his own band of ninjas who want to use Hachirou and Hibiki to bring Oda Nobunaga back from the dead. A lot happens over the series's run, but that's the setup we get to work with.

Often I've called this show a "Poor man's Naruto", because its recurring themes of a brutal and uncaring world these ninja kids have to live in echoes that classic immensely. Unfortunately, that's about where the similarities end, because where Naruto builds up its world with well-written characters crafted by a skillful pen, Ouka Ninja Scrolls vomits up its one-note cast onto the screen like a drunk college freshman. These characters are not only poor made, but barely even human. They speak in stinted, monotonous tones, reciting platitudes and spouting obvious exposition. Their backstories are shallow and their interactions forced and dripping with cringe.

Because of the failure of this show to establish its characters in any meaningful way, its plot becomes bizzare and baffling. I've watched the show in its entirety for 24 weeks, and the only conclusive feeling I've had about is "What the hell have I just witnessed." It takes loops and turns and twists that make me want to puke; character motivations are either nonexistent or random, magical powers come and go at the plot's convenience, and by the end of the series, characters are travelling through time, dying and resurrecting with such frequency that I can't make heads or tails of what's possible and what isn't. On a basic, fundamental level, Ouka Ninja Scrolls cannot tell a story; it cannot communicate to me what in the seven hells it was actually trying to say.

All of this would be just bad storytelling; mediocre, but not disgustingly bad, were it not for the subject matter this show deals with. Perhaps for shock value, perhaps out of obligation to the original work, this show deals with some pretty dark themes. Hachirou and Hibiki have an incestuous relationship; they are, at several points in the show, ordered to have sex with each other or die, and Hibiki is almost raped by Joujin towards the series's end. Character die brutal, disgusting deaths, with the MVP of the bunch being when a character's body literally explodes because his muscles won't stop growing. In a better series, these plot points might be handled more carefully, but Ouka Ninja Scrolls is not that series. Its in bad taste, verging on disgusting, to see a show like this take such obvious measures to try and shock its audience into a morbid fascination with its otherwise horrible plot. I can stomach bad, but this kind of schlock is not fit to exist.

And then there's the animation quality. Good god, I'd thought I'd seen it all, but Ouka Ninja Scrolls never ceases to amaze me with how terrible it can look. Are there cheap animation tricks? Yup. Ugly tweening? You betcha. All this and more await you in what is supposed to be an action anime. If there is one thing this show needed to get right, it was its action scenes, but they're as boring and ugly as they could possibly be.

Ouka Ninja Scrolls is trash, plain and simple. It is a burning garbage fire that's mediocre on its good days and offensively terrible on its worst. I don't think anyone out there will like this show. Not fans of the original, not anyone who has eyes and a working brain. I think, perhaps, its only enjoyment might be from ingesting it as a piece of "So bad its good" media, but the show is so long and dull that I don't think that it will sustain a viewer's desire for good cringe that long. I hope Funimation learns from this and takes a good hard look at what crap it decides to import from Japan, because this is something that should have never crossed the ocean, and I wish we could return to sender.