Image Credit: Netflix
Few things can balance mindless entertainment and big ideas like shonen anime Baki Dou: Invincible Samurai This is a great example of this. Netflix is no stranger to adaptations of the Baki The Grappler manga, which was first published in the ’90s, with two series and a film coming to the service over the past few years. Invincible is a strong continuation of the Samurai mythology, with strong world building and a new, nearly omnipotent enemy for Baki to defeat. At times, the ridiculously exaggerated character models may border on the cheesy, but the carefully placed action and overarching themes keep The Invincible Samurai always engaging.
world of the remaining two It’s populated by superhuman fighters, a global community of the most ripped guys you’ve ever seen who regularly battle at major events like the World Cup finals. In Invincible Samurai, the highest levels of these fighters, whose neck and cheek muscles jut out from the screen as much as their beaks, find themselves in crisis of boredom. In the show’s opening scene, Bucky confronts a challenger and delivers a devastating blow, suppressing his yawn. Soon, that boredom goes away, as a suspicious plot to revive the greatest fighter of all time, ancient samurai Musashi Miyamoto, succeeds. This threat to the supremacy of Bucky and his fellow fighters causes uproar around the world.
Image Credit: Netflix
Rest Doing a true adaptation of a story like The Grappler means matching the action with the right tone, and The Invincible Samurai delivers with aplomb. The show avoids the temptation to have every other scene being a brawl between musclemen, a mindless “who will win” tournament, but when we do get a taste of the action, Bucky Doo really works. Many fights are not about who can punch the hardest, but rather the subtle details that allow one to avoid an attack or strike the exact cell of skin for the desired effect. Only in animation can the action be slowed down to convey all this information, and The Invincible Samurai makes frequent use of this.
Unfortunately, the show suffers from a classic case of shonen over-interpretation, which makes its visual communication a bit questionable. Usually the dialogue gets stuck in a frustrating cycle where the same information is repeated multiple times in a matter of minutes. This comes with the territory in a lot of anime, but it’s no less annoying when a show can obviously reach its conclusion faster and artificially pad its runtime.
This is all the more disappointing because The Invincible Samurai touches on more interesting topics but doesn’t fully interrogate them. The boredom felt by Bucky and the rest of the fighters is an interesting commentary on the zombification of the average person. Many of us are stuck in the work, scroll, sleep cycle, which is reflected in the endless, daily training we see Bucky go through to challenge himself and go some way to free himself from the edge of sleep.
Miyamoto provides the same exact challenge, but brings with it a series of complications. His power brings an existential crisis to fighters around the world, with everyone sensing his presence as he revives. What they once thought of as the height of human power and achievement has been surpassed – an existential problem for them all. As much as they yearn for a challenge, Miyamoto destroys both their worldview and social order, questioning the reasons behind scientific progress and technological development. Miyamoto was brought back to create spectacle, which was the only thing that mattered to those running the operation.
Image Credit: Netflix
Miyamoto himself could have been a 2D bloodthirsty presence invincible samuraiBut the show goes out of its way to portray their adaptation to modern times with significant depth. The wonders of today’s world put into perspective how much humanity has progressed in the 400 years since Miyamoto’s death, an idea so big to him that it almost breaks his brain. War was all he knew, his only purpose was to fight, and now he has to contend with something even greater.
Invincible Samurai makes the minimum effort necessary to make all of these between-fight moments visually appealing, but to say that it reinvents the wheel in any way would be too much of an exaggeration. The most consistently amusing visual elements are the designs of the fighters, all of which have a different thing going on, whether it’s hairstyle or scars. They all have extremely fleshy faces that completely and delightfully defy physics. Baki is the exception, whose baby face is a stark contrast to the other fighters.
In terms of shonen anime, you could do a lot worse than Baki Dou: The Invincible Samurai. Even without seeing the rest of the media, it is easy to enter this ridiculous world, whose order and characters are very clear from the beginning. Its action packs a punch, and it has a lot more on its mind than it seems on the surface, making for a more than serviceable season of TV.