Fun movie, faithful to the manga
What a great, great movie. I've been getting back into samurai flicks after a long hiatus. I wanted to see this after having seen Kill Bill v.1 -- you can see the influence after watching Lone Wolf and Cub -- and boy, this movie and its vol. 2 sequel (baby cart on river styx) -- great!
Clean picture, clean sounds. This is an awesome DVD. I also read the manga before the DVD and can say: it is very faithful to the manga, doing a wonderful job of bringing the Kojima's artwork to the screen. Readers of Dark Horse's manga series, vol. 1 will recognize the care taken to adapt the manga.
I showed this film to a bunch of friends and they hooted and hollered. Great fun.
LW&C DVDs are full widescreen
Just so there is no confusion, the AnimEigo LW&C DVDs (and all our samurai DVDs) are full widescreen in the original aspect ratio. NOTHING has been chopped off or pan and scanned.
NOTHING!
The DVDs are 16:9 anamorphic encoded, and since the original films are have higher aspect ratios than this, they are letterboxed.
The confusion arises from the fact that if your haven't configured your DVD player and TV correctly (in particular, widescreen TVs), the image can appear either squashed (the Toho logo at the start will be oval) or have the sides clipped off.
What you have to do to get the best video quality is
1) if you have a widescreen TV, configure the DVD player so that it knows this, and configure the TV so it knows it is getting widescreen video. Be careful about TV modes where it displays a 16:9 image in 4:3 with the edges clipped.
2) If you have a regular 4:3 TV, make sure the DVD player is configured this way, otherwise it'll send out a 16:9 signal which will...
Kogi Kaishakunin
This series of films have been among my absolute favorite since I first saw them more than 30 years ago.
I can remember my first experience with Kozure Ohkami as a young Japanese American youth in early 1970s Los Angeles. One day my friend's dad piled a bunch of us young "JAs" into a Mercury Montego and took us to see the fourth movie in the series, Baby Cart In Peril at the long gone Toho LaBrea Theater. One thing nice about growing up in LA in the '60s and '70s is that we got to see a lot of movies unavailable to many people outside of Japanese American communities during the pre-VCR days. While I grew up watching The Man From UNCLE and Gilligan's Island like all my friends, I also had the bonus of being able to enjoy the exploits of Ogami Itto, Zatoichi and a host of Mifune and Nakadai movies.
During my high school years, my friends and I eagerly awaited each pending showing at the Toho. Parts 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 were in heavy rotation during the mid to late...
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