And here we have the last of Aniplex's Blu-ray Disc re-releases from the Rurouni Kenshin catalog: Rurouni Kenshin: The Motion Picture.
No, this isn't the long-awaited live-action adaptation of Kenshin which has been in the works for some time now -- believe me, I wish it was! -- but rather the feature-film spinoff released theatrically during the original TV show's run in Japan.
Many feature-film adaptations of long-running anime amount to the same sort of production one sees derived from live-action TV shows (and even some animated shows as well, e.g., The Simpsons). They're little more than feature-length episodes of their original TV series, often with some token explanations of the main characters' relationships thrown in for newcomers. And they're almost always standalone items: they don't make changes to the continuity of the show they're derived from. Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto had movies that were like this.
Rurouni Kenshin: The Motion Picture also fits all of this perfectly. It was originally released while the TV series was still on the air (in 1997), and takes place at some point in the middle of the show's continuity. It's not clear exactly where, but again, the whole point of a project like this is to have a standalone digression that could in theory exist most anywhere along the show's timeline. And it also copies the TV show in both its look-and-feel and emotional style--it's a kinder, gentler story, as it were, than the two despairing and dark OAVs.
Over time I've seen the development of another way to spin off a feature film from a TV franchise: the second season that's actually a movie. Eden of the East used this approach: instead of a second thirteen-episode TV series, the producers opted for two back-to-back feature-length films which canonically continue the same story. It comes out shorter that way -- around 200 minutes for two films, where a thirteen-episode show clocks in at around 300 -- and therefore a little easier to fit into animation budgets which are shrinking across the board. (I understand the excellent Tiger and Bunny is going to get a similarly-engineered movie continuation as well.)
Some people have asked whether or not Aniplex will also be re-releasing the original series in a high-definition edition, at least for U.S. audiences. That hasn't happened for a variety of reasons -- for one, Media Blasters controls distribution of the title in the U.S., and hasn't announced they are undertaking anything of that magnitude. They did remaster Berserk in HD for a recent DVD re-release, but I was told the original film masters were such that the difference between a standard-def and high-def release would have been marginal at best. I don't know if that's the case with Kenshin as well, or if Media Blasters even has access to the original film elements for the show.
Check out our review of Rurouni Kenshin: The Motion Picture, and be sure to check out our reviews of the other standalone Kenshin features as well: Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku-hen (Trust & Betrayal) and Rurouni Kenshin: Seisou-hen (Reflection).
Image: Rurouni Kenshin. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.
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