Awesome Movie

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

What begins as a feel-good-human-interest story turns into a mystery, then a tragedy, and ultimately an outrage.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The Yotoden feature isn't really a film. Well, it's not how Yotoden was ever intended to be seen, anyway. In the UK Yotoden has been released in it's original OAV format, in 3 one hour parts. In the US however, aforementioned series was bought up, edited down to 90 minutes, removing most of the story segments in favour for the series' admittedly brilliant battle sequences. What story was left was turned into gibberish by an unintelligible dub, and the rest is history.Yotoden is one of the better Anime series to make it over here during the 80s. Bubblegum Crisis it ain't, but when you think that BGC aside, the era it's from was typified by Robotech and Fist of the North Star, even the American feature version looks quite solid. The story is reasonably strong, never over-egging itself too much but keeping dramatic tension high regardless, and the character design and animation is inventive. Many reviewers have commented on it's similarity to the better known Ninja Scroll, and this is a fair comment, but the extra restraint Yotoden shows makes it a more subtle and satisfying watch than Ninja Scroll.Still, it has it's down points. The ending is both anticlimactic and slightly annoying, the main character actually gets to do very little despite apparently being 'the only one who can stop this disaster' etc etc, and the movie is showing its age much worse than some of its peers, perhaps because of its rigid attachment to the constraints of the ninja genre. If it mixed it up a bit more, Yotoden would come out of enjoyable and into great, but it just doesn't manage it. Also, the American voice actors don't really fit too well with their characters, and the story in the half-length version is butchered so badly as to make the series incomprehensible.If you can track a full unedited version down, add two points to the above score, and check it out. However, as it stands, there's not enough going for the US version of Yotoden to really recommend it over other more coherent films like Ninja Scroll or Shadow Skill. Yotoden in it's original form is a great sleeper hit from the 80s, but getting your mitts on it will be very tricky.

I'd have to agree with the previous reviewer: This film has awesome animation, but has problems throughout the rest of the movie.Plot holes are huge, dialog barely explains the concepts of the plot--the MAIN PLOT POINTS aren't even fully explained until the last five minutes of the film. The characters state the obvious, while failing to explain the more confusing points of the film. There are characters that pop up and have importance in the storyline that are never explained--most of them have names that are only mentioned *once*, and it is exceedingly confusing to a viewer.Don't waste your time with this movie. Unless you are in it for a good laugh and how DUMB it is.

Well OK, I've seen Wrath of the Ninja.It isn't something that I would recommend to people who aren't seriously into japanese fighting movies. This is a sort of japanese fighting ninja movie, with a complex plot. It's about these 3 old ninja schools that had these 3 "Swords of Sorcery". I saw the subtitled version (NOT recommended by the way, it's easy to miss something) and I didn't really keep up with it all. It had some good scenes tough, but in general, it wasn't much to my liking.

It's perfectly ok that people dies in an animation, but there are just way too many death in this one. Start from the very beginning, the story is all around battles, fights, death, and revenge. It goes on and on for entire one and a half hour. It was interesting at the beginning, but I grew very tire after before the show was half way through. Unlike other animations, this one is lack of humor. There are not many interactions between the characters either. The good thing about it is the sword fight scene looks pretty good and the characters look nice.