A Meiji-era supernatural anime means that I was always going to at least watch episode one, and I'm glad I did.
Joran Princess of Snow and Blood hit nearly all the right notes for me. Nearly.
It goes hard on the vivid colour, fractious cast and a bleak story – though it's not without uplifting moments sprinkled throughout.
One immediate point of interest was that the narrative kicks off with our heroine working for the bad guys, but since they're after a different bad guy, it seems for a little while that our team are the heroes…. but they're not, they're actually dogs of the oppressive shogun.
Yet the characters all have their secrets and reasons, and if you give Joran Princess of Snow and Blood a shot, I think that for some of them, this will seem entirely reasonable.
Visually too, I enjoyed instances of captivating scenery, thinking most of the sea-side scenes – showing the muted palette and soft light effects.
Above all, I loved the flame-skull effect on lead character Sawa during action sequences.
In contrast, the hard outlines of such scenes, that stylistic choice, did occasionally seem to appear almost too sketch-like. Kinda… Although, maybe that's in fact partly due to a high contrast with the more detailed, 'softer' backgrounds?
I don't believe what I've highlighted below is the best example of my quibble, but I do really like the effect.
To shift to other quibbles, I certainly disliked Hana at times, but I respected her as a character, great writing there. In terms of twists there was definitely one that did not work for me, but I won't spoil it here.
And as is the case with supernatural shows sometimes, there's not a lot of consistency in terms of damage and death, ie: what hurts a bad guy vs what hurts a hero.
Overall, this one definitely could have been a 5 star watch, but the ending didn't land, for me.
I actually finished the series convinced that two different stories were actually being told the whole way through, and when those two stories met, it somehow combined weaker outcomes of both – becoming both not a tragedy and also not a revenge story.
On the other hand, since this anime is (for the most part) a re-telling of the seminal Lady Snowblood from 1973, if you're familiar with that film (or the manga), then you'll see things differently compared to if you came to this show 'cold', as it were.
3 Stars
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