bamboo blade review

(am i the only one that notices the uncanny resemblance between bamboo blade’s logo and.. FF7’s? and square enix’s one of the sponsors of the show too..)

stats

# eps: 26, oct 2007 – apr 2008
anidb rating: 8.12 (62 votes)
my rating: 9.00

thoughts

i finally realised how scary kiais can be. despite using cheapskate speakers, which aren’t ramped anywhere near its maximum (any louder, i’ll hear similar kiais from my next-door neighbour =P), tamaki’s kiai manages to make my heart skip a beat. i can even feel the adrenaline coursing through my body sometimes! woah.

truthfully, i rarely indulge myself with sports-related anime – “slam dunk” was my first encounter of anime from this genre. i loved it, and so did my friends – we spent countless hours on the basketball court trying out cool stuff learnt from watching hanamichi and rukawa’s moves. however i avoided baseball-related anime like the plague, as i wasn’t interested in it, and will never be.. i guess.

one of the big reasons why my friends and i liked slam dunk was that it managed to mix humour and bona fide basketball moves in the anime, and the highlight of the anime has got to be the numerous matches they played against other rival schools. while i’m no judge of how real the kendo moves are in bamboo blade, it certainly looks believable, and that’s why i like this anime so much.

and the big fat fact that the action scenes make me feel like jumping out of my seat wins big fat brownie points from me =)

’nuff said.

story-wise, i was contented with the fact that the emphasis of the anime was balanced between the skill-ups of the various kendoka and the maturing of various personality over the course of the anime. by “skill-ups”, i mean the practice sessions the muroe koukou girls and guys had to hone their swings and footsteps, the sparring practice between members of muroe koukou, friendlies with machido koukou, as well as the various matches the characters participated in.

i’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that this anime manages to be touching at the same time as well – kirino knitting the SD good luck charms for everyone, or even tamaki finally understanding the meaning of defeat – cheesy as it might be, it made my eyes water and my nose stuffy. oh well.

however, i do not understand the purpose some characters served. carrie seemed to be an afterthought on the author’s part, added in so as to motivate miya miya to perservere on; blade braver seemed to be.. a waste of time! everytime i see blade braver on screen, i rue the fact that kendo action scenes were sacrificed for the atomic fire blade’s stupid explosions. come on, why did yuuji and tamaki spend one whole episode to watch 14 masked actors fight a villian made out of cardboard? atrocious waste of screen time!

and i still fail to understand how miya miya was “tamed” by dan-kun. was it purely because of him looking like her dead pangolin? or because he had the evil eye as well?

overall a nice series, a couple of filler episodes here and there, but the action scenes is superbly executed. highly recommended to anyone with any degree of interest in kendo!

ps biological musing-of-the-day: i have no clue whatsoever about what the girl is saying heh.