GHOSTSWEEPER
MIKAMI'S
(RE-)DEATH
OF ODA NOBUNAGA
It's really maddening, but Oda Nobunaga to 20th and 21st centuries' creators of pop trash is a routine villain. Anime movies alone already have quite a chunk of evil Odas; more to be found saturating the gullible market of computer games. This anime movie isn't any better. Like in the Flame of Recca and Samurai Deeper Kyo, Oda is THE devil incarnated around whom everything bad evolves and whose life the heroes of the tomes must take with no regret. But there is a little difference in this movie that no one I know has ever heard of. It is ABOUT Oda Nobunaga. In other attempts at fictionalization, that also give us bloodlusty Odas, the center of the movies or TV series or comic books are other people -- invariably rather airheaded teenage mutants bent to save the world without knowing why. But in this one, there is no story without Oda. It starts with him and ends with him, and other characters don't have personal lives. The graphix ain't nothing but average, and the story surely sucks from my point of view at least, but there Oda Nobunaga and his valet Mori Ranmaru dress like they used to in real life, their relation to each other is just like that, too (I mean as a 16th century warlord and his valet and not, for instance, as an intergalactic spaceship captain with a dog, or Satan with the high school bully, or or as fellow basketball team players, or such). Here is also featured the tower of Azuchi, Oda Nobunaga's greatest architectural project in life, and, even better, presentations of how the Honno temple was like, when Oda was attacked by Akechi's army in 1582. And this never-ever-thing, too: a complete song and dance of Atsumori by Oda Nobunaga is depicted here (click here for those scenes). Those things never got into any other anime movie. And here is the rare instance of Akechi Mitsuhide's presence in popular culture, too. Though he is THE ultimate protagonist here for causing Oda Nobunaga's death (though, just in case you know nothing about it, the movie's version of how he died is 100% fictional). That much the movie doesn't deviate from the mainstream.
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