Another trend in anime nowadays is adapting some 20-something year old manga, and showing some of these tryhards how it’s really done. We’ve had good successes with Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Parasyte (and a dud with Sailor Moon), so can the trend continue?
Ushio and Tora, a MAPPA and Studio VOLN adaptation of Kazuhiro Fujita’s manga, follows Ushio Aotsuki, a young man who tends to dismiss his father’s talk about an ancient samurai that impaled the demon Tora on a temple altar stone with the legendary Beast Spear 500 years ago. But when Ushio finds said demon in his own basement, he begins to take his father’s words to heart. Meanwhile, demons have started to awaken in the human world due to Tora’s demonic aura building up, and in order to protect his family and friends, Ushio releases Tora from the Beast Spear and invokes the power of the ancient samurai to bend Tora to his will and destroy the demons together, if they don’t destroy each other first.
Aaaaaand I think we got ourselves a winner here. First episode in had me thinking this show is so 90’s shonen, and it’s awesome. I get the feeling that somewhere around the line, shonen anime started getting more and more generic as things started running out of ideas, but when an old manga-turned-anime comes around, things feel refreshing, and Ushio and Tora is indeed a refreshing compared to others.
[the jinxed darkstar blog] 