A few weeks ago, I had caught wind of a animated samurai movie by BONES was being run at a few theaters in neighboring cities, Being that it would be at least an hour and a half drive either way, I basically texted a friend in New Orleans about Sword of the Stranger showing in two theaters knowing that he might be interested in it and promptly forgotten about it. Well, he gets in touch with me the day before the premiere and mentioned watching it at a theater in New Orleans, and I ended up taking the two and a half hour drive to the city to meet up with him and go to the AMC Elmwood Palace 201.

What I was expecting:

1. Samurai Action
2. Nice Animation
3. Crappy Plot and Characters

What I got was a bit more than what I was expecting. The first was a given, but the movie also features a more Chinese style of sword fighting. Watching the battle between the two styles animated on-screen was quite a treat.

When it came to animation, I do have caveats that wasn't the film's fault. The projector setup the theater had was definitely sub par. There was some strange issue either with mis-matched frame rates or ghosting occurring on the digital projector, the brightness was too low to watch low-light scenes without straining, and it didn't look like they got more than a 720p2 source to project up on the screen. That said, I am definitely interested in buying a copy of the film on Blu-ray disc just for the animation quality. BONES went to all efforts to get the animation to look very smooth and it shows. Despite the projector issues, the visuals were great, with only one moment where the CG stuck out to me.

And for the plot and characters? Well, they're not going to win any awards, but the story is not bad at all. The characters are common archetypes, so you know who you're dealing with. Some of the characters are given enough time to give them a bit of backstory. The story itself feels like a solid Hollywood movie and is paced just right so you're not overly-assaulted by action scenes nor bored out of your mind during slow moments. In essence, the film didn't take any risks on plot and characters, so it didn't end up insulting your intelligence with how the final showdown came together.

In the end, it was a very fun movie; one that, as mentioned above, I am very interested in picking up the Blu-ray Disc of so I can watch it in an environment that won't strain my eyes trying to follow the action. If you're up for a nice animated action flick, I'm pretty sure you're not going to go wrong with Sword of the Stranger.

1. 1. which was showing it on a pretty impressively sized screen
2. 2. It might have been higher resolution and possibly slightly out-of-focus