A wandering ex-ninja crosses swords with a colorful team of supernatural villains, flirts with a posturing female assassin and grudgingly cooperates with a diminutive old spy in this rippling hunk of early ‘90s anime excess. Back in my teens, _Ninja Scroll_ represented everything cutting-edge and cool about so-called “Japanimation.” It delivered flashy swordplay and charged character designs, embraced mature themes, stripped down every member of its female cast and sprayed the countryside with geysers of blood. Everything about it screams badass, from the handsome, give-no-damns ronin protagonist to the rock-skinned super-heavyweight rapist he deposes in an early fight scene. What more could a goggle-eyed adolescent really ask for? Though I surely held it in high regard among friends, a frequent suggestion for overnight pizza parties, this is most definitely not a movie I’d have sat down to watch with my parents.

Revisiting it now, thirty years later, I didn’t want to watch it with my pre-teen kids, either. I’m on the other side of the embarrassment spectrum now. _Ninja Scroll_ is still everything I remembered, and a few things I didn’t. All the thirsty, edgy indulgences are still here, every bit as superficial and titillating as they were in ’93, and its visual stylings have aged like wine. No wonder there: it’s an early feature film flex for Madhouse, the now-famed animation studio. I had no idea the gang behind _Perfect Blue, Wicked City_ and _One Punch Man_ were responsible for this, too, but now that I’m a little more experienced in the genre, I can see their fingerprints all over it. With a wild cast of elaborate character models, an intense knack for dynamic combat scenes, oodles of extreme camera selections and a thick cloak of moody atmosphere, it hits each of their hallmarks. Every frame is a killer, composed to maximize impact and emphasize exaggeration. Even now, well past my impressionable teens, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the sheer, ballsy audacity of it all.

The story, by comparison, is adequate. We don’t get too in-depth about the motives of its power players; why the big boss can regenerate lost limbs or how the dark shogun fits into the larger picture. Suffice to say they’re bad guys, deserving of increasingly merciless ends... and now let’s get to slicing them apart. There’s in-fighting and squabbling in each alliance, changed allegiances and shades of gray which lend the whole picture a sense of unpredictability, so it’s more than your stereotypical case of “line ‘em up and knock ‘em down,” even if the best scenes do fit that template.

It’s action aplenty, in other words, with occasional examples of breathless exposition and/or bare tits to liven the calm between bloodstorms. I had a great time remembering why I wore this particular VHS tape out, and noting its influence in the direction of popular anime since. A fairly shallow parade of grimacing samurai pin-ups and gore-soaked payoffs that’s bound to please both current teens and their fondly reminiscing former counterparts alike.