news culture Fans of manga and cinema, don’t miss this excellent Live Action film on Netflix!
Big-screen adaptations of manga and Japanese anime series have often disappointed their fans. It is therefore good to point out when this is not the case with that of Mugen no Junin, released on Netflix in 2017.
Summary
- A successful live-action adaptation
- What is Blade of the Immortal?
A successful live-action adaptation
Cowboy Bebop live-action.
Today, large companies want to explore the metaverse and expand the already colossal universes of certain flagship pop-culture licenses. The adaptation in real shots (also called live-action) is one of the processes used for this objective.. with more or less success, especially when it comes to mangas which are transposed on the big screen. For example, the movie Death Note released in 2017 does not have very high RottenTomatoes scores (37% for the press, 23% for the public). More recently, it is the series cowboy bebop which was canceled by Netflix while some observers do not give much of the next series adaptation of the cult manga One Piece.
However, not everything is to be thrown away. Witness the very recent success of the Netflix series Alice in Borderlands. Season 2 was recently released and is generating records, something to highlight since it is basically an adaptation of a manga.
The opportunity to come back to the excellent adaptations of manga on the platform, as was the case in 2017 with the arrival on Netflix of the film Blade of the Immortal. Still on RottenTomatoes, the film directed by Takashi Miike mobilizes 86% favorable opinions from the press and 70% from the audience. A similar finding posted on metacritic with a score of 72/100 for the media and 6.7 for the public. Far from having a perfect score, the film still shows good results for an adaptation and is even selected at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
What is Blade of the Immortal?
In effect, Blade of the Immortal picks up the story from the manga Mugen No Junin (L’Habitant de l’infini in French) by Hiroaki Samura. We follow Manji, a samurai from the Edo era in 1770: after killing his corrupt lord, a bounty is put on his head and ronins (samurai without a master, like him) take his sister hostage. While Manji accedes to their request to disarm, the kidnappers nevertheless decide to execute his younger sister. This angers the samurai, who decides to slaughter them all. Wounded to death, he will nevertheless survive thanks to the injection of worms making him immortal (but not insensitive to pain).
On a quest for redemption, Manji meets Rin Asano: a young girl seeking revenge after the annihilation of her family dôjô. The two characters, with very different mentalities, will therefore travel together with very different goals.
The Mugen No Junin manga was pre-published between 1993 and 2012: thirty volumes were then published. Several television adaptations were then broadcast: a first in 2008 then a second (directed by Liden Films) in 2019. The latter is available for streaming (under the name The Dweller of Infinity) on the Amazon Prime Video SVOD platform.
