How Was Ninja Scroll Made?
After Wicked City succeeded in 1987, Kawajiri had the freedom to build a film from nothing: no novel, no manga, an original story of his own set in feudal Japan. The result, Ninja Scroll (Japanese title Jūbē Ninpūchō), was a co-production of JVC, Toho, Movic and Animate, animated by Madhouse, and released in Japanese theatres on 5 June 1993 through Tokyo Theatres. Kawajiri is credited as director, screenwriter, original work and original character designer.
His ingredients were two literatures. From Japan, the ninja novels of Futaro Yamada, whose Ninpōchō books filled clan wars with grotesque, superpowered ninja; Kagero, the poison maiden, is a direct homage to Yamada’s first Kouga Ninja Scrolls. From the West, spy fiction: the film is structured like a Bond mission in period dress, a reluctant agent blackmailed into service by a spymaster. The hero’s name borrows the folk hero Yagyū Jūbei Mitsuyoshi, but Kawajiri renamed his man Kibagami Jubei and made him a mercenary with no master and no cause.
The production around him was compact and strong: Kōichi Yamadera as Jubei, Emi Shinohara as Kagero, Takeshi Aono as the spymaster Dakuan, Daisuke Gōri as the villain Gemma, and a score by Kaoru Wada. The film won the Citizen’s Award at the 1993 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, the audience prize at Japan’s genre showcase.
And then, in Japan, it settled into being a respectable genre film rather than an event. Madhouse’s own chief executive said the quiet part out loud in 2014: the original was, in his words, not a big hit in Japan. Everything that made Ninja Scroll famous happened somewhere else, which is the subject of the next page.