What Is the 2008 Blade of the Immortal Anime?

A thirteen-episode overture: atmospheric, handsome, and over long before the story is.

Fifteen years into the manga's run, Blade of the Immortal reached television. The series was announced in March 2008 and made by Bee Train, directed by Koichi Mashimo with music by Kow Otani. It aired on AT-X from July 14 to December 29, 2008, in thirteen episodes, opening with Akai Usagi by Makura no Soshi and closing with Wants by Grapevine. Tomokazu Seki voices Manji.

Thirteen episodes cannot hold a story that was still running in its source magazine, and this adaptation does not pretend to: it adapts the opening movement of the manga, the hiring of Manji and the first Itto-ryu encounters, and ends with the larger war untouched. What it is remembered for is texture: Bee Train shot Samura's Edo as a place of rain, wood and lamplight, and the series functions as a tasting menu for the manga rather than a substitute for it. Media Blasters released it in North America from September 29, 2009.

Blade of the Immortal volume 12 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 12**Volume 12 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE PRODUCTION CARD

Bee Train, 2008

The studio

Bee Train, Koichi Mashimo's studio, known for mood-first adaptations; Mashimo directed, Hiroyuki Kawasaki wrote the series composition.

The music

Kow Otani, whose scores favour live instrumentation and space: the sound of the series is part of why its quiet scenes carry.

The length problem

Thirteen episodes against a manga that would run to 207 chapters. Any 2008 adaptation was structurally a fragment; this one chose to be a well-made fragment of the beginning.

The second attempt

Eleven years later Liden Films adapted the whole manga in 24 episodes. The two series make a clean comparison pair, documented on the 2019 anime page.

What Is the 2008 Blade of the Immortal Anime?

THE PRODUCTION CARD

THE FIRST WORD