The TV series has adapted the story to present day Japan, with enigmatic George Kodama (voiced in the Japanese version by Hiroaki Hirata) visiting a small town in rural Japan, Kimujiku, to investigate mysterious events that occurred there 15 years before.

As in Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the mysterious stranger befriends a modest shopkeeper, in this case, a ramen shop owner, and is viewed with suspicion by two warring factions within the town. The boss of one of the criminal gangs, Tanokura, a city councilman, hires George to protect the gang boss's teenage daughter. Later, rival gangboss Samekichi hires George as well, just as a series of attempted murders and drive-by shootings erupt and gradually unravel the uneasy truce. Meanwhile, a beautiful innkeeper also hires George to protect her, at the hotel where George is staying.

Though the program was co-produced by Kurosawa's production company (some three years after the famous director's death), Kaze no yojimbo doesn't have much in common, not in content and especially not stylistically, with the Kurosawa-Mifune classic. The original screenwriters, Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima, are not credited with the story, nor should they have been. Though it uses the film's basic premise (itself suggested by Red Harvest, which this more closely resembles), the approach is completely different. Here, George is more a detective with a mysterious past than the warrior rogue who stirs things up in Kurosawa's film. The TV show's look, with its pastel backgrounds and cleanly drawn characters and landscapes, looks nothing like Kurosawa's gritty black comedy, and so on.

On its own terms, Kaze no yojimbo is pokey and uninvolving. In keeping both George's motives and the gangsters' activities mysterious through all five shows, the program raises a lot of questions but frustratingly offers few answers -- boredom quickly sets in. (A second DVD containing the next five shows, Kaze no Yojimbo: Small Town Secrets, is due out June 8.) George is too enigmatic a character to latch onto, while the rest are stock anime types: burly henchman, big-breasted teenager in schoolgirl uniform, etc.

Director Hayato Date's look is likewise standard, if rather restrained, anime style. Common to the genre, the design does a great job capturing the iconography of small town Japanese life, the atmosphere of trains and noodle shops, albeit with that common anime weirdness of incorporating European designs to some elements (such as the hotel where George is staying). The rest of the animation is okay, nothing special. CGI is used to animate automobiles and trains.

One genuinely annoying visual device comes during key bits of dialogue or scenes of heightened emotion. At these times, the background inexplicably turns into what looks like a bad television signal, which is "matted" behind tight, sometimes roving close-ups of characters exchanging dialogue. The effect does nothing except draw attention to itself, and comes off mainly as condescending to its audience ("Hey, wake up! Something important here!")

The five shows are complete and unedited, except possibly for the addition of a title card announcing the name and number of each episode.

Video & Audio

The series is presented in 4:3 format and looks clean with good color. The optional English subtitles translates the Japanese dialogue well, which is paraphrased somewhat for the English dubbed track. The show's theme song is presented in a kind of karaoke format, subtitled simultaneously in English and romanji. Both the English and Japanese audio tracks have strong Dolby Stereo tracks. The Japanese voices have a bit more life to them; I found the English voice characterizations (recorded in Studio City, California) well above average but also slightly generic, with George's English counterpart (Michael Lindsey) sounding a bit like Christian Slater.

Extra Features

The only extras are three "trailers," really promos, for other Bandai titles. A full-color, four page booklet is short on information about the show, but does offer plot summaries of each episode and admirably complete credits for both the Japanese and English-language versions.

Parting Thoughts

Anime fans deeper into the genre than this reviewer may find Kaze no yojimbo an interesting variation of the usual show of this type. As someone not especially enamored of anime beyond Miyazaki, Ghost in the Shell and some early Osamu Tezuka, Kaze no yojimbo came of as sluggish and uninspired, especially in light of its superlative source.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.