In Black Lion, we learn of a Japanese warlord, Nobunaga Oda, who was trying to take over Japan in the year 1580. The interesting thing initially was that we got to see machine guns, lasers, and other high tech weapons that aren't available even now. On top of that, there was a demon-like man who seemed completely indestructible who mowed down hordes of ninja. The basic story followed one ninja, Shishimaru, who escaped after a battle with the demon and wanted revenge. As the story progressed, it was shown that the demon was also a high tech device and virtually impossible to defeat using ancient Japanese tactics and weapons. I won't ruin the 45 minute long feature for you by telling you more but the story was quite compact and could've used some fleshing out of the characters as well as more exposition on the details of what was going on. Too much was hinted at yet not explained for me to comfortably enjoy this dvd.

Picture: The original release in Japan was in 1989 which means there wasn't too much that ADV could do to improve the technical qualities here. The picture was not bad but the full frame release didn't get one of ADV's better dvd transfers either. Pretty bare bones for the most part.

Sound: The audio choices were either 2.0 English or Japanese with subtitles. While the mix was pretty basic, I remember the original audio track having lots of problems so the sound engineer should probably receive some extra credit for cleaning it up. Good work.

Extras: There were trailers for the feature itself and some other ADV projects. Not much.

Final Thoughts: I prefer anime that makes a statement or at least provides a sensible story that'll keep me interested. While Go Nagai fans will want to own this, the rest of us will be content with a mid-week rental. I've never been a fan of short anime releases that had less than an hour of show yet kept the high price of a regular release. The reason here is almost certainly the fault of the cost of the rights from Go Nagai but perhaps it would've been a better deal if better extras had been included. If you really like Nagai's work or have to own all the ninja anime on the market, this one will make you happy. The rest of us will get a rental worth of pleasure at best.