Presentation
The box art does a really good job of showing you what to expect from the series. It’s a relatively simple design of the faces of Irako and Fujiki on a brown background with a blood splatter in the center of the box spreading a bit over the two faces. The art for the DVD cases of the two disks inside are less inspiring, both sporting various parts of the human body lightly done on a brown background. The art in the series overall is rather unique. It uses primary light and dull tones, except for in the cases of blood or violence. This of course makes the blood and gore most prominent in the film. The art does definitely give a good feel of a historical Japanese anime as opposed to the normal fare you usually see. The character designs tend to pronounce a single physical feature on a character so that you can easily differentiate between all the different characters. This is important because all the characters are dark haired and dark-eyed, and at times can get a bit confusing as to whom is whom. This series is exceptionally gory. It doesn’t shirk away from showing just how gruesome someone’s entrails falling out would be, or how disturbing it is to see someone’s head get cut in half. The music in this series is nice a pleasant, sticking to more typical older Japanese tones. It sounds very much something you would expect to here out of one of the older Japanese films as opposed to the harder metal and sounds we get today. It’s a very nice change of pace. The opening and closing songs both follow the same trend, mostly relying on plucked strings and drums to get across certain accents. Both voice cast do an excellent job portraying their various characters. There is a significant change in dialogue between the two so it might be worth watching them both to get a complete story.
Extras
The extras in this collection are rather nice. The first one being something called Marathon Play. It’s a great way to watch the entire disc without having to watch the intro and closing song between each episode. It’s great for getting the story all in one go. It also features Audio Commentary on one of the episodes, as well as production art of the characters and the settings in Shigurui. Then of course the standard amount of trailers and textless songs also come with it. One other small but fun little feature is a 24 page booklet that comes with it, featuring more about some of the characters and a bit more of the artwork. Overall it has a pretty nice amount of extras.
Overall this anime does a great job of pulling a fictional story and making it seem truly historical with pulling great references from Japan’s actual past. If you can get past the gore and violence, or even enjoy it, then you will most certainly enjoy the intriguing and complex story Shigurui tells.