Ninja Scroll (獣兵衛忍風帖 Jūbee Ninpūchō, "Jubei Ninja Wind Scroll") is a 1993 anime film by Yoshiaki Kawajiri set during the Edo period. It was one of Manga Entertainment's first major releases during the mid-1990s anime boom and did a lot to shape the early fandom as well as perceptions of the medium.
The main story begins when a dying peasant girl staggers into the village next to hers and claims a plague has wiped out her village before collapsing. The area is promptly evacuated and quarantined, but the leader of the local lord's ninja force receives reports of a group of strangers seen in the wilderness around the village just before the plague outbreak and asks for permission to investigate.
As the ninja squad makes their way towards Shimoda village, they're slaughtered by Tessai (Ryūzaburō Ōtomo), a giant of a man who can turn his skin into stone. Tessai only leaves alive a young woman, Kagero (Emi Shinohara), because he plans to rape her. But as he forces himself on her in an abandoned shrine, the protagonist, wandering Rōnin Jubei Kibagami (Kōichi Yamadera) comes across them. Jubei manages to wound Tessai in a brief fight and helps Kagero escape, but the duo parts ways afterward.
Kagero returns to report the death of her squad and is promptly sent back to gather more information about the attackers. In the meantime, Jubei is attacked by Tessai and then by another strange member of the group of super ninja that Tessai is a part of: the Eight Devils of Kimon. Jubei is saved from one of these attacks by Dakuan (Takeshi Aono), a crazy old man who works as a government agent tracking the Eight Devils. Dakuan asks Jubei to help him, but Jubei refuses until Dakuan traps him in a Poison and Cure Gambit before revealing a startling piece of information: the leader of the Eight Devils is Himuro Genma (Daisuke Gōri), a man Jubei has some history with—and whom Jubei insists he killed years ago.
Jubei's only chance of survival lies in defeating the Eight Devils of Kimon and retrieving the antidote he needs, and working together with Dakuan and Kagero (after they encounter each other again) appears to give him a greater chance of staying alive. Even for a Master Swordsman, though, taking on the rest of the Eight Devils and their schemes is a formidable challenge as the Devils turn all of their considerable power to wiping out the three protagonists.
Ninja Scroll was inspired by the ninja-themed Historical Fantasy novels penned by authors like Futaro Yamada and Takeshi Narumi, and is essentially a big Homage by Yoshiaki Kawajiri to them and their genre. Contrary to popular belief, it is not an adaptation of Yamada's The Koga Ninja Scrolls or any other work.
A sequel anime series was released years after the film's release. A big-screen sequel was announced in 2005, as well as a potential live-action adaptation, but both have languished in Development Hell ever since.
Ninja Scroll contains examples of:
- Accidental Hero: Utsuru Mujuro has Jubei dead to rights in their fight before Kagero tries to save Jubei by backstabbing Mujuro; the attack fails and leaves Kagero's blade stuck in a bamboo tree. When Mujuro later attempts a killing blow on Jubei, his sword hits against Kagero's blade (which he can no longer track by his hearing). Jubei doesn't waste the opportunity, and Mujuro dies wondering how, as far as he can tell, Jubei blocked his sword and stabbed him simultaneously.
- Acquired Poison Immunity: Kagero is immune to all types of poison, although it's implied she's a poison taster because of her immunity (instead of being immune because she's a poison taster).
- Action Bomb: Zakuro's MO. She turns the leader of the Koga ninjas into one to attack Kagero and Jubei. Later she uses a rat that she has turned into such a bomb in an attempt to kill both Yurimaru and Jubei, succeeding only with the former. Her fate, ironically, is to virtually becomes one herself, as Dakuan splashes oil all over her and Jubei sets her on fire, causing all the gunpowder she always carries around to explode.
- Ambiguously Human: It's not clear if the Eight Devils are literal demons or if they're just supernaturally gifted humans.
- Ambiguous Situation: Kagero has a troubled and distraught expression when she sees Chamberlain Hyobu is having sex with a woman while giving orders. Is she upset by the Chamberlain liking courtesans? Is she disgusted by the older man humping one in front of her? Is she upset that he's reacting so casually and disrespectfully to the news about the deaths of her comrades? Considering how Kagero sees herself as a mere tool to be used by her lord, is she jealous of the courtesan? Or, considering she cannot have sex at all due to her poisonous body, is she simply jealous of anyone who can?
- Affably Evil: Utsutsu Mujuro, who saves Jubei and Kagero from Zakuro's death trap so he can have a proper duel with Jubei. Of all the Eight Devils, he comes off as the least sadistic.
- And I Must Scream: This is Genma's final fate: encased in a shell of molten gold that sinks into the depths of the ocean.
- Badass in Distress: Jubei gets pinned down by Benisato's legion of snakes and is rescued by Kagero.
- Badass Normal: Unlike the Devils, Jubei doesn't have any special powers, which means he must rely on his basic skills and his wits to come out ahead. That said, Jubei has the ability to perform an iaijutsu draw which can apparently strike an enemy or object that is beyond the actual range of his blade, though it might be just a really fast hit-and-run attack and not a straight supernatural technique.
- Bad Habits: Dakuan carries a shakujo staff, a tool strongly associated with the Buddhist religion, which along with his hat, the rest of his outfit, and his advanced age would make him pass in the setting as a monk or a pilgrim, instead of the ninja spy he is actually.
- Battle Amongst the Flames: The climactic duel takes place inside a burning treasure ship.
- Convection, Schmonvection: The fire is hot enough to melt gold. Gold's melting point is over one thousand degrees Celsius, yet the combatants fight without discomfort or having their clothes burst into flames.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Eight Devils are dead and Genma will never be able to hurt anyone again due to what happens to him. Unfortunately, Kagero perished in the conflict, as did an entire village of innocent people. Jubei is no better off then he was at the start. He isn't a single coin richer and his heart is broken due to Kagero's death.
- Bee-Bee Gun: The ugly hunchback Mushizo is a living hornets' nest. He communicates with and controls the insects, using them to gather information and as a weapon. The wasps' deadliness has some basis in reality.
- Big Damn Heroes:
- Jubei is this to Kagero when he confronts Tessai.
- Kagero returns the favor when Jubei fights Utsuro Mujuro.
- Blade Reflection: Utsutsu Mujuro uses this to blind Jubei.
- Blood Lust: Tessai drinks the blood from the lead Koga ninja's dismembered arm, for no apparent reason than to just freak out Kagero.
- Body Horror: Good God. All over the damn place, but noteworthy examples include...
- Benisato stuffing a nun's corpse full of snakes and using it as a puppet—the serpents burst out of the nun's eyes and mouth to disturbing effect.
- Mushizo's hunchbacked for a good reason—he's got a goddamn hornet hive fused with his back, and we see them emerge from it. Oh, and they start stinging him from within after he plunges into a pond, and they're trying to escape the water.
- Zakuro taking the corpse of Kagero's former leader and stuffing it full of gunpowder as an explosive trap for Jubei and Kagero. The result is a stitched-together mess of a body that's still missing its arms, with its eyes and lips sewn shut.
- Genma recovering from mortal injuries is rather graphic, from Jubei headbutting the crown of his skull inward to being cut partially in half from the waist up. And that's not counting what he looks like after being caught in a tidal wave of molten gold...
- Bond One-Liner: In the English dub when Yurimaru is killed, Zakuro explains that he must have "accidentally" gotten caught in her trap. After she finishes her explanation she throws in this homophobic quip:Zakuro: Now, he's the queen of the devils.
- Broken Bird: Kagero has been pretty much used and abused by everyone until she meets Jubei.
- The Brute: Tessai is an enormous, heavily muscled man who is Nigh-Invulnerable in a sword fight due to his ability to turn his skin to stone, and thus favors simple, unsophisticated force. Somehow he's also able to move with the grace and agility of a ninja, which is fairly mindboggling.
- Can't Have Sex, Ever: Kagero's body absorbs poisons instead of processing them. It makes her ideal for her job and protects her from the venom of one of Benisato's snakes, but the numerous toxins have made her bodily fluids so poisonous that even kissing someone else would be deadly. Tessai finds out the hard way.
- Carrying the Antidote: This trope is subverted; Jubei thinks Dakuan is doing this, so he attempts to Cut The Knot by hitting Dakuan with the same poisoned shuriken that Jubei was wounded with. Unfortunately for Jubei it isn't actually the same shuriken; Dakuan had already thrown away the poisoned shuriken and replaced it with an ordinary one, either out of an abundance of caution or because he believed Jubei might respond the way he did.
- Chameleon Camouflage: Dakuan shows the skill to turn his body into a vegetal-like state to blend with a tree when hiding from Shijima.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The wire attached to Jubei's sword, which he can use to pull the sword into his hand when it's been knocked away from him.
- During Jubei's battle with Utsutsu Mujuro, Kagero tries a sneak attack and embeds one of her short swords in a bamboo pole. That sword then comes in handy when Mujuro attempts a killing blow on Jubei, only for Kagero's blade to deflect his attack, allowing Jubei to kill him.
- Coitus Uninterruptus: Kagero reports the massacre to her clan's Chamberlain, who is... preoccupied, much to Kagero's disgust (and possible jealousy, depending on how you interpret the face she makes).
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Jubei blows through a small group of brigands in the opening scene and later does the same with a group of Genma's nameless and faceless ninja mooks, but is forced to fight for his life against the much more powerful and skilled Eight Devils of Kimon throughout the rest of the film.
- Contrived Coincidence: It's nothing but pure luck that Jubei happens to be using the same abandoned shrine which Tessai brings Kagero to after he captures her.
- Corpse Land: When the group goes to Shimoda village they find it is littered with diseased corpses. Or rather, poisoned corpses...
- Crapsack World:
- This is a Japan where the ninja aren't just skilled spies, they're legitimate supernatural monsters that come out of nowhere, resurrect from the dead, betray each other left and right, pop out of the shadows to molest you, disguise themselves as normal people to trap you with venomous snakes, poison whole villages, rape you or your corpse and display barely even practical concern when all their friends, lovers, and family die in one evening because, by then, they've seen and done so much that the darkness of the loss and insanity of it all doesn't even faze them at that point. In this world, you literally have to break the laws of nature just to survive. No thank you.
- The legitimate side of the setting doesn't come off any better; vicious and often lethal political intrigue is everywhere, with dishonorable conduct and self-serving actions being the expected course of every authority figure or government agent encountered. Human lives are a cheap commodity, with mass death being carelessly waved off.
- Just to drive it home further, there is one, ONE moment in the entire movie that has unabashed happiness in it. It's the villager who cheerfully tells his neighbor that the storm made his wife go into labor and now he has a ninth child, and even this moment is cut short because a damn corpse wanders in under control of one of the devils to tell them that a plague has wiped out the neighboring village.
- Deadly Bath: Benisato attacks Jubei while he's bathing in a hot spring, but thankfully he kept his sword within arm's reach and is able to defend himself, and they both go for a Full-Frontal Assault.
- Death Seeker: Kagero shows signs of this throughout the movie. In the dub, Jubei chastises Kagero several times over her willingness to throw her life away even in situations where she doesn't need to take such risks.
- Deus Sex Machina:
- Benisato extrudes a snake from her vagina to bite Kagero.
- Subverted when Jubei chooses not to sleep with Kagero despite knowing her poisonous bodily fluids would counteract Dakuan's poison.
- Disability Superpower: Utsutsu Mujuro may be blind but he's a fearsomely skilled swordsman, and it's only a trick of fate that saves Jubei in their fight.Mujuro: Your sight is a weakness.
- Divided We Fall: This is in play among the bad guys. Yurimaru is upset over the fact that Benisato is sleeping with Genma, so when Kagero gets the drop on Benisato he takes the chance to kill her for her failure, despite the fact that she still could have been a major threat to Jubei at least with minimal effort. Later when Zakuro is upset with the way Yurimaru has coldly rebuffed her, she uses one of her Action Bombs with the intent of blowing both him and Jubei up. Yurimaru had been on the edge of torturing and electrocuting Jubei to death, but the distraction lets Jubei get away and only results in Yurimaru's death. The infighting among these villains saved the good guys a lot of trouble.
- Due to the Dead: After Kagero dies, Jubei places her body into a boat and pushes it into the water. Then, he rips off his sleeves and attaches her headband onto his head before going out to exact revenge on Genma.
- Effeminate Misogynistic Guy: Pretty Boy Yurimaru sleeps with his male boss Genma, treats Zakuro like garbage, and murders Benisato for failing twice in a row. Since Benisato was also sleeping with Genma, jealousy may also have been a factor.
- Everything Is Better With Explosions: Zakuro's specialty is filling corpses with gunpowder and reanimating them.
- Exact Words: This exchange:Jubei: Okay, it's out of your system. Let's just call it quits.
Tessai: Not until you've repaid your debt.
Jubei: Well that's just excessive. If we keep this up, it's almost certain one of us is going to die.
Tessai: [grinning] "One of us'', yes - Exotic Weapon Supremacy: Shijima—his prosthetic arm can shoot its claw-tipped fingers out on the end of a long chain.
- Eye Scream: Tessai can turn his skin to rock, but that doesn't mean his body is as hard as rock everywhere.
- Fanservice:
- Benisato's appearances at the hot springs and when she emerges at the abandoned temple both focus on her alluring curves. The first one in particular, in which she gives off a seductive air.
- Zakuro's outfit, which is very similar to a one piece swimming suit, also qualifies.
- There's also Jubei's appearance at the hot spring.
- Faux Action Girl: Subverted in Kagerō’s case. Despite being a well trained kunoichi, she's never able to stand toe to toe with any of the film's villains, save for perhaps Benisato. However, her male partners Jūbei and Dakuan are not any better themselves at it, and more often than not it’s thanks to Kagerō that Jūbei survives his closer encounters, be it directly or by accident. Also, although she puts up a front of not needing anyone’s help, Kagerō is explicitly stated to be just a poison taster in her very first field mission, which means she's not experienced enough to be called an Action Girl in the first place.
- Fridge Logic: An In-Universe example. After Kagero reports on the destruction of her ninja squad, the Chamberlain immediately dispatches her once again to the area of Shimoda village to gather information about the attackers who did this. It makes sense on the surface that he'd want her to gather that information... but when Jubei hears this he points out the crucial logical hole by wondering what the hell the Chamberlain expects Kagero to accomplish by herself after the attackers massacred her entire squad and made it look easy. It's a little bit of foreshadowing about the fact that Genma has pulled a Kill and Replace on the clan Chamberlain.
- Go Out with a Smile: Kagero's heartbreaking farewell to Jubei.
- Gorn: Quite a bit, especially in the first half of the move and especially any scene with Tessai in it.
- Guns Are Revolutionary: The Toyotomi retainers seems to believe so, intending to use the gold acquired from Shimoda village to buy the most advanced muskets and cannons from Spain to retake Japan from the fledgeling Tokugawa Government.
- Hat Damage: Jubei is displeased when Tessai cuts a slice in his straw hat.
- The Hero Doesn't Kill the Villainess: Benisato isn't killed (or even defeated) by Jubei; after Kagero takes her captive Yurimaru kills her remotely due to failing too many times. Jubei kills every other Devil of Kimon except (ironically) Yurimaru, who is killed by Zakuro, the other female member of the team. note
- Heroic BSoD: Jubei falls into a major one when Kagero dies in his arms to the point that he decides to exact revenge on Genma.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Hanza sacrifices himself to save Kagero from Tessai, but it doesn't work.
- He Who Fights Monsters: Dakuan explicitly says that the group must be just as ruthless and monstrous as the Devils if they want to prevail.Dakuan: When you fight demons, be a demon yourself, or you can't win!
- High-Pressure Blood: It rains blood during the Koga massacre.
- Honor Before Reason:
- When he sees that she is reluctant and at least somewhat unwilling, Jubei refuses to sleep with Kagero despite knowing the act would cure him. They eventually do kiss just before she dies.
- In a flashback, we see that when Shinjuro's clan has outlived its usefulness, Genma played a Batman Gambit, ordering them to kill Jubei. Jubei lampshades this while begging for their lives. They don't listen to him, attack, and end all dead.Shinjuro: [Genma's] word is the law.
- Hope Spot: Not long after Dakuan cynically suggested that Kagero's clan might not make any attempt to stop the Eight Devils (due to not wanting to be the small clan that gets squished between the shogunate and the Toyotomi, the exiled former rulers who hired the Eight Devils), the Chamberlain and his samurai come riding into town and face down the ninja mooks working for the Eight Devils... and then we find out that Genma killed the Chamberlain several days earlier and has been using his powers to impersonate him when he suddenly stabs Kagero in the back.
- Hot Springs Episode: Jubei drops by a hot spring after fighting Tessai.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Where did Kagero carry so many flower petals, anyway?
- If I Can't Have You…: Zakuro doesn't take Yurimaru's rejection very well, especially since he treated her poorly while doing it.
- I Have You Now, My Pretty: Kagero gets kidnapped and molested by Tessai and later Shijima.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Benisato and Kagero both have powers that revolve around this.
- Intimate Healing: Dakuan tells Kagero she has to sleep with Jubei to cure his poison. Their kiss is implied to be enough to cure him.
- Invincible Hero: Subverted with Jubei. The Action Prologue and his first encounter with Tessai seem to point toward Jubei being this, and while he kills regular ninja mooks by the truckload, he is clearly overwhelmed by the presence of more exotic enemies. When he battles the Eight Devils of Kimon he only barely manages to defeat them, in many cases due to help from others or just sheer luck, and he also tends to get beat up pretty badly in the process.
- Irony: The death of Utsutsu Mujuro is rather ironic: after saying Jubei's sight was a weakness, Mujuro is killed because he couldn't see a knife stuck in a bamboo tree (which deflected his attack and gave Jubei the chance to deliver the killing blow).
- Jerkass: The Chamberlain and Dakuan fall under this trope. The Chamberlain, especially, seeing as he's Genma in disguise.
- Juggle Fu: In Jubei's introduction and Establishing Character Moment, he simply had to take care of three disgruntled assailants before he could finish eating his rice-ball. So, he tosses said rice-ball straight into the air as two of his would-be murderers leap into him, blocks the first with his sheathed sword and knocks him silly with a headbutt, takes his spear and smashes the second incoming idiot unconscious with it, then cuts the pistol of the third in half and sheathes his sword in one fast motion so fast the audience couldn't see it, and then opens his hand and catches the rice ball, nonchalantly finishing his lunch afterwards. It's as badass as it sounds.
- Karmic Death: Jubei actually doesn't succeed in killing Genma. The gold Genma took from the illegal mine melts in the heat of the burning ship and encases him, taking him to the bottom of the ocean.
- Last Kiss: In a World… where lust, violence, and greed have cheapened sex as an expression of love, Kagero's simple kiss for Jubei was an expression of love stronger than any other.
- Let Me Get This Straight...: Jubei's tone of voice when offered a job by Dakuan.'A Tokugawa government spy' wants to hire me?!
- The Load: Despite traveling with talented comrades in the movie and TV show, Jubei pretty much ends up doing all the work and killing most everyone. It seems pretty pointless in the movie, when he's fighting Utsutsu, that he calls out "This one's mine!" when they've pretty much all been his. He kills six of the Eight Devils of Kimon, with the other two lost to betrayal from their own brethren. Subverted, however, in that his comrades in the movie have their own contributions. Dakuan's Rubber Man and camouflage abilities make him good at infiltration. Kagero ends up making all the difference in three of Jubei's confrontations with the Eight Devils—her status as a Poisonous Person has a delayed effect on Tessai that weakens his stone skin; she ambushed Benisato when her snakes had Jubei at her mercy; and her kodachi getting stuck in a bamboo tree blocked Mujuro's sword and gave Jubei the opening to land the killing blow.
- Love Dodecahedron: There is a minor subplot of the strange love rectangle between Yurimaru, Zakuro, Genma, and Benisato. Zakuro is hot for Yurimaru (who is gay, sleeping with Genma, and not exactly gentle with letting Zakuro down), while Genma is also sleeping with Benisato, much to Yurimaru's chagrin. For these characters, Love Hurts.
- Mad Bomber: Zakuro. And because just throwing simple explosives would be too dull, she combines this with controlling corpses that she's sewn gunpowder into.
- Made of Iron: Jubei takes absurd amounts of punishment throughout the film and manages to walk away every time.
- Make Sure He's Dead: Yurimaru electrocutes an entire river trying to kill Jubei and his friends—then tells the other Devils of Kimon present to comb it for dead bodies.
- Master of Disguise: It turns out that Genma can do this. Being able to control every atom of his flesh and bone allows him to not only recover from any wound, but alter his body to look like the Chamberlain of the clan that Kagero's ninja squad serves.
- Master of Your Domain: The Big Bad has an extreme example of this trope.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never clear if Jubei's iaido technique is a regular but very fast attack or an actual supernatural skill. His battle against Tessai suggests a possible mundane explanation (he has a wire attached to the sword which might serve to throw and recover the sword quickly to hit faraway targets), but his battle with Mushizo points to the other (he somehow manages to cut the root on which the demon is standing despite Jubei being several feet underwater, making it appear to be a Razor Wind Sword Beam).
- Men Don't Cry: Played with in Jubei's case; he tries not to cry even when faced with the death of friends and loved ones, with the emphasis on the word tries.
- Miniature Senior Citizens: Dakuan is barely waist-high to Jubei.
- Ninja: Every named character in the film is a ninja, or at least uses the supernatural skills established in the setting as ninjutsu.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The final fight between Genma and Jubei is easily one of these, with Jubei mostly on the bad end of it. He only has a chance to strike back because Genma draws the beating out and Jubei starts finding opportunities to fight back. He survives by sheer determination, a well-timed collapse of support timbers as the burning ship begins to break apart, and a wave of molten gold engulfing Genma.
- Not Distracted by the Sexy: Pay attention to Benisato's introduction. While Jubei is making small talk, he's also readying his sword for the draw. He's instantly suspicious of the tattooed, attractive woman that he's never met before who slips into the hot spring with him while saying in an alluring voice that he reminds her of someone she's looking for.
- Off with His Head!: Jubei initially doesn't believe that Genma is behind the plot because he clearly recalls slicing off Genma's head.
- Oh, Crap!: A lot of them.
- Kagero when Tessai rips Hanza's arms apart and captures her.
- Tessai when Jubei blinds him in the eye.
- Jubei when Tessai corners and punches him.
- Tessai when he realizes that his skin is starting to crumble and later when his own boomerang sword comes back to kill him.
- Jubei when Benisato uses her snakes to entrance and then kill him.
- Kagero has a moment of terror when Genma runs her through with a sword while posing as the chamberlain.
- Yurimaru, while electrocuting Jubei, sees a rat wander into the room and collapse, displaying sutures on its belly. He connects the dots (floor covered with black powder + Zakuro's remote bomb = BOOM) when it's far too late.
- Zakuro has her own when confronting Dakuan in the hold of Genma's ship. She hacks open his sake gourd when he throws it at her and asks if that's all he's got. "Not at all," Jubei replies and drops a lit candle into the pool of flammable alcohol at her feet.
- There's one a split-second before this; Dakuan is about to light the fuse to blow up Zakuro when a thrown knife slices the wick on his candle.
- Old Soldier: Dakuan. Being old hasn't dulled his effectiveness as a government spy much.
- One-Man Army: The best way to describe Jubei's fight with Genma's ninja minions—specifically, the Mooks—would be Lawnmower versus Grass.
- People Puppets: Three of the Eight Devils of Kimon have mastered this art, in different ways:
- Shijima can use some unspecified technique to control people's bodies—he manipulates the body of a girl from Shimoda village to spread the rumors about a plague. Later on, he hypnotizes Kagero with the same technique and sends her after Jubei.
- Benisato slips snakes into the body of a dead nun and uses her as a mouthpiece before setting the snakes loose on Jubei.
- Zakuro can fill corpses with gunpowder, turning them into stitched-together, zombified Action Bombs.
- Pillars of Moral Character: Kagero qualifies as On (恩), due to her desire to repay her debt to Jubei for saving her from Tessai.
- Poisonous Person: Kagero. As a result, she's the perfect person to taste-test for poisons, or assassinate an enemy by sleeping with them.
- Psycho Electro: Yurimaru, who channels the lightning through the slender steel wires that he throws to snare and strangle his victims.
- Pun-Based Title: The Japanese title Jūbei Ninpūchō is a play on Ninpōchō (literally "Ninja Arts Scroll", but more often translated simply as "Ninja Scroll") a term used frequently in the titles of the novels which inspired the movie. Most directly, it's a reference to Yagyū Ninpōchō (which starred the famous historical samurai Yagyū Jūbei).
- Rape as Drama:
- When Kagero resists Tessai's attempts to rape her, he flat-out tells her he wouldn't mind raping her corpse instead.
- Shijima molests Kagero, but whether it's part of establishing his mind control over her, for his own twisted kicks, or both is never made clear.
- Rubber Man: Dakuan has a subdued version of this—as he infiltrates the ship of the Toyotomi retainer, he's seen stretching his arm to incredible lengths to hang onto the railing.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: Mushizo sends a swarm of hornets to attack the three heroes. Kagero uses sleeping powder mixed with pollen to hold them off.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Genma orders his forces to flee the sinking ship when Zakuro dies.
- Sexposition: The film contains an important strategy meeting which the authority figure coldly attends while in the middle of a Coitus Uninterruptus.
- Shout-Out: Being a Pastiche of ninja fiction, it requires its own page.
- Significant Hair Cut: Kagero cuts off her topknot to show she's not going to Stay in the Kitchen while her fellow ninjas are out risking their lives.
- Single Tear: Jubei may be a man amongst men, but when his manly heart is overwhelmed with grief for the deaths of his friends at his own hands and Kagero at Genma's, even he cannot help but shed these.
- Sissy Villain: Yurimaru. He wears the most complex and fanciful outfit of the Eight Devils, and often indulges in such artful activities as calligraphy or pausing to smell the flowers.
- Smug Snake: Benisato. The best example of this would be when she gets chewed out by Yurimaru (and has to block one of his steel wires), but has the nerve to taunt him about her relationship with Genma despite her superior's own relationship with their master.
- A Storm Is Coming: Jubei says this as he runs off at the end of the film's opening scene.
- Sword Sparks: Most visible in Jubei's duel with Mujuro, when their swords cross.
- Suck Out the Poison: Jubei attempts to do this to Kagero's thigh after she's bitten by a snake, but he earns a swift kick for the effort (as she was trying to protect Jubei).
- Summon to Hand: Jubei does this with his sword via a barely-visible string.
- Taking You with Me:
- Tessai attempted this with Jubei, but failed. (He left an impression of Jubei's face in stone so his comrades could avenge him, though.)
- Mushizo also attempts this by using a Last Ditch Move... twice in a row. He tries to spear Jubei after he falls into the water, and when Jubei blocks that attack with his sword, the wasp-user spits out a poison needle from his mouth (which Jubei manages to block with his sword's handle).
- Tragic Keepsake: Jubei ties Kagero's headband on his sword's scabbard.
- Trying Not to Cry: Yeah, Men Don't Cry in medieval Japan, but it still took all that Jubei had to do so until Kagero passed on in his arms, and even then a Single Tear that honored his manly heart was shed.
- Tsundere: Kagero is a rare tragic example of this trope; she didn't learn to express her feelings until it was too late.
- Unstoppable Rage: Jubei goes into this after Kagero is mortally wounded, slaughtering dozens of Genma's ninja henchmen.
- Use Your Head: During the climax, Jubei manages to knock Genma to the ground—despite having a broken arm—and repeatedly headbutts Genma hard enough to cave his face in. Genma gets back up seconds later, but still...
- Vicariously Ambitious: Genam knows that a ninja's life is regarded as even more worthless than that of a peasant's in Feudal Japan, and therefore even with his Complete Immortality he will never be legitimately recognized as an Emperor no matter how much gold he has. Therefore, he settles instead to use the blood-money of Shimoda village acquired by his monsters to buy an army of Ninja so massive and well-armed that any legitimate government, regardless of dynasty, will have no choice but to be figureheads puppeted by his absolute word from the shadows, making him the true ruler of Japan.
- Villainous Rescue: Yurimaru has strung up Jubei with his wires and is torturing him via electrocution—then Zakuro uses one of her "living bombs" to kill Yurimaru (Jubei manages to escape, although he is severely hurt).
- Walking the Earth: Jubei starts the movie doing this. He ends the movie in the same way.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: The Koga ninja clan is regarded as expendable; their lord regards their slaughter with irritation, since they didn't do their job properly.
- When She Smiles: Kagero blushing like a schoolgirl for the first time as Jubei tenderly held her is simply adorable.
- Woman Scorned: Zakuro doesn't take Yurimaru rejecting her well at all. Of course, Yurimaru's poor treatment of her probably didn't help much...
- World of Badass: There's Jubei, Kagero, Dakuan, the Eight Devils of Kimon...
- Worthy Opponent: Mujuro has this opinion of Jubei, saving him and Kagero from a fatal plunge down a cliff so he can duel Jubei personally.
- You Have Failed Me / You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Yurimaru kills Benisato for failing twice to kill Jubei in one evening; the fact she was sleeping with Genma, his lover, was an added bonus.
- You Need to Get Laid: Apparently Dakuan's second objective in hiring Jubei and Kagero in the same team.
