Mugen no Juunin: Immortal - finally a good anime

  Mugen no Juunin: Immortal, or Blade of the Immortal, may confuse some people because it's one of many adaptions to the screen of the same story. There have been anime before, live action adaptions and so on. The one I am talking about is the 2019 one, that was released on Amazon Prime.

  Part Twilight Samurai, part Ninja Scroll, this is a story of a lot of characters on various sides, fighting each other for their own reasons, while the Shogunate is happy to influence the issue or downright force it, since it sees all swordsmen and by extension all people who choose to better themselves against all cultural pressure and outside any organization, as threats.

  The film focuses more on the character's motivation and the politics that lead to the situation they are caught in and less on the fight scenes. It's not like you don't get fight scenes, but many of the fights are bypassed when they don't actually further the story. At 24 episodes of 20 minutes each, it's long enough without swordplay porn inflating its duration, so I appreciated that.

  Now, the main character is Manji, the Immortal, a man who cannot die and regenerates any wound due to a curse, but in truth that's a detail that doesn't affect the story too much. One could easily do something similar with a guy who is just that good that every hit on him is superficial. There are some episodes and some characters dedicated to his particular affliction, but if you remove them, you still get a solid era storyline.

  The animation is really good, as well as the Japanese voice acting - I really like Tsuda Kenjirou's voice, and if I have to find one issue with the series, it's that there are too many characters. I understand why the same people who vote isekai anime every year as 10/10 would not be able to understand (or maybe even abide) such a complex story. And I say abide because it is sort of subversive, as well. It's not hard to understand how modern Japan got the way it did after such cleansings of independent thought.

Bottom line: a very good anime which I wholeheartedly recommend.