DREAMS COME TRUE!

You have no idea how excited I am that we’re getting a full adaptation of Ushio and Tora!  Okay, maybe it won’t be covering everything from the manga (nor would I want it to), but it’s confirmed we’re getting a 3-cour (26 + 13) that will definitely include the final battle with Hakumen no Mono (which the old OVA didn’t even touch).

Now, if you remember, way back I did a post on 10 awesome anime openings.  One of them was the second opening to the UshiTora OVA, and for good reason: it fucking ROCKED.

The new TV opening doesn’t rock quite as hard, but it’s certainly following in the right footsteps.

The opening has hard rock and includes several scenes of Ushio and Tora being back-to-back badasses.  You honestly don’t need any more than that… and yet, just for the hell of it, we get glimpses of superior characters like Hyo, the Kamaitachis, and HOLY FUCK, WE’RE ALREADY SEEING GLIMPSES OF USHIO’S MOM, JUST LIKE THAT?!  The thing I love best about this opening is that it’s promising… in that it delivers a promise that we will be seeing everything that makes this series great.

Gentlemen, I am hyped.

We start things off being introduced to the Beast Spear, a holy spear crafted to kill demons.  Our hero, Ushio, is the son of the priest at a shrine that keeps the Beast Spear safe.  Naturally, Ushio doesn’t believe in the legend, especially since he never saw it.  What follows is just the type of father-son violence we don’t get nearly enough of these days.

Hey, at least you didn’t have to suffer the Cradle From Hell.

Anyway, Pops is off to go on a journey and leaves Ushio in charge of the shrine.  While Ushio airs out the warehouse, he trips on a trap door and discovers a demon trapped to a wall by the Beast Spear.  The demon asks Ushio to free him, then makes the mistake of being honest about his plans to eat him and create a hell on Earth once he gets out.

You have to love Ushio’s response to this: he kicks the Beast Spear deeper into the demon to punish him for being so stupid.

Personally, I like the way this was animated in the OVA better.  It looks cuter.  But it was also pointlessly zoomed out so you don’t see as much detail.

It’s at this point I have to point out that the art style is very different to what most people are accustomed to.  It actually looks nothing like the original manga chapter, but DOES look spot-on for Fujita’s art in later volumes.  So yeah, despite what you may think, the art style is actually an update of sorts.

We actually spend some time following Ushio to school (which didn’t happen in the manga chapter).  We meet his best friends, tomboy and blatant tsundere Asako Nishimura (spoilers: she wins), and Mayuko Inoue (best girl for the first half of this series).

Upon seeing the girls, my first reaction was: WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY DO TO MAYUKO?!  She’s supposed to have brown-orange hair!  I don’t even know what to call that color!  DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY BLEACH COMPARISON JOKES YOU’VE DENIED ME?!

So yeah, we got some fun character-establishing moments at school… which is all okay.  It’s the kind of antics you expect out of Asako and Ushio.  The thing is, like I said, this didn’t happen in the manga.  The entirety of the episode takes place in the morning, and this change shifts the second half of the episode to the afternoon.  Not really that important, but food for thought.  Also, in the old OVA, instead of character-establishing school scenes, we get character-establishing scenes with Asako’s family at their shop.

Asako and Mayuko go to the shrine to pick up a notebook Asako lent to Ushio.  While there, Ushio sees demons floating around, but Asako and Mayuko don’t.  This leads to… well, this:

This was very MUCH better animated than the OVA, which consisted of pretty much a single action still.

Ushio heads to the demon, who explains that his built-up demonic aura was released once Ushio opened the trap door, and it’s this aura that is attracting all sorts of lesser demons to the town.  Left with no other option, Ushio agrees to release the demon if he promises to kill the lesser demons that were brought to the town.  The demon immediately reneges on his deal, but Ushio is powered up by the Beast Spear (a process that temporarily makes his hair grow to SSJ3 proportions) and fights back.

Frightened of the power of the Beast Spear, the demon agrees to kill the demons.  Ushio names the demon “Tora” and tells him he’s responsible for all of the demons brought to the town due to his demonic aura.  Ushio and Tora silently think they’ll kill the other once the threat of the other demons is dealt with.  And thus we have established the dynamic of the series.

Basically it was a perfect first episode for what Ushio & Tora is.  It’ll be a while before we really get into the swing of things and see what the series is truly capable of.  Very rapidly, we will start seeing some dark, horror-type storylines one might see out of Vampire Princess Miyu (though they rarely end as depressingly as Miyu’s stories), and we’ll eventually be introduced to girl after girl that sorta falls in love with Ushio even though none of them have a chance because Asako.  And I feel perfectly okay with spoiling that Asako wins out in the end because not a single one of those girls are thought of in a romantic way by Ushio at any point, which ultimately makes the whole thing just a horrible series of pointless shipteases.  You have been warned.  Still, many of them are good characters in their own right.  Y’know, aside from that one flaw.

With this TV series, I’m already promised most of what I want.  I can now only hope for two things: 1) For 2 generations of anime fans to recognize what relatively few have known for years: that Ushio & Tora is fucking badass and should never have been overlooked for as long as it has; and 2) For the series to be successful enough that a TV adaptation of Karakuri Circus can be considered.  Kazuhiro Fujita was ahead of his fucking time.