he 52-episode InuYasha anime series begins with a bang, as the title character—a white-maned young man with claws, fangs and pointy ears atop his head ("Like a dog's!" one character later says, though they really look more like a cat's)—smashes his way into a temple to steal a glowing necklace. Departing in a series of inhumanly powerful leaps, he gloats over the necklace, which will finally allow him to become "all demon."
Then an arrow pierces his chest, pinning him to a tree. One of the shrine's guardians, a woman named Kikyo, retrieves the necklace from the ground. Mortally wounded and trailing blood, she hands the necklace to her young sister, Kaede, and charges her to see that it is burned with Kikyo's body, so its powerful Jewel of Four Souls can never again be claimed by evil.
Cut to modern-day Tokyo, where a practical, if slightly arrogant, girl named Kagome lives with her family in an ancient shrine. The place is the source of many legends—even the pickles the family eats with their dinner are supposedly "full of history." But Kagome dismisses the legends as nonsense, until her 15th birthday, when a horrific woman/spider/centipede-demon lunges out of a sealed well on the shrine grounds and drags Kagome into the earth. She emerges in a feudal Japan full of monsters and horrors. Among them is InuYasha the half-demon, who, after 50 years, is still pinned to a tree by the powerful spell contained in Kikyo's arrow.
It quickly emerges that Kagome is the reincarnation of Kikyo, and the guardian of the Jewel of Four Souls. InuYasha revives and attempts to steal the jewel from her, but the now-elderly Kaede binds him with a spell. Then another demon claims the jewel, which Kagome accidentally smashes into a multitude of tiny fragments, which fly off. Kaede warns that each piece is a danger, and suggests—several times, with varying amounts of luck—that Kagome and InuYasha work together to retrieve them. At first, they both balk, but eventually, they begin to come to terms with each other, and the necessity of their semi-competitive, semi-cooperative quest.
A capable concoction of light and dark
Rumiko Takahashi, the writer/artist behind the enduring, mega-popular manga/anime series Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1/2, and Urusei Yatsura, scored another big hit in Japan with her latest project, InuYasha. Viz Communications is distributing the ongoing series here: the company's up to 10 printed graphic-novel compilations, in addition to the monthly comic. But this is the first time the animated adaptation will air in the United States.
It's easy to see why Cartoon Network chose to put this series in its Saturday-night "Adult Swim" programming block—the show's tone is not as dark as some of Takahashi's more brutal occult series, like the Mermaid Forest stories, and it retains some of the flavor of her romantic comedies, where a lot of comic yelling and rivalry takes place, and the ultimate insult is for a male character to tell a female character that she's "not cute." But InuYasha is still a graphic horror series—blood and severed limbs fly, people and animals die grotesquely, and InuYasha himself, in spite of his teddy-bear looks and redeeming qualities, is a brutal, smug killer.
The InuYasha TV adaptation looks great—the colors are vibrant and vivid, the animation is excellent (so much so that the occasional shortcuts are very noticeable), and the design fills out and solidifies Takahashi's somewhat scrunched-looking, sketchy characters without losing their individuality. The voices in the early episodes seem a bit inconsistent, and the translation's an odd mixture of formal dialogue, colloquialisms, modern slang and at least one awful pun. But most importantly, the series' adventure kicks in strongly in the first episode, setting up a solid framework for all the adventure to come. In her decades on top of the manga field, Takahashi has become a consummate storyteller, whether she's dabbling in comedy or horror—or, in this case, both, in a
comfortable balance and with equal success.
