A very high degree of seriousness is dangerous. While it may work wonderfully with truly complex and well built stories and themes, it only makes the lack of real quality more obvious. Combine it with unjustified gore, erotic explicitness and general grossness, and the only thing you get is weak creative power trying to hide itself behind stylistic tricks. Just to make myself clear, I'm not saying that movies (or cartoons or anything) *need* to be more than a nice style, I could make a fairly long list of such items that don't contain any deep philosophy, yet which I love as much as anything else, starting with Bessons's "Fifth Element". What I disliked about "Shigurui" (and other stories that share its faults) was the obvious *attempt* and failure at being thoughtful, combined with the unawareness about the failure, unawareness divulged through the utter seriousness of its tone. An example of what I understand by successful seriousness and thoughtfulness is Hiroshi Hamazaki's other animated series, "Texhnolyze". The awesomeness of "Tex" was also the reason why I wanted to watch "Shigurui", also considering the wonderful experience I had with "Samurai Champloo" after "Cowboy Bebop" – I thought that hey, if Watanabe could make a wonderful samurai series after a wonderful SciFi series, maybe Hamazaki could do it too; well, he couldn't.
So what did I dislike so much about "Shigurui"? Apart from the incompleteness of the plot line, which I assumed to have been caused by design-unrelated production problems, the story was pretty thin and inarticulate to begin with. Worst of all though, the characters were completely incoherent, changing mood, behaviour and motivations from one scene to another, creating the strong suspicion that their character was designed as a pretext for the rough scenes and not vice-versa (so the character was changing in order to allow new rough scenes). Also, they were obviously not what they tried to be, if we think just about Kogan Iwamoto, the sword genius and boss of the Dojo. He is supposed to look like a god of death, like an unreasonable and deadly entity that instils absurd order and despair among its followers (we get this idea through the comments of those who witness his actions, and through visual messages such as superimposing the image of a tiger on Kogan before a fight). Well he's nothing but an obnoxious (when conscious) and gross (when unconscious) old geezer, who's good with a sword. Of course, he can also be gross when conscious, and obnoxious when unconscious. Taken away from the general awe or fear of the other characters (which worked like a blatant tag that said "GOD OF DEATH!"), there was nothing truly impressive about him. The other three main characters, his daughter and the two tough young samurai struggling to step in his shoes as the next bosses of the dojo, are changing from reasonable humans to freaks according to the weather. Meanwhile, the story was filled to the brim with pointless scenes of torture, gore and humiliation (we were even being shown gross actions of completely irrelevant characters, what would have been the point of that, to show that the whole world was wicked? But this story was not a universally apocalyptic one like "Tex", it was not a social commentary on the whole human- or samurai- or Japanese kind, it was just a local story about a group of characters!).
There were several references (or influences) in the series, like the reference to the mill sex scene from "Sword of Doom", but the references were clumsy. Like the "Sword of Doom" reference: in "SoD" the images and sounds of the mill machinery were used to symbolize the erotic activity going on, in a very suggestive and yet inexplicit manner. Here, we got both the piston image *and* the sex scene, which pretty much nullified the figurative meaning of the former, for the sake of showing some more explicit imagery. Which imagery was not particularly relevant to the plot either, it only showed the male involved to be a womanizer, but that we could have understood through many other means, besides it got nullified by his subsequent sudden faithfulness towards another female character.
What's more: although the general visual quality of the series is quite impressive, the lines are expressive and the colours & shapes harmonious, the sex scenes are quite well done and the bodies drawn look like real human bodies, so even though all this works just fine, the gore looks just silly. The blood is just some super-red, super-shiny glue gargling from various wounds in slo-mo, the guts look like plastic toys from the biology lab of an elementary school, the facial and body expressions of the characters in the gore scenes are simply the same, and we get to see these things the whole goddamn time! (come to think of it, the BDSM-ish erotic scenes were also pretty much similar, except that there only happen about 5 or 6 of them in the series, so they were less obnoxious) I gave this series a 4 because, like I said, the graphic was often terrific, and also because the faults I found here were faults you can find only from a certain level of quality on. So "Shigurui" is indisputably better than many anime on the market. It's just that the series wasn't anywhere close to other things I saw, and, like I said earlier, that it committed some of the sins I find most unpleasant: it took itself way more seriously than it deserved, and it used a deliberately slow, violent and dark style to create the *illusion* of depth where there was none. It fell from a high position, or out of a good premise, but fall it did.
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