Ninja Slayer From Animation has a single joke so funny it wants to tell it for 26 episodes. Granted the joke is funny, but studio Trigger has already told this joke before with the show Inferno Cop, except that Inferno Cop was around a half hour in total, split into two minute pieces that actually had a uniqueness that made them funny, and even that may have been a bit too long. Yet at the end of every Inferno Cop episode I was doubled over with laughter at the joke, excited for another episode, while watching Ninja Slayer turned the joke into a weekly chore. I feel like I watched the same episode 26 times, as the overarching plot caves to a mess of a narrative with absolutely no focus, no sense of direction, and nothing compelling me to watch any more. I’m not a huge fan of the joke anymore.
The setting is the technological paradise of Neo-Saitama, but all its characters are firmly trapped in the Edo period. The city is dark and rainy as yakuza rule over citizens and ninjas serve corporate interests to terrorize the populace. A businessman has his life turned upside down by a group of ninjas who destroy his home and kill his wife and son, on the orders of the sinister Soukai Syndicate. To get his revenge, he contracts with a wayward “ninja soul” and becomes the dreaded Ninja Slayer, hunting down all ninjas and swearing to one day topple the Soukai Syndicate. As we follow his nonsensical journey to that goal, he takes down countless ninjas in identical fashion: they each bow and introduce themselves. They spout stereotypical battle lines. They begin to fight while yelling “Yeeart” and “Wasshoi” and “Don’t screw with me bastard!”. The enemy ninja has a special theme that Ninja Slayer figures out his way around. The enemy ninja is beaten and dies in a poorly animated explosion yelling “sayonara” into the void. This is the joke. It is funny.
The most noticeable part of the show is the Inferno Cop style paper cutout animation used for the fight scenes and other encounters, while other scenes are handled with regular animation. Switching between them hurts my brain, although having two paper stills flip around and fight with voiced lines over top is an amusing way to see how contrived a lot of anime fight scenes are, and to realize how much lack of substance can be covered up by choreography. Once again, this is the joke, and it was funny the first couple times. The dual animation style wears out its welcome incredibly fast, as does its attempt to criticize how vapid anime fight scenes are. Hilariously enough, if you take away this aspect of criticism Ninja Slayer is pretty vapid itself.
The source material for Ninja Slayer is a novel meant to parody the western perception of anime in the 80’s and 90’s, and so obviously any worn out clichés and bad animation are intentional. The women ninjas are scantily clad and fall victim to scenes of implied sexual deviancy, there is a recap episode with few scenes actually in the show, and many of the significant characters disappear without having their plotlines resolved. As a parody it does indeed encompass many of the issues not just of how late 20th century Western exoticism carries over to the big screen, but also how anime has conducted itself since that time. And yet a parody has to be better than the thing it pokes fun at, or nothing is really solved. Just because Trigger made a bad 90’s ninja show on purpose rather than by accident doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t enjoy watching it. If it wanted to prove a point, then it did; I never want to watch Ninja Slayer again, nor do I think it deserves to be watched in the first place.