Shinsuke Sato's The Princess Blade is, in some respects, a standard Japanese action adventure with a lot of swordplay and repayment of blood debts; but it differs in that it stretches the formula in interesting ways. Its moody angst is turned up to full power and it has a twilit elegiac quality, a sense of the sadness of things, which is at once very Japanese and very stylish. Yukio is one of the assassins of the house of Takemikazuchi, a group of exiled royal guards from a neighbouring kingdom who have created a life in the isolated low-tech kingdom Japan has become... in some near future. She is in fact the last of the original Takemikazuchi family, who have gradually been marginalised and murdered. Informed of this and on the run from her fellow swordsmen, she takes refuge with, and falls for, Takashi, an assassin of a more modern kind, an alienated young man whose concern for his retarded sister sits uneasily with his bomb-making. The film moves steadily from explosions of passionate action beautifully choreographed to quiet intense moments of stillness, ending ambiguously on the latter. It is a superior film in its genre because it coherently questions the values and actions it celebrates. --Roz Kaveney [show more]
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In a post-apocalyptic future, Japan has become a monarchy again and the ruling family regularly calls upon the help of the House of Takemikazuchi, a family of highly-trained assassins, to suppress the activity of the rebel factions. When Princess Yuki, a talented member of the assassin clan, discovers that her own mother was killed by a man high up in the new ruling class, she vows to take her revenge. However, when she is wounded in battle and nursed back to health by the rebel Takashi, she finds herself making an unexpected alliance in order to carry out her plan.
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