Publisher: Funimation (USA)Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles.
Length: 26 episodes x 24 minutes
Production Date: 2007 - 2008
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
Toraji Ishida, better known as Kojiro to his work
colleagues, is a part time teacher at Muroe High and also more importantly the
coach of the school’s kendo club. A meeting with his sempai, Kenzaburo
Ishibashi leads to him wager that his students can beat the other. As Kojiro is
a pauper, if he wins he gets to eat at Ishibashi’s father’s sushi restaurant
for a year. As Kojiro lucked out and beat Ishibashi in a kendo championship in
high school, and Ishibashi still feels slighted by this. If Kojiro’s team loses,
he has to surrender his trophy to him. While Ishibashi already has a full team
ready, Kojiro only has a total of two students that fit the criteria. The
battle will take place against five of Ishibashi’s female students and
currently Kojiro only has two in his team; Kirino Chiba the quite competent and
happy go lucky team captain, and Sayako Kuwahara, another girl quite competent
at kendo, but she often quits and re-joins on a whim. She hardly turns up to
practice.
Hoping that he bumps into a girl who’s an expert at
kendo, Kojiro’s wish literally comes true. He discovers Tamaki Kawazoe, a
student in the first year of high school who is a kendo prodigy. Tamaki spends
hours at home honing her skills and fighting grown men at her father’s dojo.
She sees no need to spend her spare time joining the school’s kendo club.
However the club has two problem members; Toyama and Iwasa. The former is an
expert bully and the latter is his lackey. Both have put students off joining
the club for a couple of years. Tamaki’s sense of justice forces her to join
and rid the club of the bullies though a match with Toyama. Soon after the very
beautiful Miyako Miyazaki joins along with her oddly dumpy boyfriend Danjuro.
Despite absolute beginners, Kojiro is pleased he has a fourth member. Fully
aware he requires five, he hatches a plan to take on Ishibashi’s girls by using
Tamaki twice in the match and pretending she’s the first and fifth member.
I’m rather iffy on a lot of sports anime. I’m not much
into sports in the first place, and secondly a lot of sports’ and manga are
aimed at the shonnen market and you end up with absurd storylines and super
human plays. I much prefer it when the sports part of the show is incidental to
the story. “Bamboo Blade” almost fits the bill in that regard. While kendo does
play a fairly big part in the show, the characters and their backstory are what
actually makes the show work. Tamaki, or Tama-chan to her friends, is unsurprisingly
the focus of the show. She is an avid anime and tokusatsu fan, with her favourite
show being the sentai-like “Blade Braver”. Tamaki is very stoic and very
serious in everything she does. The humour in her character comes from her
child-like obsession with her favourite shows. There is also some romance
hinted with fellow team mate Yuji Nakata, but his is mostly in the minds of the
female kendo club members. Tamaki doesn’t seem to be interested in boys as
such. Miyako is another key character in the show. The humour generated from
her character revolves around the fact she’s sweetness and light on the outside
but has a rather dark and almost demonic side which comes out frequently. She
also has a bizarre female stalker from old school, Reimi, whose antics are a
bit creepy at first until find out what’s really going on, which only adds to
the laughs. Also Miyako’s taste in men (i.e. Danjuro) is strange for a girl as
pretty and popular as herself.
For most of the show it’s quite light and focus is on comedy
rather than the tactics or rules of kendo. However at times it does veer
towards melodrama and some sequences felt like they were taken out of a shoujo
manga melodrama handbook. Then suddenly it’ll snap right back into comedy mode.
These moments really threw me. I don’t think throwing these moments of drama
into what seems to be a comedy works. I felt that it really threw off the flow
of the story. Surprisingly a lot of the secondary characters, mainly the girls
from Ishibashi’s team are really quite well fleshed out (despite their short
screen time) and provide a lot of humour to the episodes they’re in. Unfortunately
for me a fair wack of the jokes fell rather flat. The strike rate was about
half. However when the writers get a set up right and its well thought out and
written, the punch line can be a cracker. The climax of the show, though
probably more accurately the coda, was a bit of fizzer for me. It just sort of petered
out slightly, especially in terms of the fate of Kojiro, though that was solved
I the final episode. The very end of the final episode was a bit annoying. It
sort of sets up a second series, which to date, never eventuated. Funimation’s
publicity of the series is just plain awful and misrepresents what the show is
about (sushi? It’s mentioned for about half of one episode at the most). Most
of their promotional material panders to the lowest common dominator (which I
blame ADV for starting the trend of this type of promotion), but for whatever
reason this time it really shat me to tears. Overall it’s quite an enjoyable series.
It’s quite funny in parts, but the drama felt a bit shoehorned in and maybe a
little out of place and unnecessary. I would have preferred if it was purely
comedy. I’m going to give the show 6.5 out of 10. Unfortunately it’d not quite
good enough to give it a 7. Perhaps I’m a bit too hard on the shows with my
scoring now days.
Remaining Backlog: 28 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).
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