PEACOCK KING: SPIRIT WARRIOR 1
Rintaro, Director
1997
(of 5)
PEACOCK KING is a strange anime. Recommended to me by a friend, I checked it out since it was directed by Rintaro, the director of this month's featured anime.
The plot is the classic tale of good and evil, with the adversary, Siegfried, attempting to become the Regent of Darkness. To stop him, an apprentice named Kujaku is chosen. Starting in modern day Chinatown in San Francisco, the story takes you to a present-day Buddhist monastary that could easily be have set hundreds of years in the past. Along with this huge jump in setting is the hard to swallow fact that the bad guys are Neo-Nazis. Despite these B-movie facets and a small dose of cliche dialogue, the anime wasn't all that bad. The story would be extremely solid if a single time frame was chosen, either a present-day setting or a setting seemingly in the past. That we are dealing with Neo-Nazis in this fight of good and evil some how makes it more difficult to take the film more seriously.
Extremely short (49 minutes), this anime was a neat comparison to X, which came out in Japan in 1996, a year before the first PEACOCK KING. It seems that Rintaro's directing quality may have slipped in between the two films, but it is still an interesting anime to watch, and Rintaro is still an interesting director to look out for.
Copyright TLM 2000
