If Trinity Blood was an example of an anime where they took a great idea and wasted it, Shinobi is the live-action version of the same sort of mistake. It is a period ninja-fantasy adventure with a game cast, based on a bestselling novel, and my god is it ever boring as hell. Sorry, gang, but that’s the way it is. The movie is all promise and no payoff.

I gave the movie a chance, honest. I let Shinobi unspool for two hours without feeling it strike a single neuron, without a single surprise that I hadn’t seen coming miles off, and when it was done I could not remember a single image, a single line of dialogue, a single scene that had held my interest in more than the most fleeting way. How is it that Japan can use the samurai / period-adventure genre to produce some of the most compelling, visually striking and all-around inventive films—Gojoe, or Takeshi Kitano’s Zatôichi—but then turn around and come up with a complete wet dog of a picture like this? Probably because Gojoe and Zatôichi were the products of artists with vision, and Shinobi is a piece of made-to-order piffle.

Otogi-Zoshi is a great and bold experiment that works—a story that spans hundreds of years of history, that freely ties together drama, mythology and fantasy into a unified whole, and above all is grand fun to watch. It’s the complete antithesis of stuff like Trinity Blood, where they took one good idea and didn’t do a thing with it; here, they have almost more ideas than they know what to do with, but they make them all serve the story. It’s also yet another remarkable piece of work by VAP—the production company who gave us Berserk—and Production I.G., the animation studio that gave us Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blood: the Last Vampire, and many other shows that are staples of anime at its very best.