Stars: Hideaki Ito, Yumiko Shaku

Director: Shinsuke Sato

Summary: Set in a mysterious closed-off country, PRINCESS BLADE is a stylish apocalyptic thriller concerning a family of exiled assassins. When Princess Yuki, the most skilled of the family, discovers her own mother may have been betrayed she puts her own life in danger as she attempts to discover the truth.

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Shinsuke Sato's The Princess Bladeis, 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

Aspect Ratio:	Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	Japanese
Region:	Region 0
Special Features:	Star And Director Filmographies, Scene Selection, Original Theatrical Trailer, Marl Wyatt Film Notes, Asia Extreme Film Reel
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2001
Release Date:	September 23, 2002
Runtime:	91 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	T V D 3386
Label:	Asia Extreme
Keywords:	Princess, Subtitled, Blade, General, Drama, Japanese
Genre:	Drama