Picture Credit: Netflix
Few things can balance mindless fun and big ideas like Shonen anime, and Baki Dou: The Invincible Samurai is a great example of that. Netflix is no stranger to an adaptation of the Baki the Grappler manga, which was first published in the 90s, with two series and a film coming to the service over the last few years. The Invincible Samurai is a strong continuation of the mythology, with strong worldbuilding and a new, near-omnipotent enemy for Baki to take down. At times, the ridiculously exaggerated character models can border on the cheesy, but the carefully placed action and wider themes always keep The Invincible Samurai engaging.
The world of Baki Dou is populated by superhuman fighters, a global community of the most ripped guys you’ve ever seen who routinely make battle in events as big as the World Cup final. In The Invincible Samurai, the highest level of these fighters, the ones whose neck and cheek muscles burst out from the screen as much as their pecks, find themselves in a crisis of boredom. The opening scenes of the show see Baki take on a challenger, stifling a yawn while landing a devastating blow. Soon, that boredom is wiped away, as a shady plot to resurrect the greatest fighter of all time, ancient samurai Musashi Miyamoto, comes to fruition. This threat to Baki and his fellow fighters’ supremacy causes uproar around the world.
Picture Credit: Netflix
Getting an adaptation of a story like Baki the Grappler right means striking the perfect tone with the action, and The Invincible Samurai delivers with aplomb. The show shirks away from the temptation for every other scene to be a brawl between muscly demigods, a mindless “who would win” tournament, but when we do get a taste of action, Baki Dou really delivers. So many of the fights lie not in who can punch the hardest, but minute details that allow someone to dodge an attack, or land one on the exact cell of skin for it to have the desired effect. Only in animation can the action slow down to depict all of this information, and The Invincible Samurai makes frequent use of that.
Unfortunately, the show does suffer from a classic case of shonen over-explaining, which makes its visual communication a little moot. The dialogue in general gets caught in a frustrating loop where the same piece of information is recapped multiple times over a few minutes. This comes with the territory in a lot of anime, but it’s no less annoying when a show could clearly reach its conclusion faster and pads its runtime artificially.
This is all the more frustrating because of the more interesting themes The Invincible Samurai touches on, but doesn’t get to fully interrogate. The boredom felt by Baki and the rest of the fighters is an interesting commentary on the zombification of the average person. So many of us are caught in the cycle of work, scroll, sleep, that’s reflected in the endless, daily training we see Baki undergo, looking for some way to challenge himself and free himself from the edge of slumber.
Miyamoto provides that exact challenge, but brings with him a barrage of complications. His power brings an existential crisis from fighters across the globe, all of whom sense his presence the moment he’s resurrected. What they once understood as the height of human power and achievement has been surpassed – an existential quandary for them all. As much as they yearned for a challenge, Miyamoto brings destruction to both their worldview and the societal order, raising questions about scientific progress and the reasons behind technological development. Miyamoto was brought back to create a spectacle, which is the only thing that mattered to those running the operation.
Picture Credit: Netflix
Miyamoto himself could have been a 2D dimensional bloodthirsty presence throughout The Invincible Samurai, but the show goes out of its way to depict his acclimatisation to the modern day with significant depth. The wonders of today’s world bring into perspective the amount of progress humanity has made in the 400 years since Miyamoto’s death, an idea so much bigger than himself that it almost breaks his brain. He had only ever known combat, his purpose solely to fight, and he now has to grapple with something so much bigger.
The Invincible Samurai does the necessary minimum to make all these moments between battles feel visually appealing, but to say it reinvents the wheel in any way would be a massive overstatement. The most consistently entertaining visual element is the designs of the fighters, all of which have a distinct thing going on with them, whether it’s a hairstyle or a scar. They also all have extremely muscly faces in a way that completely and delightfully defies physics. Baki is the exception, whose baby face stands in stark contrast to the other fighters’.
In terms of shonen anime, you could do a lot worse than Baki Dou: The Invincible Samurai. Even without watching other Baki media, it’s easy to slide into this ridiculous world, the order and character of which is so clear from the start. Its action hits hard, and it has way more on its mind than it seems to on the surface, a more than serviceable season of TV.
