Anime that premiere in the middle of the traditional season usually do so in non-traditional places.  That’s certainly the case with Ninja Kamui, a straight-to-Cartoon Network series with simuldubs in English and Japanese.   But it’s anime – produced in Japan by a Japanese studio – and if I cover stuff on Netflix I see no reason why CN should somehow be ineligible.  And it’s not as if LiA has ever had any kind of hard and fast rule about only anime getting coverage.

So that really only leaves the merits of the show itself to discuss.  And it does have some, though I don’t quite buy into the extravagant praise from some quarters (like aggregator scores).  Ninja Kamui is a pretty stock anime action template, really.  A former ninja (nice to see Tsuda Kenjirou finally getting some work) is living a quiet and happy life on a farm somewhere in America (the romantic in me wants to say Iowa) with his wife and six year-old son.  They’re all living in a sort of high-tech witness protection program, with holographic fake faces, but his old comrades are systematically being hunted down and graphically eliminated.  I think you can see where this is going.

The brutal murder of the family, the life of revenge – it’s a fine setup for an action show, if one we’ve seen many times before.  The execution (no pun intended) of the prologue is fine, but in truth the draw with Ninja Kamui is Park Seong-Hu.  He’s a legendary action director (JJK Season 1, et al) for a reason.  A protege of Watanabe Shinichirou, Park is a master of action choreography and it really shows here.  The animation itself, from relative newcomer E&H Production, is nothing special – it’s the way Park composes the shots that makes the fight scenes special.

Given that this premiere was basically the prologue, one can’t draw any conclusions about the larger story until we get into the meat of it, though I’ll be surprised if it brings many surprises.  Expect there to be plenty of balletic combat and fountains of blood, at least.  There’s nothing in Ninja Kamui that particularly screams out the fact that it’s produced for U.S. TV to me.  Certainly it fits the mold of what typically lands on Adult Swim, but I’d never mistake it for anything other than a Japanese anime production.  I’m not sure if there’ll be enough in the story to keep me hooked, but the visuals alone are probably enough to make this series worth a look.