Satomi Hakkenden SP ’06
Posted on January 24th, 2010
Satomi Hakkenden SP
[Rating: 8/10]
Genre: fantasy, historical
Satomi Hakkenden SP is a two part drama based on The Legend of the Eight Dog Warriors, a classic Japanese text. A wicked enchantress (Tamazusa) curses the land of Awa and the future children of Fusehime, the princess of the Satomi clan. Fusehime kills herself to relieve the land of the curse and the eight glass beads she wears disappear… to be found years later by eight men all whose sirname contain the kanji for ‘inu’ (dog). The pieces fall into motion as the hero of the story, Shino, is searching for his beloved Hamaji, who has gone missing with his family heirloom, Muramasa, a sword which is gushes out water out when it is used by the right owner.
I’m probably one of the few people who enjoy watching book-to-film adaptations. Granted many of them aren’t that good but it’s always nice to see someone’s intepretation and for a story that has alot of things happening and lots of action, I prefer to watch the action. If you actually look up the novel of Nansou Satomi Hakkenden I can tell you that it is very long… 106 volumes anyone? So parts were obviously changed and cut for this drama, but it did look alot better than screencaps I’ve seen of the adaptations produced in the 50s and 80s. In the cast you’ve got some pretty big drama-screen names – Kanno Miho (Tamazusa), Nakama Yuki (Fusehime) Ayase Haruka (Hamaji) who has been appearing in quite a few historical-ish productions lately (Ichi, JIN etc), and of course Takizawa Hideaki who plays our hero, Shino. I find it interesting how this was his role right after his success in the historical epic, Yoshitsune. The cast was pretty alright, though their characters’ bonds felt rather rushed (well, they did only have 2 episodes). While I don’t normally go for the villans, I must say Kanno Miho gave a stellar performance as Tamazusa. All along I’ve only seen her in the lead heroine roles and she was downright creepy as the vengeful enchantress. She also probably had the most character depth, especially at the end. As for the other things, the graphic effects were pretty cheesy, I swear the monster in the woods can’t compete with killer rabbit in Monty Python look. After hearing the talk about the feared beast what you get is an oversized black cat that looked really fake. I was hoping it’d be a spider considering Tamazusa and the black widow imageries thrown about in the earlier part of the show. Another thing was Inusaka’s real identity… I was hoping there’d finally be at least some girl power on the good side but… But despite those two letdowns I think the show was pretty good on the whole, hence my rating. Historical epics have always been a favourite of mine (even though this was more of a mythic legend type story than actually based on true historical events). I think it’s good for people who don’t want to sit through 40-50 episodes of NHK drama (NHK being where they show the big historicals, Hakkenden is a TBS production).
Filed under: ** jdrama, fantasy, historical