Kurenai Sanshirou

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[Kurenai Sanshiro Review Part 1]

Kurenai Sanshiro is mostly known for its animated adaptation, especially in France and Italy in the 80s when it aired under the title "Judo Boy". It is one of the first projects from Tatsunoko Production, and with Speed Racer, one of the first to gain some kind of popularity in Japan. Kurenai Sanshiro stood out mostly by focusing on martial arts with its realistic aspect when their previous projects were all slapstick comedies.

Kurenai Sanshiro was initially a short manga created by Toyoharu Yoshida (under the nickname Ippei Kuri), the youngest of the 3 brothers who founded TatsuPro, however it is still ... felt clearly that it was made to gauge the opinion of the public with an eventual future anime already in mind. It even feels to me like a storyboard for the anime as you can find a lot of its trademark inside and a lot of elements that don't belong that well inside a manga. For example you'll get a narrator regularly summing up the events of the story and flashbacks of Sanshiro's father getting murdered, even in the first chapter. You'll also get these terrible side-characters that are only there as comic relief / romantic interest or to react to Sanshiro fighting and they feel even more useless than ever, only hindering the pace of the manga.

It also looks dated even for the standards of 1969, the action scenes are especially messy with the characters constantly jumping and spinning around and doing these weird acrobatics. What was a small revolution in the anime industry to bring dynamism and life to the characters looks utterly chaotic and confusing here. I can give it the fact that it's not all squares, it occasionally has some diagonals layout and tries to vary quite often the widths and lengths of its panels to convey dramatic intensity but it's miles away from the likes of Ashita no Joe or the works of Ishinomori.

Its premise can't be said to be anything exciting as the tale of the boy trying to avenge the murder his father is severely boring and generic but it at least avoids the purely repetitive format that I would've expected by only focusing on 2 arcs in a somewhat coherent manner, don't expect any kind of conclusion as to the identity of the one-eyed man, it was left unfinished just like its anime counterpart.