Now, my view on this film is definitely a minority one. Sword of the Stranger has been pretty well-recieved by most anime fans and reviewers, and it's not hard to see why. It certainly has many things going for it in terms of production, after all. The animation is superb, the art very well-drawn, and I was quite fond of the character designs as well. It's a well-paced film - it never feels like it is dragging - and the plot is pretty coherent. If you want to watch an anime film just for the sake of enjoyment, there are certainly worse things out there than Sword of the Stranger.
However, I personally found it difficult to enjoy the film due to the fact that when I was watching it I was both puzzled by what it was trying to be and constantly thinking that it could have been so much better.
Sword of the Stranger's premise seems pretty generic, and there's a good reason for that - it is generic. A boy of some initially unknown importance is being hunted by bad guys when he happens to meet a depressed samurai who is tired of fighting and killing. The samurai first helps the boy in promise of being paid, but soon comes to genuinely care for him.
It's not a bad premise, but it is just very generic. It's what you expect from a shounen series or a kids film. However, this movie is definitely neither of those two. It's too adult. By "adult" I don't mean that it features mature themes or complex characters - it certainly doesn't have either of those. What I mean is that it features blood & gore. Lots and lots of it.
A while back I mentioned that Sword of the Stranger's art and animation are why it has been pretty well-recieved. I might be cynical, but I think the particular artistic choice that has led to this film being well-liked by the western fanbase is this sheer amount of gore - it's more explicit than the vast majority of recent anime, that's for sure. It's like those schlocky OVA series from the 90s that were occasionally brought over to the west, except well-animated, and that's good enough for a lot of people.
For me, though, it's just weird. I'm fine with a film or series that has a lot of explicit violence in it, but if that explicit violence is it's main selling point, I can't really hold it in a particularly high regard. Stranger just doesn't have much else going on for it. The characters are mostly weak and generic. Our protagonists, Nanashi and Kotarou, are at the least like-able and understandable, but the antagonists are just bizarre - they are literally a bunch of drugged-up Chinese super-soldiers seeking immortality. It's sounds silly, and it is silly. Oh, and amongst their members is Luo-Lang western warrior who's backstory is never explained whatsoever, and who's only motivation is that he wants to fight someone who is his equal (because every samurai anime has to have at least one guy like that). These characters would be fine in a shounen kids series, but in a film where they don't have nearly enough time to be properly fleshed out, they just aren't particularly memorable.
Indeed, probably the best characters in this entire movie were the samurai retainer Shougen Itadori and his right hand man Jurota Inui. Itadori in particular is the only character who seemed like he had any complexity whatsoever - he's clearly not a good person, but he also isn't a cartoony super-soldier villain. In other words, he's a character who seems like he would actually be a pretty good main character (either as a protagonist or an antagonist) in a mature story. But this isn't a mature story, so he's a side character who barely gets any screen-time and has little to no plot relevance whatsoever. Were the writers trying to convey some message about the futility of military ambition? Maybe, but if they wanted to explore that theme they certainly could have done a more thorough job.
Indeed, Sword of the Stranger could have been a great movie if it focused on mature characters and themes such as that. Instead, it has a generic plot with generic characters who mostly have very little development due to the thing being only 100 minutes long. It's visuals are really the only thing it has going for it. They are good visuals, to be sure, but not good enough for me to consider Sword of the Stranger to be anything more than just blood & gore fanservice.
